Gita Govinda. Jayadeva
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the devotee’s emotion. This implies that God could not be reached without that language: we, ordinary people, may have a feeling of fullness towards the world, and towards God; but we do not possess a language which can carry that fullness and bring it to a flowering expression. This can only be expressed by poetry.
But this is also a song about Govinda, with very interesting features. At the center of its poetic world is Krishna, but worshipped in a significantly new form. The “Gita·govinda” represents a crucial extension of the narrative scope of the story of Krishna. In earlier, conventional texts, Krishna was primarily admired for qualities of invincible valor or states-manly wisdom. These qualities make the figure of Krishna ________
dominant in the “Maha·bharata” story—although he is one of its least active figures. Drawing on another tradition embodied in the Puranas, Jaya·deva’s “Gita·govinda” instigates a fundamental transformation of this heroic figure into a different figure which is erotic and aesthetic. The story shifts in space from Kuru·kshetra and Dvaraka to Vrinda·vana, in biographical emphasis from his maturity to his adolescence, and in his character from a warrior and statesman, concerned with the order of the world, to a lover, concerned with an aesthetic enjoyment of the world. In a subtle expression of this change, he is now worshipped as madhur’/adhipati, “the sweet lord,” rather than Mathur’/adhipati, “the lord of Mathura,” the city where Krishna had slain the evil king Kansa; he has unrivaled dominion of all beautiful things. “Gita·govinda” is the great celebration of this transference in the narrative, the defining text which ensures that at least in some regions, the name of Krishna would be inextricably linked not to the grimly dark battlefields of Kuru· kshetra, but the blooming forest in full moon nights on the leafy banks of the Yamuna. Although the narrative connection with the Krishna of the “Maha·bharata” was retained, the “Gita·govinda” wrought the most astonishing transformation in the way devotees imagined godliness.
This is a text of a very different rasa, of a different rhetorical orientation towards the world. The “Maha·bharata,” on its most sophisticated readings, is meant to produce a drying up of desire (trsna/ksaya/sukha); the “Gita·govinda” is a celebration of desire, although as a great text it maintains a witty ambiguity regarding its meaning. An early invocation invites an ideal reader who should be someone whose mind ________
is drenched by remembering Krishna (yadi Hari/smarane sarasam mano, 1.3) and who has a curiosity about the in-exhaustible playfulness of worldly love (yadi vildsa/kalasu kutuhalam, ibid.). Readers, in this imperfect world, might come with only one intention; but there is a subtle suggestion that his poem has the transformative capacity of transferring the reader whose curiosity is mundane to the higher curiosity about god’s nature; and against conceptions of ascetic devotion, it also promises that devotees with a mere dry reverence for Hari might also thrill at the joys of worldly love. Against the anemic visions of asceticism, the devotee is taught the central place of erotic love in human life, and its appropriate settings in a blooming nature, describing acts of love with the immense naivete common to all great art. The love between Radha and Krishna is described as if it were happening for the first time, and as if this happening will go on for ever. There is a strange spareness to the story: nothing much happens except for Radha’s suffering at being separated from Krishna, Krishna’s realization that without Radha he was unfulfilled even when surrounded by hundreds of gopis, his contrite return to Radha (tatyaja Vraja/sundarih, 3.1), his celebration of her beauty, and their union. The poet wants to leave them an eternity to enjoy themselves on the banks of the Yamuna (Yamuna/kule rahah/kelayah, 1.1). By this shift, the “Gita·govinda,” with other Vaishnava texts, achieves a fundamental transformation of how Vaishnavas conceived of God: instead of a single male figure, godliness is vested in the dual figure of Radha and Krishna.
The only adequate expression of the fullness of this devotion is a song. Actually, it is a song in two senses: first, by his poetic enhancement of ordinary language, the figural (alankaric) virtuosity of Jaya·deva takes the language as close to music as possible; second, in some regions of India like Orissa, the poem became inextricably associated with singing. Accordingly, the “Gita·govinda” is a festival of words. It is an enchanted garden, not primarily of sights, but of sounds: it is a world of the ultimate aural enchantment. Reading the text makes it increasingly clear that this is a work that devotes extraordinary attention to its own language, and constantly draws attention to it. What is happening in the poem—the expression of Radha’s anguish, of Krishna’s desire, of the joy of their union—is happening in its language, in the manner in which sounds are chosen, strung, and gathered, syllables are repeated through alliteration, surprisingly pleasurable changes are wrought by shifts in meter. Jaya·deva is not telling a story in the ordinary sense; it is not a story of the peculiar way we read in order to know what peculiar, unexpected incidents will follow. It is a story of the unpeculiar, the general, the ordinary—of love and separation and union—that happens to human beings all the time. From one angle, there is nothing remarkable about it: it is the eternal story of love. From another angle, there is hardly anything more remarkable in human life, an experience which illuminates all others, and life itself. The literary problem is not that people cannot feel this remarkable fullness, but it is a fullness that is particularly hard to bring into language. It is the language of ultimate musical- ity which alone is adequate to that task. The “Gita·govinda” _________
uses all kind of metric resources to create this atmosphere of never-ending surprise in its musicality, and one of its great attractions is the surprising use of Apabhransha meters like pajjhatika, alongside the great staples of Sanskrit meters like the sardula/vikridita.
After it established itself as a classic of Vaishnava devotional literature, the “Gita·govinda” went on to have an increasingly interesting history. Vaishnava sects of later times, particularly the Bengal Vaishnavas who became followers of Chaitanya in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, began to read the “Gita·govinda” as a coded text of deep spirituality, using the figure of Radha as an exemplary metaphor of union with God. This strand of reception would eliminate all worldly reference from the verses of the poem, and read them entirely as metaphorical expressions of the anxious communion between God and his ideal devotee.
Historical evidence is largely too meager to speculate about the context of this remarkable text. But in two ways the “Gita·govinda” marks an immense change in literary imagination. The first, as noted above, is the transformation in the figure of Krishna: from the greatest warrior to the greatest lover, who now rules the world by his dominion of all that is beautiful. Literary figures usually bear a connection to social imagination, and the power of moral norms. This change in the nature of the Krishna figure may be linked to a change in the social ideals reflected in literature: literature is seeking a new subject-matter, turning away from the tradition of heroism and warlike virtues to-wards virtues of a very different intimate and intense kind, ________
in a way perhaps appropriate to the world of late twelfth-century Bengal, where the poem was written.
The “Gita·govinda” exhibits another remarkable feature in its use of language. The “Gita·govinda” is certainly composed in Sanskrit, but at a time of fundamental transformation of the Indian literary universe—in the early part of the “vernacular millennium.” It is a text of a world in which the linguistic economy is being reconfigured. Sanskrit literature had already given rise to vernacular literary cultures, and was coexisting in lively interchange with them. Jaya·deva composed in an astonishing form of Sanskrit in which the visible marks of its complex grammar are so minimally used that it became intelligible, almost without residue, to a much wider audience of vernacular readers. Literary skill obliterates the formal boundaries between different natural languages. It is an ironically democratized Sanskrit which can be read and enjoyed by those who do not know it. It is a strange bridge language, and it is a text that lies at the crossing and therefore joins the literary world of Sanskrit and of several vernaculars.
In modern times, the “Gita·govinda” has enjoyed a curiously changing reputation. Bengali critics of the nineteenth century derided its utter absorption with eroticism and its inauguration, as they believed, of a deluge of erotic poetry in the late medieval period. In defense, Vaishnava theologians developed an equally one-sided interpretation, asserting that its erotic content is a metaphor for