Gita Govinda. Jayadeva

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 himself to his audience, the poet proclaims his veneration of Padmavati. King Mananka glosses the name as “Lakshmi,” the heavenly consort of Vishnu and goddess of Prosperity. Jaya·deva is, ________

      he himself says, a royal poet obeisant, literally “[bowing] at the feet of,” Padmavati. The word here used for “poet” (carana), an apt reference to the gandharvas who sing for the gods, is, not without some etymological justification, read in light of the hagiographies, as “wandering singer” or a “mendicant bard” who sings not “at the feet” of the goddess, but “for the feet” of the dancer, his wife.

      In Song xxi, the poet proclaims that his songs please Padmavati. The fifteenth-century commentator Kumbha, paraphrastically explains the statement as a reference to a shrine in Kenduli village where Lakshmi is known as Padmavati, and where a young Jaya·deva pleased that goddess by worshipping her in his youth. By the sixteenth century, however, as evidenced by the commentary of Shankara Mishra, Padmavati had become Jaya·deva’s wife. The legends of the devoted married couple, the singer and the dancer, dedicated together to serving Krishna at the Jagannath Temple, had become an accepted history, a true story that legitimated the “Gita·govinda” as a liturgical text to be performed in song and dance for the deity as it still is each evening at that temple in Puri.

      That the hallowed songs of the “Gita·govinda” would transport the sixteenth-century Vaishnava saint, Chaitanya, into ecstasies and beatitude, affording him epiphanies of Krishna, made the singing of them integral to the devo- tional practices of the Bengal Vaishnava movement. Ac- cording to the “Nectar of the Acts of Chaitanya” (Caitanya-caritamrta), as the saint sang the onomatopoetic and alliter- ative third song of the “Gita·govinda,” “lalita/lavanga/lata...,” Krishna, enchanted by its mellifluousness, appeared to ____________

      him in a garden in Puri. And then, as Chaitanya rushed to-ward his lord, the god vanished and Chaitanya swooned, falling to the ground in blissful trance.