Nanoor (Chandidas-Nanoor)

Nanoor, or Chandidas-Nanoor, as it is locally known, is one of those places that looks unremarkable from the main road but opens, as you walk deeper into it, into extraordinary depth. The whole town is organized, mythologically at least, around the life and love story of a medieval poet who died six centuries ago. And yet that story remains vivid here, inscribed on gateways, preserved in temple mounds and enacted each year in the festivals at Rami's pond.
Chandidas: The Poet & His Story
Boru Chandidas (flourishing 14th–15th century CE) was a Brahmin priest and poet of the Nanoor temple, the son of Durgadas Bagchi of the Varendra Brahmin community. He composed Vaishnava padavali (lyrical devotional songs around the love of Radha and Krishna) that represented a major milestone in the development of the Bengali language. Historians note at least three poets associated with the name Chandidas (known as Baru, Dwija and Din), but it is Boru/Dwija Chandidas whose association with Nanoor is strongest.
Local tradition narrates that Chandidas fell profoundly in love with Rami, a washerwoman (rajakini) of low caste, in a relationship that transgressed every boundary of the caste system of his day. His verse celebrated this love as a spiritual path, arguing that the love between two human beings, regardless of caste, embodied the love between Radha and Krishna. This was heresy to orthodox Brahminism and tradition holds that Chandidas met a violent end because of it.
The poet's influence reached far beyond his own era: his songs so moved Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, the great Vaishnava reformer of the early 16th century, that Chaitanyadeva is said to have wept upon hearing them. Nanoor consequently became a pilgrimage site for Vaishnavas from the era of Chaitanya onwards.
Chandidas Bhita (The Ancestral Mound)
At the very heart of Nanoor stands the Chandidas Bhita, a large earthen mound, some 550 feet in radius and 17 feet in height, which local tradition identifies as the site of Chandidas's ancestral home. Archaeological excavations by the University of Calcutta (1945–46) and the Archaeological Survey of India (1963–64) confirmed material culture at the site dating to the 14th century and earlier, with the lowest occupation level reaching back to the Gupta era.
Today, fourteen temples stand atop and around the mound, constructed mainly in the 17th and 18th centuries, though the sacred ground beneath them is far older. The Archaeological Survey of India maintains and protects the complex. A flight of stone stairs leads visitors up to the mound level; the views from the top over the green fields and red-soil lanes of Nanoor are quietly wonderful.