Introduction: Jayadeva’s World
by Heidi Pauwels
Jayadeva and court Rivals. c. 1540, National Museum, New Delhi 63.1596
Jayadeva is often understood to be a religious poet, a Vaishnava devotee (bhakta). The title of his work, Gītagovinda, refers to Krishna as Govinda, the cowherd and evokes Krishna’s bucolic exploits, in particular his romancing as a youth with the cowherdesses or gopīs. Indeed, each of the twelve chapters (sargas) of Gītagovinda is entitled with an epithet of Krishna and a mood of love. This fits the exclusive focus of this masterpiece on the emotions of Krishna and Rādhā, his favorite,who is sometimes seen as his own wife (svakīyā), sometimes as his mistress, belonging to another (parakīyā). Rādhā became a goddess in her own right, but had been relatively unknown prior to this late twelfth-century work.
Jayadeva calls himself an “emperor of bards at Padmāvatī’s feet” (Padmāvatī-caraṇa-cāraṇa GG 1.2). He does this in the same breath as praising the Goddess of speech (Vāgdevatā), so it is natural to assume he means the Goddess Padmā or Lakshmi, of whom Rādhā is considered an avatāra. Traditionally, this has been interpreted also as the given name of Jayadeva’s wife, praised here as his muse. Given the later popularity of performance of Gītagovinda offered as worship in the Jagannātha temple in Puri in Odisha, Padmāvatī is considered to have been a temple dancer there, performing for the deity. This may have to do with the 1499 Odiya inscription by King Pratāpa Rudradeva of Kalinga on the main door (Jaya-vijaya-dvāra) that prescribes the exclusive performance of Gītagovinda in song and dance for Jagannātha.
Small wonder that Jayadeva himself is hailed as a saint. Legends about him abound in later vernacular hagiographies (including Nābhādās’ c. 1600 Bhakt-māl ‘Rosary of Devotees’), some later translated into Sanskrit. It is possible that there is some conflation with the vernacular devotional poet of the same name, two of whose songs are included in Sikh sacred scripture. Whatever the source, those stories have found their way into popular culture, including devotional movies, such as the 1936 Telugu Bhakta Jayadev directed by Hiren Bose, and a 1961 remake directed by P.V. Rama Rao, with music composed by Saluri Rajeshwara Rao, featuring the actor Akkineni Nageswara Rao as Jayadeva and actress Anjali Devi as Padmāvatī. Whatever the details of Jayadeva’s life, there is a strong sacred dimension to Gītagovinda.
At the same time, Jayadeva is associated with the Bengali court milieu of king Lakṣmaṇa Sena (1179-1205) whose capital was Lakshmanavati (modern Lakhnauti). After a period of territorial expansion of his kingdom as attested in inscriptions, by the beginning of the thirteenth century, he was pushed south due to expansion of the Delhi Sultanate. Half a century, later Persian historiography detailed this in connection with its glorification of the military adventures of Bakhtiyar Khalji (in 1260 in Ṭabaqāt-i-Nāṣirī ‘Tables of Sultan Nasir-ud-Din’ by Minhaj al-Siraj Juzjani of Ghor).
The Sena king had some literary ambitions himself and in its heyday, the court employed several litterateurs, whom Jayadeva mentions at the beginning of his work (GG 1.3): Umāpati composed many of the inscriptions of praise (praśasti), Govardhana and Dhoyī created flattering descriptions of this patron in classical genres (Ārya-saptaśatī ‘The Noble 700’ and Pavana-dūta ‘The Wind-Messenger’), and the ex-tempore composer Śaraṇa’s stray verses are preserved in the devotional anthology (Padāvalī) of the later famous theologian Rūpa Gosvāmī. Active at court was also Śrīdhara, who compiled in 1205 an anthology of verse (Sadukti-karṇāmrita ‘Aforisms as Nectar for the Ears’) that includes some of Jayadeva’s compositions. Some of those in praise of the king may seem jarring to those mainly acquainted with Jayadeva’s saint-devotee persona. Still, it documents what Jayadeva confirms by mentioning the courtiers, namely that he also was part of this secular courtly milieu.
Jayadeva’s virtuosity in highly ornate poetry or kāvya comes across more in Gītagovinda’s verses than in the songs, but as our work shows, it is amply demonstrated by a careful reading of even the songs. In particular, the signature (bhaṇita) verses tend provide meta-poetical musings on poetic craftsmanship. They are not folksy or naive spontaneous outbursts of subjectivity. By its own statement, Gītagovinda addresses audiences interested in the sacred as well as the profane dimensions of love:
yadi hari-smaraṇe sarasam mano yadi vilāsa-kalāsu kutūhalam
madhura-komala-kānta-padāvalīm śṛṇu tadā jayadeva-sarasvatīm (GG 1.4)
If your mind is impassioned by Hari’s remembrance, if it is keen on the arts of sensuality,
Then listen to the sweet and tender lovers’ song cycle of Jayadeva’s Muse Sarasvati
Whether the first line of this verse is interpreted as both simultaneously or either/or, still, it breathes an ethos of inclusivity. Reading the text, one may not want to downplay the vivid allusions to physical intimacy, nor exclude the possibility of allegorical interpretation. For the true connoisseur the ambiguity is not a drawback but at the heart of the work.
Given its popularity, it is easy to forget that Gītagovinda is actually quite unusual in Sanskrit literature. It stands out as a dramatic lyrical poem built around a cycle of songs, called prabandha, or aṣṭapadī because typically each one has eight stanzas. Those songs have innovative characteristics uncommon in Sanskrit kāvya, such as a refrain (dhruvapada), end rhyme (antyanuprāsa), and a signature line with the poet’s name (bhaṇita). Moreover, rather than the fixed rhythmic sequence of short and long syllables (vārṇika chandas) that characterizes classical Sanskrit kāvya (and the non-song parts of the Gītagovinda), the songs are composed in more musical meters of the moric type (mātrika chandas), that show a constant number of mātrās (latinate mora) in each line, with a short syllable counting for one and long syllable for two mātrās. That means that there is room to vary the rhythm by changing the number of syllables while keeping the total length of mātrās constant, for instance four mātrās may constitute of four short, or two long syllables, or any combination of one long and two shorts. Typically, each line has two halves separated by a short break or yati (latinate caesura), falling after a fixed number of mātrās. Given the prevalence of such meters in vernaculars and combined with the fact that the language of the songs is in a simplified Sanskrit, all this has led scholars to surmise that these songs might be translations of Apabhraṃśa or Early Bengali songs, in other words, that there is a ‘vernacular’ substratum for the songs. This is a fascinating question to ponder and it is on these intriguing songs that this volume will focus.
Discussion Questions
After working through some of the songs in this volume, do you subscribe to the vernacular substratum theory? Why (not)?
What stanzas of the songs in this volume are preferred in what performance recordings? Would you say this might have to do with whether they lend themselves to devotional interpretation? Why (not)?
Sources/Further Reading
Gosvāmī, Rūpa (eds. Kuśakratha Dāsa and Purṇaprajña Dāsa). 2007. Padyavali: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry. Vrindavan: Rasbihari Lal & Sons
Irani, Ayesha A. 2026. “The Auspicious Rise of the Shaykh: Reimagining the Islamic Conquest of Bengal.” International Journal of Islam in Asia, April: 1–44.
Kāvyatīrtha, Nārāyaṇa Rāma Ācārya, ed. 1989. Jayadevaracitaṃ. Gītagovinda-kāvyam Śrī Kumbha-nṛpati-praṇīta-Rasikapriyā-vyākhyayā, Mahāmahopādhyāya-Śrī Śaṅkara-Miśra-nirmita- Rasamañjarī-vyākhyayā, Dīpikā-Pada-dyotanikā-Sañjīvini-Bālabodhinī-vyākhyā-viśiṣṭāṅśai, tat- pāṭhāntaraih, pariśiṣṭaiśca samanvitam; Nārāyaṇa Rāma Ācārya "Kāvyatīrth" ityanena saṃśodhitam. New Delhi: Meharcand Lachmandās Publications.
Kālidāsa, Dhoyī, and Rūpagosvāmī (trsl. James Mallinson). 2006. Messenger Poems. New York: New York University Press.
Knutson, Jesse Ross. 2014 Into the Twilight of Sanskrit Court Poetry: The Sena Salon of Bengal and Beyond. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Miller, Barbara Stoler, ed. and trsl. 1977. Love Song of the Dark Lord: Jayadeva’s Gītagovinda. New York: Columbia University Press.
Pauwels, Heidi. 2017. Mobilizing Krishna’s World: The Writings of Prince Sāvant Singh of Kishangarh. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Pauwels, Heidi. 2021. “The Vernacular Pulse of Sanskrit: Metre and More in Songs of the Gītagovinda and Bhāgavata Purāṇa.” The Journal of Hindu Studies 14: 294–319
Siegel, Lee. 1978. Sacred and profane dimensions of love in Indian traditions as exemplified in the Gītagovinda of Jayadeva. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Singh, Pashaura. 2003. The Bhagats of the Guru Granth Sahib: Sikh Self-Definition and the Bhagat Bani. 116–48. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Śrīdharadāsa (ed. Rāmāvatāra Śarmā). 1912. Saduktikarṇāmṛta. Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal.