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 entirely theological ideas. But the text retained its vast popularity among literary audiences, augmented by its use in music associated 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.
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