Gita Govinda. Jayadeva

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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 Sanskrit and vernacular literatures and literary theory, the great epics, collections of mythological literature, and the shastras—those normative compendia of the ways and means of polity, religion, and sexuality. He would cultivate his wit, cleverness, and skill at manipulating words in such a way as to inspire aesthetic transport in sophisticated and erudite people of refined tastes. By doing so, he could earn patronage and a position in a royal court. Kings sponsored literary recitations, performances of plays, music, and dance, and granted awards and titles to the most accomplished poets, dancers, and singers. Jaya·deva was, as he exults in the introduction to his work, given the title of royal poet, “King of heavenly bards” (carana/cakravartin).

      The period during which Jaya·deva composed the “Gita· govinda” was, both in Bengal under the Senas and in Orissa under the Gangas, one in which there was a revival and reaffirmation of traditional religious values and classical cultural ideals, with ample subsidies to encourage Sanskrit literary and artistic endeavors, and there was funding for the building of grand temples, lavishly ornamented with sculp- ________

      tural depictions of the sexual pastimes of heavenly beings. There was, furthermore, a shift in sectarian orientation from Shaivism to Vaishnavism, and an efflorescence of devotional practice. By way of influence from South India, the god Krishna was becoming the focus of that popular devotionalism, a rapturous bhakti that conceived of and articulated the devotees relationship with the deity in terms of passionate human love and longing. It was an ideal milieu for the composition of a Sanskrit court poem celebrating the erotic relationship of Radha and Krishna.

      Not long after the composition of “Gita·govinda,” however, with the end of Hindu rule in Bengal and the decline of the Ganga dynasty in Orissa, courtly ideals and sensibilities dwindled, Sanskrit poetry lost its royal patronage and aristocratic audiences. Vernacular poetry, much of it echoing Jaya·deva’s songs in both form and content, began to flourish. As the ecstatic devotional bhakti movement gained momentum in the northeast of medieval India, the rasika became a bhakta, the connoisseur a devotee, and Jaya·deva, the refined courtly kavi, became Jaya·deva the popular pious saint, a wandering singer of adorational psalms to Lord Krishna. It became expedient to divine a new biography of Jaya·deva through a theological reading of the “Gita·govinda,” one that transformed the literary text into a sort of hymnal for the medieval bhakti movement.

      Legends of the life of Jaya·deva, the zealous and exemplary bhakta, were told, and have been recorded, in Bengali, Oriya, Hindi, and other vernacular Indian languages. These were amalgamated in the early nineteenth century into the Jayadevacarita of Bana·mali·dasa, a Sanskrit, and therefore ________

      implicitly authoritative, version of the marvelous life of the poet as holy man. These chronicles constitute a religiously motivated and apologetic exegesis of his text in which the courtly love story is read as an allegory of spiritual relationship with Krishna as the Lord of the Universe.

      In most versions, including those that I myself have heard over the years in Puri, Jaya·deva had, as a young man in Kenduli village, Orissa, consecrated his life to the service of Krishna by becoming an homeless sadhu, taking a vow of chastity, and singing hymns of praise to Krishna as he wandered. Pleased with the sweetness of his songs, Krishna, according to the legends, arranged a marriage between his devotee and a beautiful dancer named Padmavati. When Jaya·deva would sing for Krishna in his form as Lord Jagan· nath, installed in the great temple of Puri, Padmavati would dance. It was only to obey Krishna that Jaya·deva broke his vow of chastity to marry Padmavati and become a householder. And likewise, it was only to serve Krishna that Padmavati agreed to that marriage. The legends about Padmavati, as both the wife of Jaya·deva and a devadasi in the Jagannath Temple, reconcile two modes of bhakti—the dutiful, dispassionate domestic devotion of a wife to her husband, and the impassioned, ecstatic religious devotion of any person, man or woman, to Krishna.

      The textual justification of these stories is to be found in two references in the “Gita·govinda” to a Padmavati. At the very beginning of the work, in introducing

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