Rameswar Bhattacharya's Shivayan, written around 1750 in the mangalkavya manner, is the fullest statement of Bengal's own Shiva. The god is a helpless, illiterate villager without money; when his family goes hungry he is made to farm, and the poem's best-known passage follows him into the fields. The episode had become a fixed set-piece by the time Bhattacharya wrote it, and later scholars describe this peasant Shiva as the version that finally took hold in Bengal, alongside and against the royal Shiva of Kailash. The original poem is public domain; the 1957 Calcutta University edition's apparatus is not.
Rural livelihood of eighteenth-century Bengal in perspectives of Shivayana by Rameswara Bhattacharya; Shibayan (Famine and Dearth project); Bengal has two Shiva traditions: the potbellied peasant and the king of Kailash; Mangalkavya — Banglapedia; Shivayan (Shibayan)
The Puranas' Shiva is the lord of Kailash, a yogi and a king of gods who owns nothing because he needs nothing.
The Shivayan's Shiva owns nothing because he is poor; the poem replaces renunciation with rural want and makes the god a working farmer.
Bengal has two Shiva traditions: the potbellied peasant and the king of Kailash
Sources: Rural livelihood of eighteenth-century Bengal in perspectives of Shivayana by Rameswara Bhattacharya; Shibayan (Famine and Dearth project); Bengal has two Shiva traditions: the potbellied peasant and the king of Kailash; Mangalkavya — Banglapedia; Shivayan (Shibayan)
The Maitri Upanishad names Brahma, Rudra and Vishnu together as portions of one being, matched to the three gunas.
The sage Atri and his wife Anasuya earn great merit through their conduct and austerity.
Vishnu and Shiva are shown as one figure divided down the middle.
A seven-metre three-faced bust fills the south wall of Elephanta's Cave 1.
Three Pallava shrines on one platform: Shiva in the centre, Vishnu on the right, and a disputed left shrine read as Brahma by Vogel but as Subrahmanya or Brahmasasta by later scholars; a Durga panel stands beside.
Shiva alone exists before the world.
Brahma's body splits into a male and a female half.
Brahma grows a fifth head, and with it pride or a false word.