Shri Bhaktadas Kulshekhar Ji

The horse goes into the sea at a dead run, and the man on its back has a naked sword raised over his head. He is screaming for his mother. The waves close over the horse's chest, then its neck, and still the rider drives it forward, shouting that he will cut Ravana's ten heads from his shoulders and carry Sita home himself. Ministers and guards stand frozen on the shore behind him, because this is not a madman, and it is not a general riding to a real war. This is Kulasekhara, sovereign of a kingdom in the far south of India, and a few minutes earlier he had been sitting quietly on his throne listening to a young boy read aloud from the Ramayana.

That contradiction, a crowned king who could not tell a recited verse from a living catastrophe, is the whole of what the Hindi Bhaktamal wants remembered about him, and it is not exaggeration so much as the plain outer shape of an inner truth: when love for Rama had fully ripened in him, the difference between then and now, between a story and the present moment, simply stopped holding. Nabhadas and his commentators knew him by two names. In his own country he was Kulasekhara, a name that means something like the crest-jewel of his lineage, a title fit for the ruler he was. But the Hindi devotional tradition remembers him more tenderly as Bhaktadas, servant of the devotees, and by the end of his story it will be clear that he earned the second name at least as thoroughly as he was born to the first.

Who this king actually was, and when he lived, is a question the traditions answer differently, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than pretending to a certainty nobody has. The great line of Vaishnava poet-saints called the Alvars, the twelve who are said to have sung the Tamil hymns later gathered as the Divya Prabandham, places him among their number, one of the few counted among them who was also, unmistakably, a reigning monarch rather than a wandering mystic. Devotional hagiography sets him in a hoary antiquity beyond ordinary counting. Historians who have tried to pin him to a century generally place him around the ninth century of the common era, ruling from the Chera country that is now Kerala, and some have proposed, cautiously, that he can be identified with a known historical Chera king; but that identification remains a scholarly guess, not a settled fact, and the honest thing is to hold it loosely. Tradition does agree on a few gentler details: that he was born at a place called Thiruvanchikkulam on the Kerala coast, that his father was a Chera king who retired to the forest and crowned his son in his place, and that Kulasekhara grew into a ruler who governed his own lands and, for a time, held sway over his neighbors as well, so completely that devotional memory calls him a fragment of the very jewel Vishnu wears on his own chest.

By day he was, by every account, a just and capable king. By evening, in the hall where the court pandit read the Ramayana aloud verse by verse, he became someone else. He wept at Dasharatha's grief without any sense that it belonged to a father who had died centuries before his own birth. He raged at Ravana's cruelty as though the demon king were breathing the same air he was. The scene that opened this story, the sword and the sea, was in fact the second time his devotion overran him so completely that soldiers had to be called. The first time came earlier, during the account of the war in the forest, when the pandit read out how the demons Khara and Dushana massed their army against Rama, who stood there with only his brother and his bow. Kulasekhara rose from his seat mid-verse, called for his weapons and his armor, and ordered his own troops assembled to march at once to Rama's side, certain that his king was that very moment fighting alone against impossible odds somewhere beyond the palace walls. It took a court pandit thinking fast on his feet, one who had spent years learning exactly how far this king's heart could be pushed, to turn the crisis aside: he simply announced, with perfect composure, that word had just come that Rama had already won the battle. Only then did Kulasekhara set down his sword, and only then could the household breathe.

The pandit had learned his lesson. From that day on, whenever his turn came to read to the king, he quietly skipped the chapter of the epic in which Ravana disguises himself as a mendicant and steals Sita away from the hermitage in the forest. He had understood something the rest of the court had missed: that for Kulasekhara, hearing that particular grief recited aloud would not feel like remembering an old injustice. It would feel like watching his own mother being carried off in front of him, happening for the first time, right now. So for years the old man simply left a silence where that chapter should have been, and no one in the hall ever noticed the gap, because no one else in the hall loved Rama in quite that unguarded way.

What undid the arrangement was something as ordinary as illness. One evening the pandit was too unwell to attend, and in his place he sent his own son, a young man well trained in Sanskrit and in the story but with no idea why his father had always quietly passed over one chapter of it. The son began where the manuscript happened to fall open, and it happened to fall open at the abduction. He read it exactly as Valmiki wrote it: the golden deer, Rama drawn away from the hermitage, Lakshmana following at Sita's insistence, and then Ravana sweeping down out of the sky to seize her and carry her weeping into the air toward Lanka. He read it well, in fact, which was the whole problem.

Kulasekhara did not hear a story that evening. He heard his mother screaming for help while he sat uselessly on a throne many miles away. Grief hit him like a physical wound, the Hindi commentary says, a wound straight through the heart, and out of that grief came the same fury that had seized him once before, this time with nothing left standing between him and the door. He called for his sword, mounted his horse, and rode for the shore with his household running behind him and no one able to catch him, shouting the whole way that he would kill the wretched Ravana himself, that his mother's tears would not go unanswered one moment longer. He did not stop at the waterline. He drove the horse straight into the surf, sword raised, weeping and radiant at once, entirely prepared to swim, if it came to that, all the way to Lanka.

And then the sea gave him what no ordinary swimmer could have reached. Rama himself appeared above the water with Sita and Lakshmana beside him, Hanuman and the monkey army arrayed around them, all of them riding the flying palace Pushpaka on their way home from the war already won. Rama called out to him as a father calls to a son who has frightened everyone half to death for love of him: the wicked one and his whole household have already been destroyed, your mother stands safe beside me, look at her with your own eyes, and now come home, because we too are going home, to Ayodhya. The grief that had been tearing Kulasekhara apart left him the instant he saw her face. He returned to shore, the commentary says, the way a dead man returns to life, and rode back to his own house transfigured rather than defeated, and no minister ever again dared to blame the pandit's son for reading the epic too well.

This is the story the Hindi Bhaktamal keeps, and it keeps it because it is making a specific and rather daring theological claim, one spelled out in the very verses that introduce Kulasekhara's chapter: that in this present age, this Kaliyuga, the elaborate disciplines of an earlier era, the sacrifice, the meditation, the renunciation, are not what carries a soul across the ocean of birth and death. Prema does that, love so undefended that it cannot keep a sacred story at arm's length as merely a sacred story. Rama himself, the verses insist, is not won by ritual correctness but by unguarded longing, and a king who could not stop himself from riding a horse into the sea for a woman who died, in the world's reckoning, thousands of years earlier, is offered as living proof that the claim is not merely poetic.

But Kulasekhara's love was never confined to the god alone, and this is where the name Bhaktadas earns itself. Later in his reign, court intrigue reached even his own council chamber. A group of ministers, uneasy that their king trusted the temple's humbler attendants, the men who swept its floors and tended its lamps, more readily than he trusted his own courtiers, arranged for a valuable ornament belonging to the temple deity to disappear, then brought the theft to Kulasekhara and pressed him to punish the devotees who had access to the shrine. He refused to accept the premise before he had tested it. Lovers of God, he told them, are incapable of this kind of theft; there is no room in a heart occupied that fully for petty greed. To prove it, he ordered a vessel brought to him with a venomous cobra inside, and before the whole gathered court he thrust his own hand into it. He drew the hand back unmarked. Shamed into confession, the ministers admitted the theft was their own doing, produced the ornament, and begged forgiveness, which the king gave them freely, though the episode seems to have finally convinced him that his heart was no longer suited to a throne at all.

He did not simply abdicate in disgust, however; by every account he handed the kingdom to his own son in good order and set out for the temple city of Srirangam, taking with him a daughter named Cherakulavalli who had grown up as devoted to the deity there as her father was to Rama. At Srirangam he spent his remaining years in the Lord's personal service, giving of his wealth to build a gateway into the temple that is said to bear his name to this day, and giving his own daughter in marriage to Ranganatha himself on the festival of Ramanavami, a union the temple still commemorates every year, so that the same king who had once nearly drowned trying to rescue one form of God's family ended his life as father-in-law to another. He is remembered, too, for a wish so entirely without pride that temples still shape their architecture around it: that he be reborn not as anything grand but as the very stone step worshippers cross on their way into the sanctum, or a fish in the temple river, anything at all that could stay permanently near enough to see, in his words, the coral-red mouth of his Lord. A step inside the great hill shrine of Tirumala is called Kulasekhara Padi to this day in memory of that wish, the last threshold pilgrims may cross before the innermost sanctum, and no one may go past it.

Out of that same devotion came two enduring works. In Tamil he composed the hundred and five hymns of the Perumal Thirumozhi, in which he does not simply praise Rama and Krishna from a respectful distance but climbs, verse by verse, into the very hearts of the people who loved them: he becomes Kausalya singing a lullaby over the infant Rama, and in another sequence he becomes old Dasharatha himself, undone with grief as he watches his son walk away toward fourteen years of exile. In Sanskrit he left the Mukunda Mala Stotram, whose most loved verse asks its Lord for nothing that an ordinary petitioner would ask, not wealth, not family, not a beautiful life, not even release from the wheel of rebirth, only the unbroken chance to keep serving; another verse begs simply that the swan of his own restless mind never be made to leave the tangled stalks of those lotus feet, the way no swan that has once found a lotus pond can bear to leave it. It is fitting that a king who once mistook a recited verse for a living wound should have spent his final years writing verses meant to work exactly that way on everyone who came after him, and it is fitting, too, that the Hindi Bhaktamal preserves his memory not as a lesson in doctrine but as a man riding his horse into the sea, because that image, more than any argument, is what the tradition means when it says that in this age, love alone is enough to cross the water.