Bal Krishna Das (Krishna Das)

The boy was no older than twelve when he stood before the elders of his own village and told them a truth that would cost him his home: that his father had cheated in the village accounts. He would not lie, not even to protect his own blood, and the village believed him over his father. For that honesty the household turned against him, and the boy who would become Krishnadas walked out of Chilotra, a farming village in the Charotar country near Ahmedabad, with nothing but the conviction that had just ruined him. Tradition remembers him as a child already marked by an old soul's seriousness, a boy so unwilling to speak falsehood that he preferred exile to silence. He drifted north with the pilgrims and traders who moved along the roads of Gujarat and Malwa, the way so many restless, homeless boys of that century eventually drifted, toward the one place in India where a person with nothing could still become something: Braj, the land where Krishna had herded cows as a child.

He arrived at Govardhan at the moment the hill itself was giving up its secret. A dark stone image had been found there, said to be Krishna in the very form he had taken when, as a boy no bigger than Krishnadas himself, he lifted the mountain of Govardhan on one finger to shelter the cowherds from Indra's flood. The image was being installed and worshipped by a Telugu Brahmin named Vallabhacharya, a wandering teacher who was, at that time, still building the foundations of what would become the Pushtimarg, the Path of Grace. Vallabhacharya taught something startling for its time: that the soul does not climb toward God through austerity or merit, rope by rope, the way older paths insisted. God descends. God floods the devotee first, the way a river floods a field before any seed is planted, and the devotee's whole work is only to stop resisting the flood. This flooding, this unearned abundance, was called pushti, nourishment, and it was to be poured out on anyone God chose, regardless of what that person had been.

Something in the runaway boy answered to this teaching immediately. He took initiation, the brahmasambandh that bound a soul to Krishna as directly as a child is bound to a parent, and he entered the service of the newly consecrated image, whom the sampradaya would come to call Shrinathji. He was given work suited to his sharp, practical mind: overseeing offerings, then the temple's affairs more broadly, until Vallabhacharya named him an adhikari, a steward of Shrinathji's own household. But underneath the administrator was a poet, and the poet's gift showed itself early. The Rupkala commentary on the Bhaktamal says he entered bhagwat-seva, the direct service of God, from the age of six, and that his verses, when he began to compose them, were praised by scholars as flawless and unlike anyone else's, layered with the fame and sweetness of Gopal. He was counted, alongside Surdas, Kumbhandas, and Paramanandadas, among the first four disciples Vallabhacharya personally received into this new devotion. Later, when Vallabhacharya's son Vitthalnathji, whom the sampradaya calls Gusainji, added four more poets to their company, the eight together became known as the Ashtachhap, the Eight Seals, poets whose every pada carried the mark of Shrinathji's own household. Krishnadas would spend the rest of a very long life inside that company, and inside that temple.

He kept one vow above every other, the tika says: bhajan to Radha and Krishna, and nothing beside it. He held the dust of Braj as something to be worshipped in itself, gathering it, touching it to his body, because in his eyes every grain of that soil had been touched by Krishna's bare feet and was therefore no longer ordinary dust. And he wrote a work he called Premrasarashi, a flood or a treasury of the very essence of divine love, and the tradition holds that Shrinathji himself was so moved by Krishnadas's premnishtha, his steadiness in love, that the Lord accepted the book as an offering in his own right. Other works are remembered under his name as well, among them a Bhramargeet, verses in the voice of the gopis answering the philosopher Uddhav's cold logic with nothing but longing, and a meditation on the nature of prem itself. It was during this same period of Krishnadas's life, the sampradaya's memory says, that the Lord did something almost playful: pleased beyond measure with his devotee, Girdhari folded his own name into Krishnadas's, so that the poet came to be called Balkrishna, the child Krishna, a name borrowed rather than earned, which is exactly the kind of gift pushti bhakti is built on.

The stories that survive of him are small in scale and enormous in what they reveal. Once he traveled to Delhi on some errand, and passing a sweet-seller's stall he watched fresh jalebis come coiling, hissing, straight out of the hot kadhai. Before he could think to buy even one, his mind had already run home to Braj: with nothing but the offering of his own imagination, he presented the jalebis to Shrinathji, a manasi bhog, a gift given entirely inside the heart with no physical object changing hands. He thought no more of it. But when the priests at Govardhan uncovered that day's plates for the Lord, there among the prepared offerings sat a tray of jalebis that no one in the kitchen had made or ordered, still warm, exactly as though a devotee far away in Delhi had just set them down. The moral the sampradaya draws from this is unsentimental and precise: the Lord does not eat food. He eats love, and he will reach across any distance to take it the moment it is offered.

The second story asks a harder question of the reader, and Krishnadas answers it without a moment's hesitation. He heard, somewhere outside Braj, a courtesan singing a raga with such mastery that it undid him. He went to her directly and asked, in words the old verses still preserve, whether she would come and sing that same raga for his moon-faced little Lord, who loved it above every other song. She assumed, reasonably, that this was simply a man of means asking for her art, and agreed. Krishnadas brought her back to Braj without a thought for what his own community would say about a devotee walking a courtesan through the streets toward the temple. He had her bathed and dressed as carefully as any bride, ornamented, perfumed, and then he stood her directly in front of Shrinathji's sanctum and told her, plainly, why she was there: you have made men lose their hearts for years; now your fortune has turned, so make our little Lord lose his. The moment she looked up and saw the Lord's face, something in her broke open. She began to sing and dance without any of the restraint of performance, lost entirely to what was in front of her. When Krishnadas asked whether she had seen his Lala, she answered that she had not merely seen him, she had already given him her body and her mind. She danced until nothing of her old self remained standing between her and the image, and the tradition says that she left her body then and there, at the foot of the sanctum, and passed directly into the highest state. Krishnadas never asked what she had been before that afternoon. He asked only what she could become in front of God, and the answer came faster than anyone watching could have believed possible.

The third story is gentler, and it belongs to the friendship between poets. Krishnadas one day met Surdas, already the most celebrated voice among the Ashtachhap, the blind singer whose padas seemed to cover every possible corner of Krishna's life. Surdas, teasing him, said: brother, you're clever, make me a new pada, but see that it carries no shadow of anything I've already written. Krishnadas composed five or seven on the spot and sang them proudly, only to watch Surdas smile each time and name the exact verse of his own that each one echoed. Surdas had simply written too much; there seemed to be no fresh ground left in the whole territory of Krishna's beauty. They agreed Krishnadas would try again with a new pada the next day, and he went to bed that night heavy with worry, afraid of failing in front of a poet he loved and admired. The tradition says Girdhari himself, seeing his devotee so troubled, would not let him carry that worry alone, and gave him in the night a pada that had never existed before in anyone's mouth, opening with cowherd boys walking home behind their calves, the dust kicked up by small hooves rising and settling, powdering the curls of a child's hair. When Krishnadas sang it to Surdas in the morning, there was no shadow in it at all, and Surdas had nothing to say but delight. What could have become a rivalry between two great poets became, instead, one more proof that the songs were never really theirs to begin with.

The last story is the strangest, and the sampradaya tells it as a lesson about faith outrunning fear. In old age, Krishnadas slipped and fell into a well, and his body did not survive the fall. Word spread quickly, and it frightened people, the way any sudden, unexplained death frightens a community that loved someone: was this some terrible, unnatural end, a sign of misfortune rather than grace? The devotees grieved and worried in equal measure. It was Shrinathji, the tradition says, who put the fear to rest, by showing Krishnadas alive and walking near the foot of Govardhan hill in a new, luminous body, speaking as he went. He said that a companion of his, remembered in the old verses only as Balbir, had already gone ahead of him, and that he was following now to catch up. He asked that his pranam be carried to Gusainji. And he named a spot where he had quietly buried money years before, instructing that it be dug up and spent entirely in the service of wandering sadhus. When they went to the spot and dug, the money was exactly where the vision had said it would be, and whatever doubt had settled over the community like mud was washed clean in an instant. Grief turned back into the ordinary, steady joy of people who had simply misunderstood, for a few days, what death actually was.

What is easy to miss, reading these stories quickly, is how consistent Krishnadas's whole life actually is, from the boy who would not lie for his father to the old man who gave away buried treasure from beyond his own funeral. He never once asked whether an act of devotion was respectable before doing it. He offered sweets he had not bought, welcomed into the temple a woman his neighbors would have turned away at the gate, and lost a friendly competition to a blind man's genius without letting it curdle into envy, because the moment it mattered, love supplied him with words of his own. This is the entire argument of the Pushtimarg compressed into one life: that grace does not wait for you to become presentable. It meets a truthful boy who has just lost his home, a courtesan mid-performance, an anxious poet lying awake with worry, and it does not ask any of them for credentials first. It only asks whether, in the moment offered, they were willing to love without holding anything back. Krishnadas's own answer, given again and again across a very long life at Govardhan, was simply yes, and the poems he left behind, however incompletely they survive now, still carry the particular warmth of a man who never once doubted that he was welcome exactly as he was.