Raskhan: If I Am Born a Stone, Let It Be That Hill

His most famous verse, and one of the best known things in Hindi.

What it says, in substance:

If I am to be born a human being, then let it be as one of the cowherds of Gokul village.

If I am to be an animal, what say do I have? Then let me graze every day among the cows of Nanda.

If a stone, then let it be that hill, the one he lifted up as an umbrella against Indra.

If a bird, then let me nest on the kadamba branches on the bank of the Yamuna.

Why it is the verse everybody knows

Because of what he is asking for.

Not liberation. Not to be freed from rebirth, which is what a devotional verse in this position would normally request. Not to be with Krishna in any heaven, and not to be recognised, remembered or rewarded.

He is asking to be a piece of the landscape.

And he works down the scale deliberately: human, animal, mineral, bird. A cowherd, a cow, a rock, and a bird in a tree.

And the only thing he specifies is the location. Whatever he is, let it be there.

The stone

The middle image is the one that stops people.

If I have to be a stone, which is the lowest thing on the list and has no awareness at all, let me be that particular hill.

Govardhan, which Krishna lifted for seven days to shelter the village from the rain Indra sent.

A rock has no experience of anything. It cannot know it is being held. And that is what he is asking to be, because of what was done with it.

And on the bird

Kadamba trees on the bank of the Yamuna are where Krishna is described as sitting and playing the flute.

He does not ask to hear it. He asks to have a nest in the branches, which is a bird's business and has nothing to do with listening.

The form

Savaiya is a Braj bhasha metre, long lined and rolling, and it is built for exactly this kind of accumulating list. Raskhan is one of its masters.

And the language: Braj bhasha, not Persian, not Urdu, not Khari Boli. The literary language of the Krishna country, which he learned and then wrote better than almost anybody.

His other famous verses

One. The stick and the blanket.

For that stick and that blanket I would give up the sovereignty of the three worlds.

The lakuti is the cowherd's staff, the kamariya the coarse blanket he wears. Both are the cheapest possible objects, and the verse offers everything for them.

Two. The ones the gods sing.

Shesha, Ganesha, Mahesha, the sun, Indra: all of them sing him continuously and cannot reach the end of it. And the cowherd women of Braj tie him up with a rope.

The contrast is the whole verse: the cosmic hierarchy singing without arriving, and the village women handling him.

Three. The verses on Braj as a place.

A large number of his savaiyas are simply about the country: the Yamuna, Govardhan, the groves, the paths, the cows, the dust.

And the recurring claim is that the place itself is the point, and that he would rather be a stone in it than anything else anywhere else.

Where to find them

• Sujan Raskhan, the collection of his savaiyas and padas, around two hundred verses
• Prem Vatika, described below
• Hindi textbooks across north India, which is where most people first meet him
• Recordings, since the savaiyas are recited and sung

Fifty three dohas, in Braj bhasha, and it is a short treatise on prem, love.

Vatika means a garden or an enclosure. Prem Vatika: the garden of love.

What it does

It analyses love, in couplets, as a subject.

Not love poems. A treatise about what love is, what it requires, how it differs from other things it resembles, and what it does to a person.

Which is unusual, and it is what you would expect from a man who was formed by an intense personal attachment before he ever came to Braj.

Its main positions

One. Prem is not kama.

The first distinction, and the one everything else rests on.

Kama is desire, and it is directed at getting something for the person who has it.

Prem is not, and the test he applies is what happens when the beloved's interest and your own diverge.

Two. It cannot be produced by effort.

You cannot decide to love and thereby love. It arrives, or it does not, and nothing in the technology of religion can manufacture it.

Which is a limitation the whole bhakti tradition acknowledges and which it usually handles by saying that the practices prepare the ground without guaranteeing anything.

Three. It is not compatible with calculation.

A person keeping accounts is not in it. The moment there is a ledger of what has been given and what is owed, the thing being described is something else.

Four. It costs.

He is direct about this. Prem is not comfortable, it does not make you calm, and a person who has it is worse off in every practical respect than a person who does not.

Five. And it is its own object.

The closing position, and it is the same one Utpaladeva reaches in Sanskrit six hundred years earlier: the thing is not a means to anything. It is not undertaken in order to arrive somewhere.

Why the Prem Vatika matters

Because it is written by somebody with the relevant experience of both kinds.

Raskhan came to Braj out of an ordinary human attachment that had gone badly, and the analysis in the Prem Vatika is written by a man who has been in both situations and is comparing them.

Which is why it is not sentimental. A treatise on love by somebody who has only ever loved a deity would be much less useful.

A note on the accounts of his earlier attachment

The tradition records that he was in love with somebody before he came to Braj, and the accounts differ on whether it was a man or a woman.

How this app treats it: as biography, reported as the sources report it, without treating the ambiguity as a problem requiring resolution. The tradition itself did not treat it as one, and the poems are what they are either way.

Reading him

• Sujan Raskhan and the Prem Vatika are both short and are widely available in Hindi with modern paraphrase
• Selections are in every Hindi literature curriculum in north India
• English translations exist though they are fewer than the material deserves
• The savaiyas are recited, and hearing the metre matters, since the form is built on the roll of the long line

Where to go

• Mahavan, near Gokul, Mathura district, where his samadhi is
• Gokul and Mahavan are on the Yamuna a short distance from Mathura
• Govardhan, for the hill in the verse
• The annual observance at his samadhi

One. The stone.

He asks that if he must be born as a stone, it be the hill that was lifted.

A rock has no experience of anything and cannot know it is being held, and he asks to be one anyway, on the strength of what was done with it.

Which is a request with no benefit to the person making it, and that is the whole point of the verse.

Two. He asks for the place, not the outcome.

Not liberation, not heaven, not to be freed from rebirth. A cowherd, a cow, a rock, a bird, and the only condition is that it be in that country.

As a way of thinking about what you want, it is worth sitting with: if the outcome were removed entirely and only the location remained, where would you want to be.

Three. He was turned away and lay down outside.

A Muslim arriving at a Vaishnava settlement was refused entry and driven off, and lay at the edge of it for days without food until the head of the sampradaya overruled the refusal.

Both halves are the record, and neither should be dropped: the community turned him away, and Vitthalnath took him in, and the result is some of the most loved Krishna poetry in the language.

Four. The intensity was redirected, not manufactured.

He came to Braj carrying an attachment that had already consumed him, and somebody observed that a person capable of that much should point it somewhere it would not be wasted.

Which is a different account of how devotion starts from the usual one. Not: acquire feeling. But: you already have the capacity, and it is currently pointed at something that cannot hold it.

Five. The Prem Vatika's tests.

Is it kama or prem: what happens when their interest and yours diverge.

Is there a ledger: if you are counting what has been given and what is owed, it is something else.

Does it cost: he is clear that it does, that it is not comfortable, and that a person who has it is worse off practically than a person who does not.

A daily practice from this entry:

• Radhe Radhe or Hare Krishna
• The famous savaiya, learned by heart. It is four lines and half of north India already knows it
• One doha of the Prem Vatika, occasionally
• At Govardhan, if you go: the hill in the verse, and the parikrama

A closing thought

A young Pathan nobleman connected to the court at Delhi was in love with somebody, badly, and it was destroying him, and some Vaishnavas he was sitting with observed that a person who could feel that much ought to point it at something that could take it.

They showed him a picture, and he left Delhi and went to a village on the Yamuna.

When he got there they would not let him in, because of what he was, so he lay down outside the settlement and stayed there until somebody senior enough came and overruled it.

He spent the rest of his life there and wrote in the local language, and the verse of his that every schoolchild in north India learns asks that if he has to come back as a stone, it should be that particular hill.

Who: Raskhan, roughly 1548 to 1628, born Syed Ibrahim Khan into a Pathan family of nobility connected to the court at Delhi. His birthplace is disputed between Delhi, Amroha, Pihani in Hardoi district and elsewhere. Raskhan is a pen name meaning the Khan of rasa, and punning on khaan, a mine, so the mine of rasa.

How he came to Braj: he was intensely in love with somebody, and the accounts differ on whether a man or a woman. It was going badly. Vaishnavas he was with observed that a person capable of feeling that much should direct it somewhere it would not be wasted, and showed him a picture of Krishna. He left Delhi for Braj.

At Gokul: he was turned away because he was a Muslim, and lay outside the settlement for days without food until Vitthalnath, called Gusainji, son of Vallabhacharya and organiser of the Pushtimarg, accepted him and initiated him. Both halves of that are the record. He lived at Mahavan near Gokul for the rest of his life and his samadhi is there.

His famous savaiya: if I am to be born a human being, let it be as a cowherd of Gokul; if an animal, let me graze among the cows of Nanda; if a stone, let it be that hill he lifted as an umbrella against Indra; if a bird, let me nest in the kadamba by the Yamuna. He asks not for liberation but to be a piece of the landscape, working down the scale from human to animal to mineral, and specifying only the location.

Other verses: for that stick and that blanket he would give up sovereignty of the three worlds; and the one contrasting Shesha, Ganesha, Mahesha, the sun and Indra singing him endlessly without reaching the end, against the cowherd women of Braj tying him up with a rope.

The Prem Vatika: fifty three dohas analysing prem as a subject. Prem is not kama; it cannot be produced by effort; it is incompatible with keeping accounts; it costs, and a person who has it is worse off practically than a person who does not; and it is its own object rather than a means to anything. It is not sentimental, because it was written by somebody who had been in both kinds of situation and was comparing them.

Since this batch and several others are full of it, the language is worth a section.

What it is

Braj bhasha is the language of the Braj region: Mathura, Vrindavan, Agra and the surrounding country.

And for roughly four hundred years, from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth, it was the principal literary language of north India for poetry.

Not Khari Boli, which is the basis of modern standard Hindi and which was used for prose and administration. Not Urdu, which developed alongside it. Not Awadhi, which was the other major poetic language and which produced Tulsidas's Ramcharitmanas and Jayasi's Padmavat.

For lyric poetry, and above all for anything about Krishna, the language was Braj.

Who wrote in it

The list is most of north Indian devotional poetry:

• Surdas and the Ashtachhap poets of the Pushtimarg
• Mirabai, in a mixture of Braj and Rajasthani
• Raskhan
• Hit Harivansh and the Radhavallabh poets
• Swami Haridas and the Haridasi poets
• Nanddas, Paramanandadas, Kumbhandas, Chaturbhujdas, Krishnadas, Govindswami, Chhitswami
• Bihari, whose Satsai is a masterpiece of the courtly style
• Keshavdas, Bhushan, Matiram, Deva and the whole ritikal court poetry tradition
• Rahim, Abdur Rahim Khan e Khanan, Akbar's commander and minister, whose Braj dohas are learned by every Hindi speaking child

Which is worth noticing: two of the most quoted Braj poets in north India, Raskhan and Rahim, were Muslims, and neither fact causes any difficulty to anybody who learned the verses at school.

What happened to it

It was displaced.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Khari Boli became the basis of standardised modern Hindi, for reasons of print, education, administration and the politics of the period, and Braj bhasha stopped being a language people wrote new literature in.

What survives:

• It is spoken in the Braj region
• It is the language of temple singing across the Krishna traditions, which is a very large living body of practice
• Its poetry is in every Hindi curriculum in north India
• Dhrupad and haveli sangeet are almost entirely in it
• Holi songs, rasiya, and the folk music of the region

Why it matters for reading any of this

Braj bhasha is soft in a specific way that translation loses. It has a lot of open vowels, it is built for singing, and the metres in it, the savaiya, the kavitt, the doha, the pada, roll rather than march.

If you read Raskhan or Surdas only in English translation you are getting the content and none of the sound, and the sound is a substantial part of why these poets are loved.

The practical suggestion: find a recording. The savaiyas are recited and sung, they are freely available, and hearing one is worth more than reading five.