Bhagavandas

One morning in Mathura, the town crier's drum sounded through the lanes, and behind it came the reading of an order from the Badshah himself: whoever appeared in public wearing the tilak of a Vaishnava, whoever carried in hand or wore around the neck a strand of tulsi beads, would be put to death. Within hours the town changed its face. People scrubbed the reddish clay and white chandan from their foreheads before they had even finished their morning worship; men slipped their tulsi malas into cloth pouches and buried them under grain sacks; those who had worn the sect-marks of their faith every day of their lives sat behind shuttered doors, waiting for the danger to pass. Fear, that morning, proved more persuasive than faith for almost everyone in Mathura. Almost everyone. Into the emperor's own court that same day walked a man dressed as though no such order had ever been announced: his brow, throat, chest and arms marked with a long, bright dvadash tilak, the twelve sacred lines that spell out, limb by limb, the names of Vishnu across the body, and around his neck not one strand of tulsi but several, heaped one over another, as if daring anyone to count them.

That man was Bhagavandas. Nabhadas, compiling his great garland of devotees around 1585, gives him a single chhappay, the 188th verse of the book, but reading it closely one senses an unusually rich inner life folded into very few words. He calls Bhagavandas a man ever joined with Shri, a well-wisher to every living being, gentle in conduct and sweet at heart, saturated in the bhaav of bhajan. His inner life, Nabhadas says, was wrapped in the hidden, subtle virtues and the lovely fame of the Lord, virtues that never announced themselves loudly. He was a rasika listener of Shrimad Bhagavatam who loved not only its meaning but the very rasa of its syllables. He lived in Mathura and held, as his one unshared hope, nearness to the feet of sants, and he served, as a beloved disciple, in the households of two Vaishnava elders remembered as Khojiji and Shyamdasji. He was, Nabhadas adds, a man of grave and settled intellect, and merely to see his face was enough to set waves of prema-ananda moving in another person's heart. Read on its own, this portrait could describe a wandering mendicant or a temple attendant with nothing to his name. It is startling, then, that tradition also remembers this same Bhagavandas as one of the most powerful men in Hindustan.

Many who have told the history of Govardhan's temples identify this Bhagavandas with Raja Bhagwan Das of Amber, the Kachhwaha ruler who was brother to Akbar's Rajput queen Mariam-uz-Zamani, father of the celebrated general Man Singh, and himself a great noble of the Mughal court who held the governorship of Lahore and, in his later years, the rank of Amir-ul-Umra with command of five thousand horse. Tradition also credits him with once shielding Akbar's own body from a mortal blow in battle, an act different chroniclers locate at different engagements, and says the emperor trusted him ever after beyond most men in his service. Nabhadas's verse itself never names the emperor and says nothing of armies or governorships; it speaks only of a devotee whose secret world was bhajan and Bhagavata rasa, and Priyadas, writing the fuller story a few generations later, calls the ruler in his account only prithvipati, a king. But Priyadas's story converges so exactly with what temple history and family memory preserve about Raja Bhagwan Das, a lifelong charge over Mathura, a Haridev temple raised near Govardhan by his own hand, that most who have walked that ground take them to be one and the same man. If so, then the truest thing about him was never the mansab the emperor gave him, but the tilak he refused to wash from his own forehead.

According to Priyadas, the emperor had begun to wonder how many of his Hindu subjects wore the mala and tilak out of real surrender to God and how many wore them merely as habit, ornament, or performance for others to see. Wanting to learn the truth of it, he had it proclaimed through Mathura that anyone found wearing these marks from that day forward would be killed. It worked exactly as such threats always work: the frightened many, loving their own lives more than their beads, quietly set aside both mala and tilak, and others hid indoors so that the emperor's men would never learn what they wore, or no longer wore, behind closed doors.

Bhagavandas did neither. The joy of bhakti, Priyadas says, had filled his heart like a brimming sea, and a sea cannot be told to hide itself. He put on a tilak longer and finer than he had ever worn before, hung mala after mala of tulsi around his neck, and walked, unescorted, straight into the emperor's presence. Seeing him, the emperor felt, inwardly, a rush of pleasure at such open defiance, though he kept his face stern and demanded to know why this one subject had disobeyed a direct royal order. Bhagavandas answered without a tremor: in our faith, he said, it is held as settled truth that whoever dies wearing tilak and mala goes without fail to the abode of Bhagavan. Weighed against that gain, your command could not hold me.

It is worth pausing over how simple, and how complete, that answer is. Bhagavandas did not argue that the emperor had no right to test him, nor plead for an exemption, nor try to hide behind some technicality about what counted as public display. He accepted the emperor's test entirely and then walked straight into the fire it had lit, because for him the arithmetic was not complicated: a king can take away perhaps sixty or seventy years; a tilak worn to the grave, in the old Vaishnava conviction, opens onto the eternal. Hearing this, the emperor understood he had found precisely the devotion he had set out to find, a sincerity that had already made its peace with dying for it. Pleased now openly rather than secretly, he told Bhagavandas to ask for whatever he wished.

Here the story turns again, toward something even more telling than the courage that came before it. A man just granted anything by an emperor at the height of Mughal power could have asked for land, gold, rank, or a title to add to his family's already rising fortunes. Bhagavandas asked only this: that he be allowed to live out his life in Mathura. The emperor wrote out an order granting him charge of Mathura for as long as he lived, and Bhagavandas kept to that single request for the rest of his days, never again leaving the dust of the town he had already told Nabhadas was his one hope in the world.

It was during those Mathura years, tradition holds, that Bhagavandas raised the temple of Shri Haridevji near Govardhan hill, on the bank of the crescent lake called Manasi Ganga, a temple that both Priyadas in the early eighteenth century and Rupkala's Hindi commentary two centuries later could each still point to and describe in nearly the same words, standing even now, worth going to see. The building he raised, cut from red sandstone hauled from the quarries of Bharatpur and set on foundations of local stone, ran close to seventy feet in length, its central hall carried on stone arches built double, one shell nested inside another, a technique of vaulting his own son Man Singh would later echo when he built the Govind Dev temple at Vrindavan. Haridev, the form of Krishna enshrined there, carries its own old story: that Radha and the gopis, searching for Krishna after he slipped away from their play, called his name again and again, Haridev, Haridev, Haridev, until he reappeared before them holding Govardhan hill aloft in one hand and a flute in the other. Across the centuries it is not hard to hear an echo between that old cry of the gopis calling their beloved by name against the fear of losing him, and this later devotee walking into an emperor's court wearing that same beloved's mark against the fear of losing his own life.

The temple's later history carried its share of grief. When Aurangzeb's soldiers came through Braj breaking images roughly a century after Bhagavandas built the shrine, the original Haridev murti was carried secretly away from Govardhan, and it is said to be worshipped still, far off near Kanpur, while a second consecrated image now receives the daily arati at Govardhan in its place. The building itself survived that danger, though a nineteenth-century repair later replaced part of its original double stone ceiling with wood, a change lovers of Braj's old architecture still regret. None of this touches what the Bhaktamal actually preserves of Bhagavandas, though. Nabhadas and Priyadas were not writing architectural history; they were writing about a man's heart, and whatever uncertainty may surround the finer details of his life or the exact fate of the temple stones, the core of the story, a devotee who would rather die marked as Krishna's own than live safely unmarked, needs no further proof to move a reader.

There is an old devotional saying that no amount of japa or mala or chhapa or tilak accomplishes anything by itself if the heart beneath it is unripe, that a mind of raw, uncooked metal only dances in vain while true metal alone takes the color of Ram. Bhagavandas's story does not contradict that warning; it completes it. He did not wear the tilak instead of loving; he wore it because he loved, and on the one day when telling the truth about that love was dangerous, he was the one man in Mathura whose outside and inside said exactly the same thing. Whoever reads his brief chhappay in the Bhaktamal, and then reads Priyadas's account of a threatened city and one man who would not lower his head, is left with a plain and unsettling question worth carrying into a quiet hour of one's own: if an order went out tomorrow that only the truly surrendered could keep any outward sign of their love for God, how many of us, tilak or none, mala or none, would still be brave enough, or in love enough, to walk in exactly as we are.