Shri Jagatsingh Ji (with Giridhar Gwal Ji and Gopali Ji)

Before the sun had fully cleared the walls of Shahjahanabad, two of the most powerful men in Hindustan crouched by the side of a dusty road like boys waiting for a procession. One was Jai Singh, the formidable general the Mughal court called Mirza Raja, ruler of Amber. The other was Jaswant Singh of Marwar, a man far more used to being watched than to watching. Word had reached them the evening before of something too strange to ignore: somewhere in this very city lived a fellow king who walked to his own household shrine every single morning on bare feet, carrying his god's bathing water himself, balanced on his own head, exactly as a temple attendant would. Neither king could sleep easily on that news. So they came out before dawn, sat down by the road he was said to take, and waited.

The king they had come to see was Jagatsingh, son of Raja Anandsingh and Rani Basodei, a man the old Bhaktamal calls "the crest jewel among kings." In battle he was said to be fearsome, his arms compared to the sun itself burning away the darkness of cowardice and ignorance, a soldier whose mere presence lifted the courage of whole armies. But inside his own house, before his family's worshipped image of Lakshmi-Narayan, that same warrior kept a discipline that looked nothing like kingship. Whenever he traveled on ordinary business, he had the deity's palanquin carried ahead of his own and walked behind it, the way a guard walks behind the one he is guarding, insisting on the lower place for himself. Only when he rode out to war did the order reverse completely: then he rode in front, and the palanquin came behind him, because on a battlefield he wanted his own body, not his Lord's image, to meet whatever came first. And every single morning, without exception, he fetched the water for his deity's bath with his own hands, carried it home on his own head, and never once handed the task to anyone else.

That is what Jai Singh and Jaswant Singh had come to see, and that is exactly what they saw. The barefoot king came down the road with a golden pitcher balanced on his head, and behind him walked priests, Vaishnavs, soldiers, and what the old text simply calls "hundreds of men," the whole procession murmuring the name of Sita-Ram without a single break in the sound. There was no royal umbrella over him, no guard walking ahead to clear his path. He was, for that stretch of road, only a man carrying water for his God. The two kings did not stay seated. They fell forward into the dust, foreheads to the ground, and when they rose they told him plainly that he alone among all of them had found what a human body was actually for.

Jagatsingh would not accept it. "What love do I have," he said, "that you should bow to me? Go home to your own sister and see prem for yourself. Your sister, the one they call Deepakunwari, is the true mine of that feeling; I cannot come near even the fragrance of her devotion. If anything of it has reached me at all, it is only because I have stood close enough to her to catch some of its scent, the way a person standing near a garden is touched by a perfume he did not grow himself." There is an old couplet the Bhaktamal drops in at exactly this point, as if the compiler could not resist it: love, however hidden, does not stay hidden; it shows itself on its own; however pressed down or sunk, the fragrance of musk cannot be smothered. Jagatsingh had just spent an entire speech trying to hide his own devotion behind his sister's, and the effort had only made it more visible to the two men in front of him.

The words did something to Jai Singh that no amount of court ceremony could have done. He and Deepakunwari, it turned out, had fallen out over something the text never explains, badly enough that he had stripped her of the villages that supported her household. Hearing his own sister described this way, by a fellow king he had just watched with his own eyes, undid him. He wrote to her at once, restored everything he had taken, and sent word to his ministers that whatever alms, worship, or care for holy people she wished to fund from then on, they were to support without argument. He told his court he intended to spend what strength remained to him on remembering Hari and singing His praise, and that his sister should be left entirely free to go on doing what she had always done.

It has to be said plainly that no outside chronicle preserves a Raja Anandsingh, a Rani Basodei, or a princess Deepakunwari among the recorded lines of Amber, Marwar, or Mewar, so exactly which small kingdom Jagatsingh held, and in which years, is not something independent history can confirm; that part of the story survives only inside the devotional memory of the Bhaktamal itself, and it would be dishonest to dress it up as settled fact. What can be said with confidence is that Jai Singh of Amber and Jaswant Singh of Marwar were real and towering men at the court of Shah Jahan, and that the new walled capital the old texts call Shahjahanabad, the Delhi that rose through the 1640s, is precisely the kind of stage on which two such kings might sit down in the dust to watch a third one carry water.

Turn the page in the old Garland and the throne room disappears entirely. Nabhadas moves next to a man the tradition calls Giridhar Gwal, "gwal" meaning cowherd, an epithet that has nothing to do with rank and everything to do with the company he kept: he was named this way because he lived as a true sakha, a companion, of Gopal, of Krishna in his cowherd form. The commentary is careful to note there were other bhaktas named Giridhar in its pages too, one from Barsana who would not eat unless devotees were present to eat beside him, another the grandson of Vallabhacharya and son of Vitthalnath, described elsewhere in the Garland. This Giridhar, Gopali's son, was neither of those men. He was, by every account the old text gives, a poet and singer whose voice broke on its own the moment he began praising Krishna, so that whoever stood near him could hear the love inside him whether he wanted it heard or not. In the solitary groves of Vrindavan he would dance until he forgot he had a body at all, forgot even that he was wearing clothes, and if anyone nearby lifted their own voice into song, he would strip off his gold ornaments and his robe on the spot and press them into that person's hands, as though generosity were simply another verse he could not stop himself from singing.

Once, in a village called Malpur, he arranged a rasa festival, a night built around the memory of Krishna's own circle dance with the cowherd women of Braj. Watching it unfold, soaked through with the very feeling the festival was meant to summon, he did not stop at admiration. He went home afterward and gave away everything his household owned, every object of value he possessed, as an offering to the God he had just spent the night remembering.

Not everyone around him was comfortable with him. He had a habit, the commentary says, of accepting charanamrit, the sanctified water that has touched a holy person's feet, even from Vaishnavs whose bodies had already died. A group of elders learned in ritual custom found this deeply improper and formally called him before them, telling him to his face that a devout man ought to give up taking charanamrit from the dead. Giridhar did not soften his answer to make it easier to hear. Let those who feel the devotee is truly gone refrain from taking it, he told them; but I know the power of God's own people, and it is this, that they never die at all, they simply enter His remembrance and stay there; you should all give up thinking of saints as dead. It is a small scene on the page, one man answering a panchayat of critics, but it carries the whole theology of his life in a single breath: for Giridhar, love for Krishna's people did not stop at a body's edge, and neither, he insisted, did their lives. Whoever heard him say it, the old text notes with evident satisfaction, liked the answer very much.

Behind Giridhar stood his mother, Devi Gopali, and the Bhaktamal reaches for its highest possible compliment to describe her: it says Yashoda herself seems to have taken birth again in this world, this time to nourish not one child but every devotee of Hari who came near her. Love showed openly in her, in her very limbs, the text says, and she served Mohan, Krishna the enchanter, with a discipline as steady as breath. None of the corruption people associate with a hard age touched her mind or body, and she never once wore a false face toward any devotee of God. Her voice was cool and soothing to hear, and the name of Govind seemed to hum inside her on its own, without her needing to remember to say it. She carried herself with a moon's quiet largeness, was patient the way deep water is patient, and loved the company of saints more than almost anything else available to her in this life. Her heart, the commentary insists, stayed clean all the way through, and in that clean heart she carried something specific: vatsalya rasa, the particular sweetness of a mother's love turned toward God, the same current said to have run through Yashoda as she rocked the infant Krishna to sleep in Gokul. Reading the two accounts side by side, it is not hard to see where her son learned to give away his gold the instant someone else started to sing.

Three lives sit inside this single page of the Garland, and none of them are related by blood, only by the compiler's sense that they belonged together: a warrior king who could not stop insisting his own sister loved God more than he did, even while carrying water on his own head in front of two other kings; a cowherd-named ecstatic who could not keep his love hidden inside his body and refused to believe that any true devotee had ever really died; and a mother who became, in her own small household, what Yashoda had been in Gokul, a woman whose only real ambition was to feed and shelter whoever loved her Lord. None of them asked to be remembered as extraordinary; Jagatsingh spent his whole recorded speech trying to point the praise somewhere else. That, perhaps, is the real teaching hiding underneath all three stories: love this real does not announce itself, and does not need to. Like musk carried inside a closed hand, it finds its own way into the air whether the one carrying it wants it noticed or not. Anyone reading this tonight, tired and half convinced that devotion belongs to other people, might ask only this: what water would I be willing to carry myself, and for whom.