Mangal-Kāvya

"Poems of Benediction") is a group of Bengali religious texts, composed more or less between 13th and 18th centuries, notably consisting of narratives of indigenous deities of rural Bengal in the social scenario of the Middle Ages.

The Mangal-Kāvyas usually give prominence to a particular deity amalgamated with a Vedic or Hindu mythological god and the narratives are usually written in the form of verses.

Lila Ray elaborates, "Indigenous myths and legends inherited from Indo-Aryan cultures began to blend and crystallise around popular deities and semi-mythological figures in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

A new cosmogony was evolved, which is different from Sanskrit tradition but has an unmistakable affinity with the cosmogonic hymns in the Rigveda and the Polynesian myth of creation".

These are so named because it was believed that listening to these verses concerning the auspicious divinities would bring both spiritual and material benefits.

Though some scholars of the early modern period tried to find out any other significance of the word Mangal that was frequently used in the medieval Bengali literature irrespective of any designated tradition.