Govind Swami

Two boys are playing gilli-danda on the parikrama path that circles Govardhan hill. One of them, a farmer's-son sort of child with quick hands, strikes the little wooden gilli so hard that it goes spinning off the danda, sails past the trees, and cracks against the wall of the temple. A pujari inside, absorbed in his rituals and his rules, comes storming out. He sees only one boy standing there red-handed, because the other boy, the one who had actually taken the turn and thrown, has a way of appearing and disappearing that ordinary eyes cannot follow. The priest seizes the visible child by the arm, calls him a menace who cannot be trusted near the sanctum, and throws him bodily off the temple grounds. What the pujari does not know, and what the boy being dragged away does not bother to explain because grief has taken his voice, is that his playmate in that game, the one who ran, ducked behind the shrine, and finally sent the gilli flying, was Krishna himself, wearing the form of Thakur Nandlal, unable to stay away from the one companion in Braj who did not worship him from a distance but wrestled him, teased him, and loved him as an equal. That expelled boy was Govind Swami, and this small, almost comic humiliation, a grown man thrown out of a temple for a child's game he did not even provoke, sits at the heart of everything Braj remembers about him.

Nabhadas, writing his Bhaktamal in the sixteenth century, named this man in a single crowded verse together with dozens of other devotees, a chhappay whose refrain simply says that whoever the Lord accepts as a companion, the poet counts himself the servant of that companion's servants. It was left to Priyadas, writing his commentary more than a century later, to slow down and tell Govind's story properly, because among that crowd of names his was one that could not be compressed into a line. Tradition remembers him as a Sanadhya Brahmin born in the village of Antri, near Bharatpur, on the ninth day of the dark half of Margashirsha in Samvat 1562, which is to say around 1505 of the common era. He was already a gifted singer and a maker of verses before Braj ever entered his life, a man restless in a way that poetry alone could not settle. Something in him kept insisting that the dust of Vrindavan and Govardhan was not ordinary earth but the very body of the Lord, that to walk there was to walk inside God rather than merely visit him, and eventually that conviction became stronger than any reason to stay home.

He wandered first to Mahavan, and it was there, the story goes, that a servant of Vitthalnath, the son and spiritual heir of Vallabhacharya, told him something that changed the direction of his life: that his master kept the Lord himself under his own roof and in his own care. Govind sought this Vitthalnath out at Gokul, and when they met at Thakurani Ghat, the guru recognized him at once, as though they had always known each other, though they had never met in this life. After receiving initiation into the Pushtimarg, the path of grace, Govind was given not the name Swami, meaning master, but Das, meaning servant, and he wore that humbler name for the rest of his days even though devotees continued to call him Swami out of love. He was drawn into the fellowship later remembered as the Ashtachhap, the eight seals, eight poet-musicians whose Braj Bhasha songs became the singing voice of the whole Pushtimarg tradition. Four of them, including the blind poet Surdas, had been initiated directly by Vallabhacharya. Govind belonged to the second four, the disciples whom Vitthalnath himself brought into that circle of song.

He settled at last at a grove on the Govardhan parikrama path called Kadamkhandi, thick with kadamba trees, and he never really left it again. The garden he tended there still carries his name centuries later, and his samadhi, the shrine that marks where his earthly story is believed to have closed, stands near the same hill he circled on foot so many times. What made him different from other devotees, what makes his story worth telling in full rather than in a single verse, is the particular flavor of his love. Bhakti wears many moods: some worship the Lord as master, some love him as a beautiful youth, some cradle him as a mother cradles an infant. Govind Das loved Krishna as a friend loves a friend, in what the tradition calls sakhya bhava, and in that mood there is no folded hands, no careful distance. A friend can be teased. A friend can be scolded when he misbehaves. A friend can be hit with a piece of fruit in a mock battle and hit back twice as hard, laughing. This is the most dangerous and the most tender of all the bhakti rasas, because it insists that God is not only to be adored from below but can be loved as an equal, close enough to touch, close enough to argue with.

So the stories that grew up around him are stories of play rather than ritual. From his very boyhood, it is said, Krishna would appear before him unbidden and simply join his games, the way one neighborhood child slips into another's afternoon without needing an invitation. They played gilli-danda together, as in the temple-wall episode. At other times Krishna let himself be turned into a horse or an elephant for Govind to ride, submitting to a child's imagination the way only a god secure in his own majesty can afford to. Once, so the story is told, Krishna pelted him with hard little aak fruits from the madar shrub in an ambush, and Govind, catching on, snatched up the same bitter fruit and returned fire with such glee that neither boy could tell anymore who had started it or who had won; both simply stood there, drenched in the sap and dust of their own laughter, lost in what the old commentators call the ocean of sakhya rasa. There is even a small, very human detail preserved from those years: that once, when Govind had gone off into the trees to relieve himself, Krishna followed him there too, unwilling to be parted from him even for that ordinary errand, pelting him again with the same fruit, until Govind's mother, worried at how long her son had been gone, came looking for him along the path. At the sound of her approaching, both boys, the human child and the god who refused to stop being his playmate, fell suddenly still and proper, as though nothing at all unusual had been happening, and only Govind, half laughing, half caught, understood exactly whom he had been playing with in secret.

Return now to the temple-wall incident, because it is the story Braj tells most often about him, and it does not end with Govind being thrown out. According to the old accounts, once the injured pujari had marched Govind off the grounds, the boy walked to the edge of a nearby kund, sat himself down at the very path that led into the forest, and said aloud that whoever had gone into that forest would have to come back out past him, and that his account would be settled then. Meanwhile, back in the temple, the day's magnificent bhog was laid out before Shrinathji as always, and the Lord would not touch a single grain of it. When Vitthalnath came anxiously to ask what was wrong, Krishna answered, in effect, that the food meant nothing to him while his friend sat exiled outside; that it was Govind's turn in the game and Govind had not yet taken it; that the priest, blind to what he had seen, had punished innocence and called it discipline. Go and bring my companion back quickly, the Lord said, or I will not eat at all. And so the guru himself went out, coaxed the grieving devotee back inside with great tenderness, and only then, reunited, did the two of them eat together and embrace. It is a story theologians could spend a lifetime unpacking, because it insists on something Braj never tires of insisting: that God's hunger for the devotee's love can be fiercer than the devotee's hunger for God, and that a rule enforced without love can shut the Lord's own friend out of his own house.

A second story, gentler in tone, shows the same intimacy from another angle. It is said that each day, when the great platter of rajbhog was carried in to be offered first to Shrinathji, Govind would plant himself in the doorway and ask to be fed ahead of the Lord, not out of greed but out of duty: because once the offering was made, Krishna would run off at once into the forest to play, and Govind, eating late as convention demanded, would never catch up with him in time and would spend the whole day searching the trees for a friend already gone. Better, he reasoned, to eat quickly beforehand so that he could keep pace with his sakha stride for stride. The temple cooks were scandalized at a devotee asking to eat before the Lord. But when Vitthalnath heard the reasoning, his heart, the old writers say, simply melted, and from that day the arrangement was allowed to stand.

Other fragments of his life, less dramatic but no less telling, have survived in Pushtimarg memory. He is remembered as a musician of such purity that Tansen, the great court singer later celebrated in the Mughal court of Akbar, would come quietly to Govardhan just to sit and listen to him, drawn by a kirtan style no palace could teach. Yet Govind himself treated his own gift with a severity that bordered on fierceness. When, as the story goes, a visitor in royal disguise once praised a particular Bhairav raga he had sung, delighted by what he had heard, Govind was troubled rather than flattered; a song that had pleased a worldly ear, he felt, could never again be sung in the same purity before the Lord, and he is said to have retired that composition rather than let praise contaminate an offering that belonged to Krishna alone. He is also remembered as refusing, out of reverence, to bathe in the Yamuna, regarding her waters as Radha's own living form and considering himself unfit to enter what he loved too much to treat as merely useful. Even within his own household, tradition says, he held nothing back for himself; when his daughter came to see him and was offered some small gift, he would not let her keep it, telling her as gently as he could that his mind had only one fixed point left, and it was not here.

By the account most often repeated in Braj, Govind Das did not simply die in the ordinary way. In Samvat 1642, around 1585 or 1586 of the common era, he is said to have gone with his aged guru Vitthalnath to a cave on the slope of Govardhan hill, and there, together, master and disciple are remembered as having passed from visible sight into the eternal, unseen play of Krishna, the nitya-leela that devotees believe continues forever beyond the reach of mortal eyes. Whether read as literal event or as the community's tender way of saying that death could not touch a friendship this complete, the story fits the man: even his ending refuses the ordinary distance between devotee and God, choosing instead to walk out of this world at his friend's side, the way he had walked so many afternoons on the Govardhan path as a boy.

What remains today is a garden that still bears his name, a samadhi where pilgrims stop on their circuit of the hill, and a small number of padas, gathered across collections such as Raag Kalpadrum and Raag Sagarodbhav, that still describe Krishna's flute and Krishna's play in the voice of someone who had actually shared that play rather than merely imagined it from afar. His story asks something quietly unsettling of anyone who reads it at the end of a long day, tired and skeptical and unsure whether any of this could be true: not that we ought to worship more carefully, but that we might be allowed to love more carelessly, to walk up to the Divine the way Govind Swami walked up to his sakha in the forest, without folded hands, without waiting to be worthy, ready to be scolded, ready to laugh, ready to throw the fruit back.