Shriji Magji

It is said that one evening at Vamshi Vat, the old tree on the Vrindavan sands beneath which the tradition remembers Krishna once lifting his flute to call the cowherd women out of their homes, a Brahmin scholar sat composing verses in Raag Malhar, the raga of monsoon cloud, and found that he could not finish the line he was singing. He had been describing the meeting of two faces, one dark as a rain cloud, one bright as young lightning, standing together beneath a swaying kadamba, and as the words left his mouth the description stopped answering to his imagination and started answering to his eyes. Devotees who still tell this story of Shribhatt say that Radha and Krishna simply stood there before him in the very form his song had been reaching for, that he fell silent with the tanpura still in his hand, and that only when the vision passed did he pick the line back up and finish it, now written from memory rather than longing. Whatever actually happened that particular evening, the anecdote has survived for centuries because it says exactly what Shribhatt's admirers wanted said of him: that his poetry was less an act of invention than an act of witness, and that the aghatit rasa his verses are famous for delivering, an unprecedented, previously unopened sweetness, was unprecedented because until he sat at Vamshi Vat with his eyes truly open, almost no one had dared look that closely, or that tenderly, at the two of them together.

Nabhadas's Bhaktamal remembers him simply as Shribhatt, a name that manuscript copying and centuries of print have sometimes worn into barely recognizable shapes, and praises him as a subhat, a warrior, who broke open a flavor of devotion that had lain sealed until he arrived. Behind the epithet stands a real, if imperfectly dated, poet of the Nimbarka Sampradaya, one of the oldest Vaishnava lineages of North India. Literary historians disagree, sometimes sharply, about when he actually lived. The text he left behind carries an internal dating verse that some readers push back as far as the thirteenth century, while three of the twentieth century's most careful scholars of Hindi literature, Ramchandra Shukla, Hazari Prasad Dwivedi, and Viyogi Hari, read the same evidence differently and place his birth around Vikram Samvat 1595, roughly 1538 of the common era, with his great work finished not long before 1595 CE. Tradition remembers him as born into a Gauda Brahmin family, and says he made his home not in any monastery but on the banks of the Yamuna itself, moving between sites such as Dhruva Tila and, above all, Vamshi Vat, the very tree that gave Vrindavan its most sacred sound.

His guru, Keshav Kashmiri Bhatt, was not a gentle man to be trained under. He was a Kashmiri pandit of formidable and widely feared learning who had walked the length of India defeating rival philosophers in open debate, humbling scholars of the Shakta school, standing down hostile qazis at Mathura, and carrying his run of victories all the way to the pandit circles of Navadvip in Bengal, until people had begun calling him a conqueror of worlds rather than merely of arguments. He eventually rose to hold the seat of acharya in the Nimbarka line. A disciple formed under such a teacher might easily have become another dry dialectician, sharpening the very weapons his guru had used. Shribhatt instead took whatever discipline that training gave him and turned it, almost perversely, toward tenderness: toward two faces in a forest grove, and toward a single hundred-verse poem composed not in the Sanskrit of the pandits who raised him but in the spoken Braj of ordinary village people.

That choice of language was itself an argument. Before Shribhatt, the Nimbarka Sampradaya already taught that Radha and Krishna were to be worshipped as a single, indivisible reality rather than as a god and his consort, that neither held priority over the other any more than moonlight holds priority over the moon. What Shribhatt did was give that idea a body a village audience could see, hear, and love, in a Yugal Shatak, a hundred verses of the pair, that scholars increasingly regard as the earliest sustained Brajbhasha attempt to map what came to be called the ashtayama lila, the eight watches of day and night in which the divine couple wake, are dressed and adorned, wander Vrindavan's groves, swing in flowering bowers, feast, rest, and rise again to an identical, never repeating today. One of his most loved couplets says simply that just as moonlight appears splendid beside the moon, so does Radhika shine supremely beautiful beside Shyamsundar; much of the sampradaya's theology sits quietly inside that one plain comparison.

The Yugal Shatak does not hold one mood for a hundred verses; it moves, deliberately, through six. There are verses of siddhant, bare philosophical statement; verses of braj lila, describing the pastimes of the pair in the forest; verses of seva, the grammar of service offered to them; verses of sahaj, the natural, unforced sentiment of a heart simply resting in their presence; verses of surat, the frankly amorous register of lovers; and verses of utsav, the color and noise of festival. Shribhatt clearly believed the amorous vocabulary was not a concession to weakness, and not a metaphor to be embarrassed about, but the only language intimate enough to gesture at what he actually meant: that the distance between the soul and God is not closed by argument, or by ritual alone, but by something closer to falling in love, and that if court poets could spend whole lifetimes describing human lovers, a devotee had every right, and arguably a duty, to spend his describing the one love that does not end when the night ends.

The clearest window into what he demanded of others is the story told of his most intimate disciple, Harivyasdeva, who would go on to become one of the towering acharyas of the Nimbarka line in his own right. Harivyasdeva came to Govardhan, where Shribhatt lived, and asked to be initiated. Shribhatt did not open with a mantra. He asked instead a single, disarming question: Harivyas, who dwells within our limbs? It was the kind of question with only one acceptable answer, where every other answer is a confession. Harivyasdeva, to his enormous credit, did not pretend. Maharaj, he said, no one. Shribhatt heard the honesty inside that admission, told him plainly that he was not yet fit to be a disciple, and sent him away to circle the sacred hill of Govardhan on foot for twelve years.

Harivyasdeva went. Twelve years of circling a single mountain is not a hardship easily softened in the telling; it is long enough to raise a child to the edge of adulthood, and he gave the whole of it to walking stone and forest path, by most accounts reciting his guru's own verses as he went. When the twelve years ended he returned to Govardhan, and by every account that survives, his guru was still not satisfied, and sent him around the mountain for a second twelve years. Only after that second circuit, twenty four years in total given over to a single act of patience, did Harivyasdeva come again into his guru's presence and see, resting within Shribhatt's very being, Priya and Priyatam, the beloved pair themselves. The sight left him, in the word the tradition uses for it, kritakritya, his life's purpose fulfilled. Only then did Shribhatt give him diksha. It is a story that answers the question the mool verse asks of any teacher: that the dridh bhakti, the firm devotion, Nabhadas says Shribhatt gave to everyone without exception, is not handed over cheaply, and that the waiting itself can be the teaching.

Harivyasdeva did not keep what he had received to himself. At his guru's instruction he wrote a Sanskrit commentary on the Yugal Shatak, so that the hundred vernacular verses would also stand up in the language of formal theology, and he later sent twelve missionary disciples out across India, founding branches of the Nimbarka tradition that remain active today. In this way the sweetness Shribhatt had first let loose at Vamshi Vat did not stay a private vision shared between one poet and two forms in a grove; it became a current that carried outward for generations, very much as the Bhaktamal claims it did when it says his fame rose like a moon and, having risen, burned the fog of confusion out of the hearts of the sincere.

Modern scholars of Hindi literature, reading the Yugal Shatak on its own terms, have often been startled by how accomplished it is for so early a text: its language is plain and unforced, its couplets tightly made, and more than one literary historian has judged its dohas even more polished in craft than the far more famous verses of Surdas, who worked the same ground of Radha Krishna devotion in Brajbhasha a little later and to much wider fame. Whether or not that particular ranking deserves to be treated as settled, the claim underneath it is easy to defend: before the great flowering of Krishna bhakti poetry in the sixteenth century, someone had to be first to trust that the local, spoken tongue of ordinary Braj villagers could carry the whole weight of the divine couple's love without embarrassment or dilution, and Shribhatt, sitting at Vamshi Vat with his guru's fierce training turned toward tenderness, was very probably that someone.

What the mool verse in the Bhaktamal ultimately insists on, more than any biographical detail, is that all of this was offered outward, giving firm devotion to everyone, continually, rather than hoarded for the initiated few. Shribhatt's own teaching, distilled, is almost embarrassingly simple: look at the two of them together the way he looked, until the looking stops being an act of the intellect and starts, on its own, raining love, exactly as Nabhadas says happened to the poets who first read him, their hearts overflowing at the sight. And if the honest answer to Shribhatt's old question, who dwells within you, still comes back as no one, the story of Harivyasdeva suggests this is not disqualifying. It may only mean the mountain is still there, waiting to be walked, for however many years it takes before the divine pair are finally recognized in the place they had been resting all along.