



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 certain that many poems of Vidyāpati have an almost wholly
spiritually significance.[3] If some others seem very obviously secular,
let us remember that we have no right to detach such poems from their
context in books and still less any right to divorce them from their
context in life.

We may illustrate this point by a comparison with poetry of Western
Europe. Take for example a poem such as the following, with a purely
secular significance (if any true art can be said to be secular):

    _Oh! the handsome lad frae Skye_
    _That's lifted a' the cattle, a'oor kye._
    _He's t'aen the dun, the black, the white._
    _And I hae mickle fear_
    _He's t'aen my heart forbye._

Had this been current in fifteenth century Bengal, every Vaishnava would
have understood the song to speak as much of God and the Soul as of man
and maid, and to many the former meaning would have been the more
obvious. On the other hand, there are many early medieval Western hymns
in which the language of human love is deliberately adapted to religious
uses, for example:

    _When y se blosmes springe,_
        _And here foules songe,_
    _A suete love-longynge_
        _Myn herte thourh out stong;_
    _Al for a love newe,_
    _That is so suete and trewe._
    _That gladieth al mi song._

Here the 'new love' is Christ.

Finally, there are other Western lyrics, and very exquisite ones, that
could equally be claimed as religious or secular, for example:

    _Long ago to thee I gave_
    _Body, soul and all I have--_
        _Nothing in the world I keep._ [4]

The Western critic who would enquire what such a poem meant to its maker
and his hearers must be qualified by spiritual kinship with him and with
them. Let us demand a similar qualification from those who propose to
speak of Oriental poetry:

    _Wer den Dichter will verstehen._
    _Muss in Dichter's Lande gehen,--_

if not in physical presence, at least in spirit.

In ecstasy, man