



Produced by James Simmons




VIDYĀPATI


VIDYĀPATI: BANGĪYA PADĀBALI

SONGS OF THE LOVE OF RĀDHĀ AND KRISHNA TRANSLATED
INTO ENGLISH BY ANANDA COOMARASWAMY AND
ARUN SEN WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES AND
ILLUSTRATIONS FROM INDIAN PAINTINGS


LONDON: THE OLD BOURNE PRESS,

15 HOLBORN, E.C.

1915.


The whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy,
whereas it now appears finite and corrupt. This will come to pass by an
improvement of sensual enjoyment.

                               --_William Blake._

Be drunken with love, for love is all that exists.

                                             --_Shamsi Tabrīz._





TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

KRISHNA PŪRBBARĀGA: The First Passion of Krishna

RĀDHĀ BAYAHSANDI: The Growing-up of Rādhā

RĀDHĀ PŪRBBARĀGA: The First Passion of Rādhā

SAKHĪ-SHIKSHĀ-BACANĀDI: The Counsel of Girl-friends (Sakhīs)

PRATHAMA MILNA: First Meetings

ABHISĀRA: (Rādhā's) Going-forth (to visit Krishna)

VASANTA LĪLA: Dalliance in Spring

MĀNA: Wilfulness

MĀNĀNTE MILNA: Reunion after Wilfulness

ĀKSHEPA ANUYOGA O VIRAHA: Reproaches, Lack and Longing

PUNARMILNA O RASODGĀRA: Reunion and the Flow of Nectar

NOTES

    ELUCIDATIONS

    BIRDS, FLOWERS AND TREES

    ILLUSTRATIONS

    TEXTS

    CORRIGENDA



INTRODUCTION.

VIDYĀPATI THĀKUR is one of the most renowned of the Vaishnava poets of
Hindustān. Before him there had been the great Jāyadeva, with his Gītā
Govinda made in Sanskrit; and it is to this tradition Vidyāpati
belongs, rather than to that of Rāmānanda, Kabīr, and Tul'si Dās, who
sang of Rāma and Sītā. Vidyāpati's fame, though he also wrote in
Sanskrit, depends upon the wreath of songs (_pada_) in which he describes
the courtship of God and the Soul, under the names of Krishna and Rādhā.
These were written in Maithilī, his mother-tongue, a dialect
intermediate between Bengālī and Hindī, but nearer to the former. His
position as a poet and maker of language is analogous to that of Dante
in Italy and Chaucer in England. He did not disdain to use the
folk-speech and folk-thought for the expression of the highest matters.
Just as Dante was blamed by the classical scholars of Italy, so
Vidyāpati was blamed by the pandits: he knew better, however, than
they, and has well earned the title of Father of Bengali literature.

Little is known of Vidyāpati's life[1]. Two other great Vaishnava poets,
Chandī Dās and Umāpati, were his contempories. His patron Rājā
Shivasimha Rūpanārāyana, when heir-apparent, gave the village of Bisapī
as a rent-free gift to the poet in the year 1400 A.D. (the original deed
is extant). This shows that in 1400 the poet was already a man of
distinction. His patron appears to have died in 1449, before which date
the songs here translated must have been written. Further, there still
exists a manuscript of the Bhāgavata Purāna in the poet's handwriting,
dated 1456. It is thus evident that he lived to a good age, for it is
hardly likely that he was under twenty in the year 1400. The following
is the legend of his death: Feeling his end approaching, he set out to
die on the banks of Gangā. But remembering that she was the child of the
faithful, he summoned her to himself: and the great river divided
herself in three streams, spreading her waters as far as the very place
where Vidyāpati sat. There and then he laid himself, it is said down and
died. Where his funeral pyre was, sprang up a Shiva lingam, which exists
to this day, as well as the marks of the flood. This place is near the
town of Bāzitpur, in the district of Darbhangā.

Vidyāpati's Vaishnava _padas_ are at once folk and cultivated art--just
like the finest of the Pahārī paintings, where every episode of which he
sings finds exquisite illustration. The poems are not, like many
ballads, of unknown authorship and perhaps the work of many hands, but
they are due to the folk in the sense that folk-life is glorified and
popular thought is reflected. The songs as we have them are entirely the
work of one supreme genius; but this genius did not stand alone, as
that of modern poets must--on the contrary, its roots lay deep in the
common life of fields and villages, and above all, in common faiths and
superstitions. These were days when peasants yet spoke as elegantly as
courtiers, and kings and cultivators shared one faith and a common view
of life--conditions where all things are possible to art.

It is little wonder that Vidyāpati's influence on the literature of
Eastern Hindustān has been profound, and that his songs became the
household poetry of Bengal and Behar. His poems were adopted and
constantly sung by the great Hindū lover, Cāitanya, in the sixteenth
century, and they have been adapted and handed down in many dialects,
above all in Bengālī, in the Vaishnava tradition, of which the last
representative is Rabindranāth Tagore. A poem by the latter well resumes
and explains the theory of the Vaishnava lovers:[2]

    _Not my way of Salvation, to surrender the world!_
        _Rather for me the taste of Infinite Freedom,_
    _While yet I am bound by a thousand bonds to the wheel:_
        _In each glory of sound and sight and smell_
    _I shall find Thy Infinite Joy abiding:_
        _My passion shall burn as the flame of Salvation,_
    _The flower of my love shall become the ripe fruit of Devotion._

This leads us to the subject of the true significance of poems such as
Vidyāpati's. It is quite true, as Mr. Nicholson says, that students of
oriental poetry have sometimes to ask themselves, 'Is this a love-poem
disguised as a mystical ode, or a mystical ode expressed in the language
of human love?' Very often this question cannot be answered with a
definite 'Yes' or 'No': not because the poet's meaning is vague, but
because the two ideas are not at all mutually exclusive. All the
manifestations of Kama on earth are images of Pursuit or Return.

As Vidyāpati himself says (No. LXIII):

    _The same flower that you cast away, the same you use in prayer._
    _And with the same you string the bow._

It is quite