Shri Padmavati Ji (and Shri Shridhar Swami)

The poet came back from his bath at the river with his cloth still damp, expecting to find his midday meal waiting untouched, since he ate only after his wife had first set a plate before the household's Thakur. Instead Padmavati looked up from the kitchen corner and said, with the faint reproach of a woman who has just been teased, that he need not pretend hunger again, that he had already eaten not an hour ago, and eaten well, smacking his fingers over the greens the way he always did when a dish pleased him. Jayadeva stood in the doorway understanding nothing. He had touched no food since morning. When he went to his writing desk to set down his palm leaves he found the very line he had abandoned there before leaving for his bath now finished, in ink still faintly wet, in a hand that was his own and yet was not his, and he understood, the way a man understands a lightning flash only after it has already passed, that Krishna had worn his shape for an hour so his wife could go on believing she was only feeding her husband.

To understand why the Lord would trouble himself to wear a mortal poet's body for the sake of one woman's midday meal, it helps to know how that woman came to be standing in that kitchen at all. Tradition remembers her as the long-awaited daughter of a Brahmin devotee of Jagannath, some tellings name him Devasharma, a childless man of Kenduvilva who had spent years praying at the Lord's feet for a child he had already vowed, before her birth, to give back to the temple. When the girl, Padmavati, came of an age to be dedicated as promised, her father brought her to complete that offering. But the god who is said to refuse no one does not always take what is brought to him in the shape it is brought. Whether the word came to the priests in a dream or to the father directly, Jagannath is said to have answered that the girl belonged not in temple service but in the household of a wandering singer named Jayadeva, a man who had renounced marriage entirely to spend his days composing verses on Radha and Krishna. The Brahmin, without argument, left his daughter at the poet's door and departed.

Jayadeva wanted no wife. He had built a life of solitary devotion and did not welcome its interruption, and by several accounts he tried more than once, gently, to send her back to her father's house. Padmavati would not go. From that very day she seems to have decided that whatever he thought of the arrangement, she herself was not a bride he had chosen but a servant Jagannath had assigned to him, and she took up what the tradition calls pativrata dharma, the vow of the devoted wife, less as a claim on him than as a form of worship in its own right. She cooked, she waited, she said nothing when he was cold to her, and over time the poet's resistance gave way to something that the songs of the Bhaktamal itself call a love so complete that it is said to have drawn Mohan, Krishna under his most enchanting name, to become jealous of it, or besotted by it, depending on which verse you trust.

The marriage settled into a shared devotional life at Kenduvilva, within sight of Puri's great temple. Jayadeva sang before Jagannath at night, composing the verses that would become the Gita Govinda, that long and burning conversation in Radha's and Krishna's own voices, and Padmavati kept house around that singing the way other households keep house around a trade. It was in the tenth canto, in an ashtapadi describing Krishna's return to Radha after his own unfaithfulness, that the poet's pen stopped moving. Radha's companion urges Krishna to place his reddened, lotus-tender feet upon her head as a mark of surrender, smara-garala-khandanam, mama shirasi mandanam, dehi pada-pallavam udaram, and Jayadeva could not bring himself to write it. To have Krishna's feet touch a woman's head, even in a poem, even as an image of a lover's abasement, felt to him like ordering God to bow. He set the leaf and pen aside and walked to the river to bathe and think.

What happened next is the miracle the whole story turns on, and it survives in Odia devotional writing in close to the same shape the Bhaktamal's own commentators give it. While Jayadeva was gone, a man wearing his exact form entered the house, sat at his desk, and without hesitation wrote the line the poet had refused to write. He then asked Padmavati for his meal, ate it with an appetite and a relish she had never quite seen in her husband before, and left again before Jayadeva returned. When the real Jayadeva came back dripping from the Ganga, or from the river at Kenduvilva depending on which telling one follows, and found his wife puzzled that he was hungry again so soon, and found in his own book a verse completed in ink he had not laid down, both of them understood that the Lord they sang to every night had, for one afternoon, sat at their table as a guest neither of them had recognized.

A second story clings to Padmavati that is harder to place with confidence, since the sources that preserve it disagree on where it happened and who exactly did the testing. The Bhaktamal's own commentary says only that a spiteful queen tested her, again and again, until at last she simply let go of her body. Later Odia retellings fill this out differently: in one, Padmavati is a guest at the Gajapati king's court in Puri and the queen tells her, carelessly or cruelly, that Jayadeva has died at his devotions in the temple; in another, set at Kashi, a king's wife sends a messenger to trick her with the same false news of her husband's drowning. The versions disagree on the court and the method, but they agree on the one detail that matters: Padmavati did not weep, did not protest, did not wait for confirmation. She simply stopped breathing, as though her own life had never been separate from the word of her husband's death, and only when Jayadeva was told what had been done, and sang or spoke Krishna's name over her, did she draw breath again. It is this instant, uncontested surrender of her body at even a rumor of his death, more than any speech she might have made in her own defense, that the Bhaktamal holds up as the far edge of what a devoted wife's love can mean, and it says plainly that no praise anyone could offer would be equal to it.

Where the couple's story ends is itself told two ways. One strand keeps them at Kenduvilva and at Puri, where to this day the Gita Govinda is sung every night before Jagannath during the temple's closing rites, an unbroken practice tradition traces back to Jayadeva's own lifetime, and where a great fair still gathers every year at Makar Sankranti in his memory, though Bengal and Odisha each claim the actual village of his birth as their own. Another strand carries the couple to Kashi in old age and has them vanish there together near the Ganga in a final, shared absorption into the God they had spent their lives singing to. Later commentators even argued about whether the name Padmavati in Jayadeva's own verses meant his living wife at all, or was a poetic epithet for Lakshmi, but the devotional memory that produced the Bhaktamal never doubted that she was a woman of flesh who cooked, served, and loved, and it is that woman, not a goddess in disguise, whose story it chose to keep.

Having told of a wife who proved her devotion in a kitchen, the Bhaktamal turns without warning to a renunciate who proved his in ink, and it is worth pausing on why the two belong together at all. Shri Shridhara Swami left no household, no wife, no home to speak of. He was a sannyasi, a disciple of a teacher named Paramananda, and by most accounts he held a seat connected to the Govardhan Matha at Puri, one of the four monastic seats Adi Shankaracharya is said to have founded, though other traditions place his birth as far away as Gujarat. His chosen deity was Narasimha, and his life's labor was three commentaries: the Subodhini on the Bhagavad Gita, the Atmaprakasha on the Vishnu Sahasranama, and above all the Bhavartha Dipika on the Shrimad Bhagavatam, very likely the oldest surviving commentary the Bhagavata Purana ever received. Almost every commentator who came after him, across sampradayas that would later disagree fiercely with one another, built on the ground he had cleared first.

What made his tika different, according to the Bhaktamal's own praise of him, was that he refused to let the Bhagavata be dragged toward any single school's convenience. Ritualists who lived by the karma-kanda tried to read it as sanction for rite and sacrifice alone; dry Vedantins tried to flatten it into pure non-dual knowledge with the love scoured out of it; others simply muddled its three strands, action, worship, and knowledge, into one indistinguishable heap because, the commentary says bluntly, they had never understood any of the three to begin with. Shridhara Swami wrote instead in the spirit of what the tradition calls the Paramahamsa Samhita, treating the Bhagavata's true fruit as bhakti itself, and doing it in a way that left the six schools of Indian philosophy, mimamsa, vedanta, yoga, sankhya, nyaya, and vaisheshika, undisturbed and unrivaled with each other, all quietly gathered under the plain sense of the Veda. He called his own expanded work the Paramahamsa-priti-vardhini, the commentary that increases the joy of the liberated soul, and the Bhaktamal insists that this gift came to him by the grace of his guru Paramananda rather than by his own cleverness alone.

The story the Bhaktamal tells to prove this supremacy is set in Kashi, where by tradition every great commentator's tika on the Bhagavata was eventually written or brought for judgment, and where a company of learned pandits, each defending his own reading against all the others, could reach no agreement about which commentary should stand above the rest. At last they resolved to let the matter be settled not by debate but by God. All the rival tikas were carried into the sanctum of Bindu Madhava, the ancient Vishnu shrine of Varanasi, and the doors were shut for two muhurtas, some three hours, while the pandits waited outside. When the doors were opened again, Shridhara Swami's commentary alone lay on top of every other manuscript, and across it, in a hand no one present had written, ran the sentence that the Shridhari tika on the Shrimad Bhagavata stood supreme over all commentaries. From that day, the Bhaktamal says, the dispute simply ended, and the minds of good people everywhere were put at ease.

It is easy for a story like that to sound like pious embroidery meant only for believers, except that history offers an oddly precise echo of it two centuries later, far from any sealed temple door. When the young scholar Vallabha Bhatta, not yet the founder of his own school, came before Chaitanya Mahaprabhu at Puri and boasted that his new commentary on the Bhagavata surpassed even Shridhara Swami's, Chaitanya did not praise his ambition. He told him plainly that Shridhara Swami was guru to the whole world, because it was only through his mercy that anyone had come to understand the Bhagavata's meaning at all, that he himself accepted Shridhara as his own teacher, and that any commentary written in a spirit of rivalry toward him, however clever, would carry a false purport that no sincere reader would ever trust. A saint who would one day be worshipped across Bengal and Odisha as an incarnation of Krishna himself had, without needing any temple's sealed doors to tell him so, arrived independently at exactly the verdict Bindu Madhava is said to have written centuries before.

Set side by side, the two stories the Bhaktamal gathers here are really one teaching told twice. Padmavati proved her devotion with a ladle and a held breath, in a kitchen no scholar would ever visit; Shridhara Swami proved his with a pen and a lifetime of exacting labor, in a debate no ordinary devotee would ever follow. Neither of them sought the proof that came to them. It arrived, in both cases, as a verdict pronounced by God himself, once at a writing desk in a poet's house and once behind the locked doors of a temple in Kashi, and in both cases the verdict said the same quiet thing: that love tested honestly, whether spoken in a woman's unwitting service or in a sannyasi's careful sentences, does not need to defend itself. It only needs to be seen.