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The Great Epics
The reason Bengal worships Durga in autumn is an episode that is not in Valmiki. It is in a fifteenth-century Bengali poem.
Every autumn, tens of millions of people in Bengal keep the largest festival in eastern India. Its mythological basis is an episode that a poet added to the Ramayana in the fifteenth century.
Krittibas Ojha composed his Ramayan in Middle Bengali, in the fifteenth century.
It is the founding work of Bengali literature. The first great poem in the language. And for centuries, the book most Bengali households actually owned.
It is called the Sri Ram Panchali, and panchali matters: it is a sung form, meant for recitation before an audience, not for private reading. The metre is designed to be chanted.
He was doing what Tulsidas would do a century later in the north. And what Kamban had done in Tamil three centuries earlier.
Putting the story into the language people spoke. In a form they could hear.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.