Khemalaratna (Ramrayan)

In his last hours, propped up in the stillness that comes just before the end, an aged Rathore nobleman named Khemalratna could not stop weeping. Everyone standing around his bed found this strange, because by every outward sign he was dying well: composed by the Lord's own grace, "prabhu-kripa" holding him steady, his mind untroubled by the fear that grips most men on their final night. And yet the tears kept coming. His son Ramrayan, himself a raja, knelt close and pressed him gently to say what was wrong. Whatever it was, Ramrayan said, name it and it would be done; there was more than enough wealth stored in their house to fund any act of charity, any punya-daan his father wished, however large.

What Khemalratna confessed was not a request for gold, or a blessing for his heirs, or even a plea about the kingdom he was leaving behind. It was smaller than that, and for that reason it cut deeper. All his life, he said, his mind had been swallowed by "rajsi badai," the many kinds of pride and grandeur that come with being born to rule. That pride had cost him two things he now wanted more than anything else in the world. He had never once carried, on his own head, a full clay kalash of water for Ram's daily worship, the humble task he had always left to servants because a raja's head was not meant to bear a water jar. And he had never tied a dancer's nupur, the small ringing anklets, to his own ankles and danced without holding anything back before Girdhar, the Mountain-Lifter, the way ordinary bhaktas danced in temple courtyards. Those two acts, plain and physical and beneath his station, had stayed just out of reach his whole life. Now his body was failing, he said, and there would be no more chances.

For a moment nobody answered him. The sons and the rest of the household went quiet, and the silence itself said something: this looked like a private vow, a debt owed between one man and his God, not an obligation anyone else could inherit. Then a young voice broke the silence. Khemalratna's grandson, a boy named Kishorsingh, stood up, folded his hands, and asked to be given the order himself. He would keep both disciplines, he said, every single day for as long as he lived, and he would do it not out of duty but with real joy, "hulaas," by Hari's grace.

Khemalratna pulled the boy to his chest. The old commentary says he found "ati sukh" in that embrace, an overflowing happiness with nothing left to ask for. Not long after, he left his body and, as the text puts it, attained the Lord. It is one of the more quietly moving deaths recorded anywhere in the Bhaktamal: an old man who spent a lifetime unable to bend low enough to fetch his own water or dance in the open, finding peace only once he heard a child promise to bend for him.

And Kishorsingh kept his word. From that day forward he tied the nupur to his own feet and danced before Girdharji with complete abandon, never treating it as beneath a prince to do so; and every single day, without missing one, he carried the brimming kalash for Ram's worship on his own head, the very water pot his grandfather had never let himself carry. He also composed devotional verse of his own, "chandabaddha vimal vani," clean, metrical language written to spell out at length the greatness of bhakti. He was still young when he did all this, "laghu vaya" in the text's own words, a boy by any ordinary measure, yet the Bhaktamal insists he had already taken on every mark of a wise elder and held to it without wavering. All of creation is said to have praised him for it. One couplet sums him up: he kept the whole discipline beautifully, and in casting off delusion and every trace of pride, what remained was nothing but an overflowing love for fellow devotees. The passage closes with a line that reads more like a blessing than a biography: victory to Shri Kishorsingh.

To understand why a dying Rajput elder's two great regrets were so specifically physical, so tied to the humblest gestures of temple service, it helps to know what family this was. The text names him outright as Khemalratna Rathore, of the Rathore clan, one of the great Rajput lineages of Rajasthan, the same clan that a generation or so earlier had given North India its most famous Krishna-bhakti poet, Meera Bai of the Merta Rathores, though nothing in this record ties Khemalratna's household to hers directly. What the commentary does say plainly is that this family stood in the spiritual lineage of Krishnadas Payahari and his disciple Agradas, the very guru who initiated Nabhadas, the author of the Bhaktamal himself, at the Galta hermitage near Jaipur and later at the monastery of Raivasa. That lineage is remembered for the "Ram Rasik" strand of Ramanandi devotion, a way of loving Ram and Sita as an intimate divine pair rather than only as remote sovereigns to be obeyed. Formally, the text says, Khemalratna's family were "Ramopasak," worshippers of Ram; but living in the shadow of Vrindavan, they could not help loving Krishna just as fiercely. That double love shaped Khemalratna's dying wish exactly: one gesture of humble service for Ram, one gesture of ecstatic dance for Krishna.

The same cluster of verses opens, in fact, not with Khemalratna at all but with a portrait of his household seen through a woman the commentary calls, with evident tenderness, "Bhaktivatiji," she who is full of bhakti, almost certainly Ramrayan's own queen. Of her it is said that her devotion to Hari, to her guru, and to Hari's devotees never wavered; that she took the teaching of the wise fully into her heart; that she cultivated both the navadha and the deeper dashadha forms of loving devotion until every lesser duty faded by comparison; that she counted love for the Vaishnavas of the "achyuta-kula," the unfallen lineage of God's own devotees, as the highest purpose a human life could hold; and that she could tell instantly, in any situation, what was essential and what was husk. Three things, the tilak says, she prized above everything: dasya, service to the Divine Couple, Yugal Sarkar; ananyata, an undivided, unwavering devotion; and generosity toward saints. What makes the verse memorable is its final line: her reputation for these qualities was spoken not only by wandering holy men but by her own husband, the raja, in his own words, in public.

That generosity is not left as an abstraction; the text hands us the scene itself. Once, King Ramrayan and his queen traveled to Mathura and stayed a few days. Whatever money they had carried with them, they gave away entirely to sadhus and Brahmins there, so completely and so unthinkingly that when the time came to head home, they realized they had kept back nothing at all, not even enough for the road.

It was in that moment, packing to leave with empty hands, that Ramrayan's eye fell on the gold bangles still on his wife's wrists. Before he could even suggest it, she had already slipped them off and pressed them into his hands. Sell these, she told him; they were worth some five hundred rupees, more than enough to see them home. But instead of selling them, Ramrayan carried the bangles to Nabhadas himself, the very sage compiling the verses we are reading now, and placed them reverently into his hands as an offering. When the queen saw what her husband had actually done with her jewelry, she did not grieve the lost money. She was overjoyed. She called him to her and told him, in front of everyone, that he had done exactly right, that seeing it had filled her with delight. Hearing his own wife praise him so openly, Ramrayan was moved to tears of love. The two of them then had to borrow money simply to complete their own trip home, and once they reached their own city, they made sure to send that borrowed sum back to Mathura in full. Even at the height of their generosity toward God, they never let themselves become careless debtors toward ordinary men.

The closing verse of this cluster turns back to Khemalratna and pictures his whole family as a vine that bore unusually sweet fruit in the soil of bhakti. His descendants, it says, became like the crowning kalash atop the temple of devotion itself; their hearts, ripened by bhajan and by feeling, ran as clear as the waters of the Bhagirathi, the Ganga; in mind, word, and deed they held without exception to the path of Ram. And there is a lovely closing image: just as the ocean is said to swell with joy at the mere sight of the full moon, Khemalratna's own heart would swell with delight every time he met a fellow devotee of God.

Interestingly, the commentary admits some uncertainty about exactly whom that closing verse was written for. Some early readers of the text, it notes, believed it described Kishorsingh; others believed it named a different grandson of Khemalratna's, one called Haridas, possibly a younger brother of Kishorsingh's. Rather than force a single answer, the tradition simply lets both readings stand, on the reasoning that either way the praise belongs to Khemalratna's own line. It is a small, honest admission tucked inside a devotional text that could easily have pretended to a certainty it did not actually have.

Beyond what the Bhaktamal itself preserves, Khemalratna, Ramrayan, and Kishorsingh do not appear to survive in any independent chronicle. No outside record confirms which corner of Rajasthan they governed, or exactly when they lived, beyond their place in Nabhadas's own generation and guru-lineage in the closing decades of the sixteenth century. That silence is worth naming honestly rather than covering over with an invented kingdom or invented dates. And in its own way, that silence is also the whole point of this entry. Nabhadas did not set out to record the size of anyone's throne. He recorded the one night an old man's pride finally broke under its own weight, and a boy stood up to carry, quite literally, the water his grandfather had never let himself carry; and he recorded the one afternoon in Mathura when a queen's bangles ended up, by her own delighted design, in the hands of the very poet writing this garland of devotees. Those are the only facts about this family that were ever meant to last, and they have.