Jayadeva: The Line He Could Not Write

The structure

• Sanskrit
• Twelve sargas, cantos
• Twenty four songs, each called an ashtapadi because each has eight couplets
• Linking shlokas in classical metres between the songs
• Around twelve hundred lines in total

Three characters: Krishna, Radha, and the sakhi, Radha's friend, who does most of the actual work.

The story

It is a very simple plot and the whole art is in the handling.

• Spring in Vrindavan, described at length
• Krishna is with the gopis, dancing, and enjoying himself
• Radha sees, and withdraws in jealousy and anger
• The sakhi goes to Radha and describes Krishna's state; then goes to Krishna and describes Radha's
• Krishna is remorseful and asks to be taken back
• Radha refuses, at length, and the refusal is the best writing in the poem
• There are misunderstandings and a failed meeting
• Eventually they are reunited
• And in the last canto Radha asks him to rearrange the ornaments and clothing he has disarranged, item by item

What is unusual about it

One. Radha.

Before the Gita Govinda, Radha exists only in scattered references. She is not in the Bhagavata Purana, which is the main Krishna text, and she has no developed presence in the earlier literature.

Jayadeva makes her the equal subject of the poem, with her own interiority, her own refusal, and the power in the relationship.

Every subsequent Radha, in every language, comes through this poem. The whole Gaudiya theology, the Braj literature, the Bengali padavali, the Odia and Assamese traditions, the Rajasthani and Braj bhasha poets, the miniature painting traditions: all of it downstream of twelve cantos by a twelfth century court poet.

Two. It is erotic and it does not qualify itself.

The poem describes desire, jealousy, quarrelling, physical union and its aftermath, directly and in detail.

And it is a religious text, sung nightly in one of the four principal Vaishnava shrines in India, which is the fact that made the erotic reading of devotion canonical rather than marginal.

Three. It is scored.

This is a genuinely important technical fact. Each of the twenty four ashtapadis is marked with a raga and a tala.

The Gita Govinda is among the earliest Indian texts to do this, and it means the poem was designed as music, not set to music later.

Four. Radha wins the argument.

In the central sequence, Krishna asks and Radha refuses, and the refusal is sustained across cantos. The poem takes her anger completely seriously and does not treat it as an obstacle to be got past.

And in the final canto, the god who has been asking is the one arranging her clothes.

The story attached to the poem, and it is one of the best in Indian literature.

Where in the poem

Near the end, in the tenth canto, Krishna is asking Radha to be reconciled. He has been asking for some time.

And the line he says, in the received text, is roughly:

Smara garala khandanam mama shirasi mandanam dehi pada pallavam udaram.

Place your foot, tender as a new leaf, on my head, as an ornament, and it will destroy the poison of desire.

Krishna, asking Radha to put her foot on his head.

Why Jayadeva stopped

Because of what a foot on a head means in that culture.

The head is the highest part of the body and the feet the lowest, and touching somebody's feet is the standard gesture of submission. A foot on a head is the strongest possible statement of the hierarchy, and Jayadeva had just written a line in which god asks a woman to do it to him.

He wrote it, and then would not have it. The accounts say he considered it improper, struck it out or refused to complete it, and left the palm leaf.

And went to bathe.

What happened while he was away

Krishna came, in Jayadeva's own form.

Padmavati saw her husband come back, sooner than expected. He sat down at the manuscript and wrote. Then he asked for food, ate what she served, and went out again.

And then Jayadeva came back from the river.

Padmavati was confused: he had already come, written and eaten.

Jayadeva went to the manuscript.

And the line was there. The exact line he had thought of and struck out.

What he is said to have done

He understood what had happened, and the accounts describe him falling down, and then telling Padmavati that she was the fortunate one, because the food she had served had been eaten by Krishna himself.

Why the story works

Because the hesitation is the point.

Jayadeva's objection was reverent. He was refusing to write something that seemed to lower the deity, and that is exactly what a careful devotional poet would do.

And the correction is that his reverence was the mistake.

The god in the poem is not lowered by asking. That is what the whole poem has been about: a relationship in which the ordinary hierarchy does not apply, in which the one who is asking is the one who is supposed to be above asking, and in which the woman's refusal is taken seriously.

Jayadeva had written eleven cantos of that and then flinched at the last step, and the story says the line was written anyway, by the person it was about.

A note on the story's status: it is a devotional legend and it cannot be verified. It has been told for eight hundred years and it is part of how the poem is read, and it is worth knowing whichever way you hold it.

Puri

The Gita Govinda is sung every night at the Jagannath temple.

It is part of the badasinghara, the last ritual of the day, when the deities are dressed for the night, and it has been for centuries.

The decree: Gajapati Prataprudra Deva, around 1499, issued an order inscribed at the temple that only the Gita Govinda was to be sung and danced before Jagannath, and that no other composition was permitted.

That inscription is still on the temple wall.

What it means: the Gita Govinda is not a devotional poem that happens to be popular in Odisha. It is the liturgy of one of the four dhams, by royal decree, for five hundred years.

The Odia connection runs further: the Odissi dance and music traditions are built substantially on it, the mahari dancers of the Jagannath temple performed the ashtapadis, and Odia manuscripts of the poem, on palm leaf, are among the finest illustrated manuscripts in India.

Where else it went

Effectively everywhere.

• Bengal: Chaitanya's three favourite things were the Gita Govinda, Vidyapati and Chandidas, and the poem is foundational to Gaudiya Vaishnavism
• Assam: Sankaradeva's tradition uses it
• Kerala: the Sopana Sangeetham tradition at temples sings the ashtapadis, and they are central to it
• Tamil Nadu and Karnataka: ashtapadis are standard Carnatic repertoire
• North India: Hindustani settings, the Braj tradition, and the whole Radha Krishna literature of Braj bhasha, Rajasthani and Hindi
• Nepal and Manipur, where it is central to the Manipuri dance tradition
• Painting: the Gita Govinda is one of the two or three most illustrated texts in Indian art, with major series in the Basohli, Kangra, Mewar and Odia styles

And in dance: every classical form uses it. Odissi, Bharatanatyam, Kuchipudi, Kathak, Manipuri, Mohiniyattam. The ashtapadis are the standard shared repertoire across forms that otherwise have very little in common.

Kenduli

In Birbhum, West Bengal, on the Ajay river, the Jaydev Kenduli Mela is held every year at Makar Sankranti, in mid January.

What it is: one of the great gatherings of the Bauls. Thousands of Baul singers and mendicants come, and it runs for several days, and it is the most important Baul event in the calendar.

Which is a striking outcome. A Sanskrit court poem written for a king's court in the twelfth century has, as its principal annual festival, a gathering of unlettered wandering singers who reject caste, scripture and institutional religion.

Kenduli Sasan in Odisha holds its own observance, and both places have Jayadeva temples.

How to encounter the poem

Reading:

• Barbara Stoler Miller's Love Song of the Dark Lord is the standard English translation and has the Sanskrit alongside
• Hindi, Odia, Bengali and other translations are extensive
• Read it as a sequence, in order. The cantos build

Listening:

• The Odissi settings, particularly by Odia musicians in the traditional temple style
• Carnatic ashtapadis, which are standard concert items
• Sopana Sangeetham recordings from Kerala
• The recordings of Jayadeva Ashtapadi by various classical singers, which are extensive and easy to find

Watching: any Odissi recital will include an ashtapadi, and it is where the form is at its strongest.

One. The line he could not write.

He stopped at a line in which god asks a woman to put her foot on his head, because it seemed disrespectful.

His hesitation was reverence, and the story says the reverence was the error.

The general form: the instinct to protect the divine from being described as lowering itself is understandable and is usually a failure to have understood the point. Every tradition in this series has some version of this: the god who comes as a servant, who holds the fence, who runs out barefoot, who eats what is offered by somebody nobody will eat with.

Two. Radha refuses, at length, and it is the best part.

The poem gives her anger the whole central section and does not treat it as an obstacle to be got past. Krishna asks, repeatedly, and is refused, repeatedly, and the asking is not a formality.

And she is the one the whole tradition after him is built around. Before this poem she is barely there.

Three. The scoring.

Each of the twenty four ashtapadis is marked with a raga and a tala. The poem was designed to be sung, and it has been sung continuously for eight hundred years across every regional tradition in the country.

The practical point: things made to be performed survive better than things made to be read.

Four. What one book did.

Twelve cantos, twenty four songs, around twelve hundred lines, written by a court poet in Sanskrit for a king in the twelfth century.

Downstream of it: the entire Radha Krishna devotional tradition in Bengali, Odia, Assamese, Braj bhasha, Maithili, Hindi, Rajasthani and Manipuri; the liturgy of the Jagannath temple; the core repertoire of six classical dance forms; several major painting traditions; and the annual gathering of the Bauls.

Five. And the honest note this series keeps making.

The Gita Govinda is an erotic poem. It is also the central devotional text of several traditions. Both are true, the second does not require softening the first, and the traditions that sing it nightly have never been confused about this.

A daily practice from this entry:

• Radhe Radhe or Hare Krishna
• One ashtapadi, listened to with the text. The Odissi and Carnatic recordings are both good entry points
• The Dashavatara Stotra, which is the first ashtapadi and lists the ten avataras, and is the most sung single section
• At Makar Sankranti, the Kenduli mela if you are in Birbhum, or a recording of the Bauls if you are not

A closing thought

A poet at a Bengali king's court in the twelfth century wrote twelve cantos in Sanskrit about a woman who is angry with Krishna and will not take him back, and about the friend who walks between them carrying messages, and about spring.

Near the end he came to a line where Krishna asks her to put her foot on his head, and he decided that was too much to say about god, and went to the river.

When he came back his wife said he had already returned, written something and eaten, and the line was on the palm leaf in front of him, exactly as he had thought it.

Eight hundred years later it is sung every night at Puri when the deities are put to bed, it is the shared repertoire of six classical dance forms, and every January several thousand wandering singers who reject scripture entirely gather on a riverbank in Birbhum in his name.

Who: Jayadeva, twelfth century, roughly 1170 to 1200, author of the Gita Govinda. His birthplace is genuinely disputed between Kenduli Sasan in Khordha district, Odisha, and Kenduli in Birbhum, West Bengal, and both have real evidence and continuous traditions. He is placed at the court of Lakshmanasena of Bengal, among the five jewels of that court. His wife Padmavati was, in the Odia tradition, a dancer dedicated to the Jagannath temple who danced the songs as he composed them.

The poem: Sanskrit, twelve cantos, twenty four songs called ashtapadis because each has eight couplets, with linking shlokas, around twelve hundred lines. Three characters: Krishna, Radha and the sakhi who carries messages between them. Krishna is with the gopis, Radha withdraws in jealousy, the sakhi goes back and forth, Krishna asks to be taken back and is refused at length, and they are eventually reunited.

Why it matters: before this poem Radha barely exists in the literature and is absent from the Bhagavata Purana. Jayadeva makes her the equal subject, with her own interiority and the power in the relationship, and every subsequent Radha in every language comes through this poem.

The technical fact: each ashtapadi is marked with a raga and a tala, which makes it among the earliest Indian texts to be scored.

The story: he came to the line in which Krishna asks Radha to place her foot on his head, decided it was improper to say about god, struck it out and went to bathe. Krishna came in his form, wrote the line, ate the food Padmavati served and left. When Jayadeva returned the line was there exactly as he had thought it.

Where it went: sung nightly at the Jagannath temple at Puri as part of the badasinghara, by a decree of Gajapati Prataprudra Deva around 1499 that only the Gita Govinda be performed there; the foundation of Odissi; central to Gaudiya Vaishnavism through Chaitanya; sung in Kerala's Sopana Sangeetham; standard Carnatic repertoire; and the shared repertoire of six classical dance forms.

Kenduli: the Jaydev Kenduli Mela in Birbhum at Makar Sankranti is the great annual gathering of the Bauls.