| The village of
Boral is only about 12 miles to the south of Calcutta. Trees and thorny bushes now make it
difficult to approach some of the old temples at this village. There is a very large tank
covering about 42 bighas of land known as Sendighi, which suggest the glorious past of the
village. While reclaiming portions of the dighi a number of stone images of deities like
Vishnu have been found. One large image of Vishnu has been identified to belong to the
Pala period. Tripura Sundari deity is the most
important village deity still in worship. At the feet of the female deity lies the
Panchadevatas or five gods of Brahma, Vishnu, Maheshwar, Ishwar and Rudra. The deity of
Tripura Sundari has four hands and three eyes and the image rests on a lotus that has come
out from the naval of Lord Sieve in a lying posture. This is a rare specimen.
The village of Bahrain was the village of famous Nana Kumar Basu, Dewan of the East India
Company. Nanda Kumar was also for some time a Dewan in Jaipur Riyasat in Rajasthan.
He had procured sculptors and painters from Jaipur and had
set up the temple of Shyamsundarji in his house with superb sculpture and paintings. The
paintings are now getting obliterated and the temple is in decadence. There is also a Siva
temple at Baharu village set up by the same Basu family. But the most important and
peculiar deity in the village is that of Dharmaraj in an ordinary tile-roofed mud hut.
Here the god Dharmaraj is represented by the sitting figure of an enormous-sized male
person with a fearful look and an imposing moustache. |
