Vidyapati: The Servant Who Was Shiva

The story Mithila tells about him, and it is a fine one.

What happened

A man came to Vidyapati's house looking for work. His name was Ugna.

He was taken on as a servant. He carried things, fetched water, walked with Vidyapati when he travelled, and did whatever a household servant does.

And he stayed for years.

The incidents that should have given it away

The accounts collect several.

One: on a journey through a dry region Vidyapati was desperate for water, and Ugna went off and came back with some, and it was Ganga water, hundreds of miles from the Ganga. Vidyapati asked where he had got it. Ugna gave some answer.

Two: various small impossibilities in the household which were noticed and not pursued.

Three: Vidyapati eventually worked it out, or was told, or saw something.

Ugna was Shiva.

The condition

And this is the part that matters.

Shiva had come to serve him on one condition: that Vidyapati never reveal who he was.

What broke it: the accounts vary. In the most told version, Vidyapati's wife was angry with Ugna over some domestic matter and was about to strike him with a piece of firewood, and Vidyapati, unable to watch it, cried out that she must not, because he is Mahadev.

And that was the condition broken.

Ugna left. He disappeared, and Vidyapati went looking for him and did not find him, and by the accounts wandered in distress.

Where he stopped: at a spot near Bisfi, where the tradition says Shiva finally appeared and told him he could not come back but would remain there as a linga.

The Ugna Mahadev temple at Bisfi is that place, and it is a working pilgrimage site in Madhubani district today.

What the story is doing

It is the same shape as the Ramprasad fence story and it is worth setting them side by side.

In Bengal, the goddess turns up to hold one end of a bamboo fence while a poor man ties it, and leaves before she can be thanked.

In Mithila, Shiva turns up and works as a household servant for years, carrying water and luggage, on condition that nobody says who he is.

Neither story has the deity arrive in state, grant anything, or require worship. In both, the deity is doing menial work in somebody's house, and in both the moment of recognition ends it.

And the condition in the Ugna story is the point: the arrangement only worked while Vidyapati did not know. Once he did, the servant could not stay a servant.

Vidyapati's own Shiva songs

He wrote a large body of them, in two named genres:

• Nachari: songs to Shiva
• Maheshvani: songs about Shiva and Gauri

And their register is domestic and comic. Gauri complains that her husband has no money, that he smokes and takes bhang, that he keeps ghosts for friends, that he has brought nothing home, and that her mother warned her.

Which is exactly the register of the Bengali Agamani songs, and the two traditions are geographically adjacent and clearly connected.

The question that has to be asked

Was Vidyapati a devotional poet or a court love poet?

The case for court love poet:

• He was a salaried court poet at Mithila, writing for kings and queens
• Many of his padas are addressed to or written about Lakhima Devi, the queen, and the boundary between describing her and describing Radha is not always clear
• The padas are erotic, and the eroticism is not obviously allegorical
• He wrote inheritance law and a manual of official correspondence in the same career
• Nothing in his Sanskrit works suggests a Vaishnava devotional commitment; his personal devotion, on the evidence including Ugna, was to Shiva

The case for devotional poet:

• The Radha Krishna subject is itself devotional material and had been since the Gita Govinda
• Several padas, particularly the late ones, are explicitly prayers
• The tradition of reading erotic poetry devotionally is old and legitimate and not an afterthought

What actually happened

Bengal decided.

Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, in the early sixteenth century, is recorded as having favoured three things above all others: the Gita Govinda of Jayadeva, the songs of Chandidas, and the songs of Vidyapati.

Once Chaitanya sang them, the question was settled for the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition. Vidyapati became one of the Panchakavi, the five poets of the Vaishnava padavali, alongside Chandidas, Jnanadas, Govindadas and Balaramdas.

And his padas entered kirtan, were sung in Bengal for five hundred years, were commented on theologically, and were fitted into the Gaudiya analysis of the stages of divine love.

A Maithili court poet became a Bengali devotional classic, and a very large proportion of the people who know his songs know them in that context.

Brajabuli

One technical consequence worth knowing.

Bengali poets writing devotional padas began composing in an artificial literary language modelled on Vidyapati's Maithili, called Brajabuli.

It is not a spoken language. It is a poetic register, mixing Maithili and Bengali forms, invented specifically because Vidyapati's language had become the sound of that kind of poem.

Rabindranath Tagore wrote in Brajabuli as a young man, publishing the Bhanusimha Thakurer Padavali under a pseudonym and presenting them as rediscovered old poems, which is a nineteenth century literary joke at the expense of a fifteenth century Maithili court poet.

How to hold the two readings

The same way this series held Kshetrayya.

Both are true. He was a court poet writing sophisticated erotic verse for a royal audience, in a tradition where that was a high art. And the poems were taken up as devotional literature by a movement that found in them exactly what it needed, and that reading is also five hundred years old and has produced its own enormous body of practice.

Neither reading requires the other to be wrong, and pretending the poems were only ever pious is a nineteenth century tidying that the poems themselves do not support.

His most famous single pada

It is not one of the Radha Krishna songs. It is a prayer, generally placed late in his life, and it is the one Maithili and Bengali both keep.

Its content, in substance:

Like a drop of water on hot sand: that is what the company of sons and friends and women has amounted to. My life has gone. I spent it in hope and the hope came to nothing. I did not think about you and now I am here. Madhava, I am asking you. There is nobody else.

Tatala saikate bari bindu sama: a drop of water on burning sand.

Why it is the one everybody keeps: because it is not a young man's poem. The rest of the padavali is the finest erotic verse in the language, and this one is a man at the end of it saying it did not last.

And it is not despairing. The last movement of the poem is a request, and the request is granted in the tradition's telling.

His end

The story Mithila tells:

He knew he was going to die and wanted to die on the bank of the Ganga, which is what a person of his background and period would want.

He set out. And he was too old and too weak, and could not reach it, and stopped some distance short.

And the Ganga came to him.

The river shifted its course, or a channel came, and reached the place where he was sitting.

Where this is said to have happened: near Bazitpur, in Samastipur district, Bihar, at a place now called Vidyapati Nagar or Vidyapati Dham, where there is a temple and his memorial.

How to hold that: the Ganga in Bihar does change course, sometimes dramatically, and the region's settlement history is full of villages that were on the river and are not, and the other way round. The story fits the geography, which does not make it true, and the tradition holds it.

His other Ganga pada is one of his best known: a poem of great happiness at reaching the bank, saying that he has found what he was looking for, and asking her to take what is left.

Places

• Bisfi, Madhubani district: his birthplace, with the Ugna Mahadev temple
• Vidyapati Nagar, Samastipur district: where he is said to have died, with the Ganga temple and memorial
• Madhubani and the Mithila region generally, where he is the presiding literary figure

Vidyapati Parva, his observance, is kept in Mithila and by Maithili communities, and there are academies and institutions across Bihar and in Nepal, since Mithila straddles the border and Maithili is spoken on both sides.

One. Ugna, and the condition.

Shiva worked as a household servant on condition that nobody said who he was, and the arrangement ended the moment somebody did.

Two readings, both worth keeping.

The first: help of that kind is not usually labelled. The person carrying your things and fetching your water is doing a considerable thing and is not announced as doing it.

The second, and it is the harder one: the recognition ended the service. As long as Vidyapati thought Ugna was a servant, Ugna could stay. The moment he was known, he had to go. There is a real observation about relationships in that, and it is not a comfortable one.

Two. He wrote inheritance law and love poetry in the same career.

His Sanskrit output includes a manual of official correspondence, a treatise on the law of inheritance, a geography, and a book on how to assess a man's character. The Maithili love songs came out of the same working life.

Nothing in the tradition treats this as a contradiction. He had a job, he did it, and he wrote the songs as well.

Three. A drop of water on burning sand.

His most kept poem is a man at the end of a long and successful life saying that the company of family and friends came to about that much, that the hope came to nothing, and that he did not think about this until now.

It is worth reading before you need it, which is the only time it is any use.

Four. Bengal decided what his poems were.

He wrote them at a Maithili court. Chaitanya sang them in Bengal a century later and they became scripture for a devotional movement, and a whole artificial poetic language was invented to sound like them.

The general point: what a work turns out to be is not entirely up to the person who made it. That is a reason to make things carefully and not a reason to control what happens to them.

Five. And the honest note.

The padavali is erotic court poetry, read devotionally by a tradition that had good reasons for reading it that way. Both are true. A guide that gives only one is giving you less than there is.

A daily practice from this entry:

• Hare Krishna or Om Namah Shivaya, depending on which of him you want
• The tatala saikate pada, read once in translation, and kept
• A Nachari or Maheshvani, which are funny and are sung in Mithila
• On Vidyapati Parva, or on Shivaratri at any Shiva temple, with Ugna in mind

A closing thought

A court poet in Mithila who also wrote the law of inheritance and a manual of official letters spent his life composing love songs in Maithili about a girl in Braj, in her own voice, at every stage from the first time anybody noticed she had grown up to the last time he left her.

A man named Ugna came and worked in his house for years, fetching water and carrying his luggage, and turned out to be Shiva, and had to leave the moment Vidyapati said so out loud.

A hundred years after he died, a man in Bengal sang his songs and wept, and the whole of eastern Indian devotional music was rearranged around them.

And at the end, too weak to reach the river he wanted to die beside, he sat down, and Mithila says the river came the rest of the way.

Who: Vidyapati Thakur, roughly 1352 to 1448, of Bisfi in Madhubani district, Bihar, in the region of Mithila. The founding poet of Maithili and a court poet of the Oinwar dynasty, principally under Raja Shiva Simha and his queen Lakhima Devi.

What he wrote: in Sanskrit, the Purusha Pariksha, a geography, a manual of official correspondence, a treatise on inheritance law and a work on Durga worship; in Avahattha, the Kirtilata; and in Maithili the padavali, the songs, which is what he is remembered for and which he probably regarded as the least of it.

The padavali: several hundred songs on Radha and Krishna, tracing the whole arc of a love affair in sequence from the girl becoming a woman through first longing, night meeting, union, quarrel, separation and reunion. Almost always in Radha's voice or her friend's, sensuous and unembarrassed.

Ugna: a man came to his house looking for work and served him for years, carrying water and luggage. He was Shiva, on condition that Vidyapati never say so. When Vidyapati's wife was about to strike him and Vidyapati cried out that he was Mahadev, the condition was broken and Ugna left. The Ugna Mahadev temple at Bisfi is where he is said to have finally appeared and stayed as a linga.

His Shiva songs: the Nachari and Maheshvani genres, in which Gauri complains that her husband has no money, takes bhang and keeps ghosts for friends, which is exactly the register of the Bengali Agamani songs.

What Bengal did: Chaitanya favoured the Gita Govinda, Chandidas and Vidyapati above all others, and Vidyapati became one of the Panchakavi of the Vaishnava padavali. Bengali poets invented an artificial language, Brajabuli, modelled on his Maithili, and Tagore wrote in it as a young man.

The honest note: he was a court love poet and his poems were read as devotion by a movement that had good reasons for reading them that way. Both are true.

His end: too weak to reach the Ganga he wanted to die beside, he stopped short, and Mithila says the river came the rest of the way, near what is now Vidyapati Nagar in Samastipur district.