Gita Govinda. Jayadeva
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with Odissi dance.
Eventually, the best judgment of the poem might be the one it gave itself. The undying attraction of the poem lies precisely in its ambiguity, in its ability to enchant audiences of very different kinds. It is a mark of great art that no one goes away from it empty-handed. Vaishnava adepts continue to seek spiritual illumination from its metaphors; but ordinary seekers of literary beauty also continue to be enchanted by its ability to turn language itself into a song, and by its celebration of ordinary love. It makes us wonder if the joys of the other world are more wondrous than the joys of the world in which we live transiently, and in which we enjoy the love of youth even more transiently. It makes Radha and Krishna strangely double signs—of both the divine and the human: readers can be attracted to both their divinity and their human perfection, the perfection of their love, of their separation, of their longing, and of their union. The poet gave them an irreducibly ambiguous status, their love is perpetually poised between the different perfections of their godliness and their unforgettable humanity. In love human lives are touched by the divine, this is the invariable core of its message, though generations might endlessly dispute exactly what it intended—to turn the lover into god, or god into the lover.
Sudipta Kaviraj
T
he “Gita·govinda: Love Songs of Radha and Krishna” (Gitagovindakavya), literally “a poetic composition about Govinda (Krishna the cowherd) with songs,” is a twelfth-century Sanskrit court poem, a sort of epyllion or little epic, comprised of twelve cantos within each of which there are one or more songs, twenty-four in all. This lyrical text was intended to be performed as a dramma per musica, its stanzas recited and its songs sung as a dancer danced, correlating physical gestures with verbal tropes, the terpsichorean ornaments of dance with those of poetry.
In the epigraphic opening stanza, the poet announces the subject of his composition—its hero, heroine, setting, tone, and theme: “Glory to the clandestine games of love of Radha and Krishna on the banks of the Yamuna.”
Jaya·deva then introduces himself to his audience, acknowledges the inspiration of the goddess of Language, and states that the “Gita·govinda” was composed for the delectation of rasikas, “people of taste” who delight in the erotic rasa, the poetic sentiment of sexual love and the physical arts and practices which are the substantive bases of that qualitative sentiment. The rasika was a connoisseur of the arts, a cultured aesthete who had cultivated the knowledge, sensitivities, and sensibilities required to savor that rasa. “May rasikas enjoy aesthetic bliss as they listen to my poetry” (6.9 [xii.8]). The poet repeatedly sings: “May rasikas be pleased by my sublime song” (9.9 [xvii.8]).
In the same introductory stanza, the poet proclaims that the “Gita·govinda” is meant particularly for the pleasure ________
of those rasikas who, while appreciating erotic poetry, also “relish recollections of [the deeds of] Lord Krishna.” Smarana, the word designating that recollection, has various connotations. As codified in the rhetorical and dramaturgical textbooks, and as employed in the literature of love, it is a diagnostic term for a particular symptom of love—the passionate longing of the lover for the beloved in separation. Jaya·deva uses it as such: “I remember Krishna dancing,” Radha sings again and again as the refrain to Song v. But smarana is also a religious term in the established vocabulary of the devotional Krishna-bhakti movement: in the “Bhagavad Gita” Krishna reveals that his favor is won by recollection of him; in the Visnu Purana that recollection eradicates impurity and evil; and in the Bhagavata Purana it affords liberation from this world and entry into the highest tier of Vishnu-Krishna’s heavenly abode. And Jaya·deva uses the word in this way: in conclusion to Radha’s song of remembering Krishna’s dance, her recollections symptomatic of erotic longing, Jaya·deva adds his intent that her song inspire virtuous, religiously-minded, people to recollection, to smarana as pious veneration of Krishna. And in the last line of the last song of the “Gita·govinda,” the poet proclaims that recollection to be the nectar of immortality that dispels the sufferings and iniquities of this degenerate age.
In dedicating the work to an audience that relishes both the pleasures of erotic love and the joys of recollecting Lord Krishna, the introductory stanza establishes a dialectical juxtaposition which informs the text as a whole. It is a sensual courtly poem about the illicit love affair of a lusty cowherd ________
and an impassioned milkmaid; and, at the same time, it is a devotional poem about Krishna, the god absolute, the source of the avatars who redeem the universe throughout the cycles of eternity, and his relationship with his divine consort, the goddess of Prosperity.
As is the case with the majority of Sanskrit poets, very little is known about the life of Jaya·deva. But the dialectic of the text, the ambiguities inherent in its juxtaposition of sexual and religious sensibilities, has encouraged constructions of two very different biographies, one of a sophisticated court poet, commissioned to compose erotic verse for a royal Vaishnava patron, and the other of a divinely inspired bard singing in devotional service to Krishna.
It has been generally accepted, though not uncontested, in academic literature that Jaya·deva was a poet in the court of Lakshmana·sena, the last of the Sena kings in Bengal at the end of the twelfth century. This is deduced from a prefatory stanza to the “Gita·govinda” in which Jaya·deva is named as one in a group of poets that includes Sharana, Go·vardhana, Dhoyi, and Uma·pati·dhara. Although it is certain that Dhoyi, whose “Wind Messenger” (Pavanaduta) extols the kingship of Lakshmana·sena, was a member of that court, inscriptions indicate that Uma·pati·dhara was patronized by Vijaya·sena, Lakshmana·sena’s grandfather. Nothing is known of Sharana or his work. The association of Jaya·deva and the other poets with Lakshmana·sena is corroborated by no more than an inscription (albeit a lost one), reportedly seen in Bengal by two disciples of the Vaishnava saint Chaitanya some three-hundred years after Jaya·deva. It identifies the poets as “five jewels orna- ________
menting the court of Lakshmana·sena.” The fourteenth-century commentator, King Mananka, attributes the stanza to Lakshmana·sena himself, making of it a royal proclamation of recognition of the talent of the poets under his patronage.
There is, however, no mention of the Sena ruler in any of the other available commentaries, and the premise that the “Gita·govinda” was composed in Sena Bengal has infuriated both traditional pandits and academically trained scholars of Orissa, who, claiming Jaya·deva as well as Go·vardhana as their own, reject the authenticity of the stanza in question. They have adamantly argued against the assumption that the Bengali ruler was Jaya·deva’s patron, insisting instead that he was a poet in the court of Ananta·varman Choda·ganga of Orissa, the king who built the Jagannath temple in Puri where the songs of the “Gita·govinda” were, from the very beginning, sung for the deity.
While those in the Bengali camp insist that Jaya·deva’s mention, in Song VII, of his place of birth as Kindu·bilva refers to Kenduli village on the banks of the Ajaya river in the Birbhum district of West Bengal, Oriya tradition confidently proclaims that the reference is to Kenduli village on the banks of the Prachi river in the Puri district of Orissa. Both villages have annual festivals in honor of the poet they consider to be their native son; the songs of the “Gita·govinda” are their village anthems. There’s yet another Kenduli village in Bihar, on the banks of the Belan river in Jhanjharpur district, and there too people are proud to hail from the place where Jaya·deva, the famed singer and Krishna devotee, was born. There are also Kenduli villages ________
in Gujarat and Maharastra, and the inhabitants of those villages are as proprietarily proud of Jaya·deva as anyone else.
The fact that Jaya·deva was, as he reiterates in his text, a professional poet, a kavi, whether in Bengal or Orissa (or, for that matter, in Gujarat or Maharashtra), is pertinent to an understanding and appreciation of his text. To be a kavi was to have a traditionally defined and highly idealized social role in Indian society. The poet, usually the son of a poet and a Brahmin, was, during the period of his studentship, rigorously trained in lexicography, grammar, prosody, and poetics. He would study