Shri Lalmati Devi Ji (and the Bhaktamal's Concluding Verses)

There is a woman in the Bhaktamal whose entire recorded life fits into six lines of verse, and nothing beyond them. No village is named for her, no father, no husband, no date of birth or death. Nabhadas gives her a single chhappay, one of the last in a roll he says himself now numbers more than a thousand devotees, and in it he tells us only what she loved and how completely she loved it. Her name was Lalmati. That is very nearly the whole of what four centuries have kept of her, and yet the verse is dense enough, and tender enough, that it does not feel like an absence. It feels like a woman standing in a doorway with her whole heart visible on her face, even though we never learn her family name.

The chhappay opens and closes on the same line, a refrain that frames everything between it like a picture: "this rare human body, Lalmati took its full gain." Between those two bookends Nabhadas simply lists what she was in love with, and the list itself is a small map of Braj. She loved Gaura-Shyam, the fair one and the dark one together, Radha and Krishna named as a single inseparable color. She loved the Yamuna and the shaded kunjas along its banks where the two of them are said to have played. She loved Bansi Bat, the great banyan where Krishna is remembered to have stood with his flute, and she loved the dust of Braj itself, the rajah that pilgrims still rub on their foreheads as though it were more sacred than gold. She loved Gokul and the elders who lived there, the gurujan whose company keeps devotion honest. She loved the twelve dense forests of Braj, the vana that stretch from Madhuvan and Talvan on one side of the river to Bhandiravan and Mahavan on the other, each one holding a different chapter of Krishna's childhood and youth. She loved the town of Mathura and the hill of Govardhan that Krishna is said to have lifted on one finger to shelter his people from a jealous storm. Reading the verse is like watching someone walk a pilgrim's circuit with her eyes closed, naming each stone as she passes it, because she has walked it so many times that the names have become endearments.

Nabhadas calls her a nagari, a word that in the devotional poetry of Braj usually marks a woman skilled and sophisticated in the ways of love, someone fluent in the emotional grammar of Vrindavan the way a courtier is fluent in a royal court. Rupkala's tilak glosses the word carefully as priti-patha-pravina, an adept on the path of love, and then adds a clarification that matters more than it looks: her love for Radha and Krishna, he says, was held in vatsalya bhava, the mood of a mother toward her child, not the romantic madhurya bhava that the word nagari would normally suggest. It is a small theological correction with a large heart inside it. Lalmati was called sophisticated in love, and what her sophistication produced was not the ardor of a beloved but the anxious, encompassing tenderness of someone who wants to feed the Divine Couple, shelter them from the sun, worry over whether they have eaten, the way Yashoda worried over baby Krishna's meals. She had made her residence in Vrindavan atal and dridh, unmoving and firm, and everything she looked at there, from a riverbank to a hillside to an old man remembered as a gurujan, became an object of that same maternal ache.

It has to be said plainly that beyond this one chhappay and Rupkala's brief unpacking of it, no other trace of Lalmati Devi appears to survive. Unlike many devotees in the Bhaktamal, she receives no expanded tale from Priyadas, no dramatic episode of a miracle or a test of faith; the commentator is simply silent where his tika would normally add a story. Careful searching turns up no other historical record, no separate hagiography, no shrine tradition that can be tied to her with confidence. Rather than invent a birthplace or a lineage to fill that silence, it seems more honest, and more in keeping with what the text itself is doing, to let her stand exactly as Nabhadas left her: a name, a devotion, a bhava, and nothing manufactured beyond it. She belongs to the great unstoried majority of the Bhaktamal, the hundreds of devotees who are named once and never elaborated, and the fact that they are named at all, given even six lines in a garland meant to outlast centuries, is itself the point Nabhadas seems to be making. A life does not need an eventful biography to be complete. It needs only to have been fixed, without wavering, on the right object.

It is fitting, then, that this quiet woman stands at the very threshold of the book's own ending. Immediately after her verse, a note in the old printed editions records that some copies carry one additional chhappay here that the handwritten manuscripts do not contain, a small piece of textual honesty preserved for centuries, an editor somewhere refusing to smooth over the fact that even a sacred garland like this one grew and shifted slightly as hands copied it. And then, with Lalmati's love for the dust of Braj still hanging in the air, Nabhadas turns to close the entire work.

The closing chhappays, some of them carrying the signature of Nabhadas's own guru Agradas, take up the question of what true greatness actually is. The poet runs quickly through the world's usual candidates: the earth is called great because it is the world's foundation, but the earth rests on the serpent Shesha's head; Shesha in turn becomes only an ornament worn by Shiva; Shiva's own seat at Kailas was once lifted bodily by Ravana in his arms; Ravana himself was undone by Bali; and Bali fell to a single arrow from Raghava's bow. The ladder of grandeur collapses under its own weight until only one rung is left standing. Whoever, in all three worlds, holds Hari fixed in the heart, the verse says, that person alone deserves to be called great. A doha attributed to Tulsidas follows in the same spirit: everyone claims to belong to Ram, and everyone hopes for his grace, but the one truly worth honoring is the one whom Ram himself claims as his own. A further couplet warns that anyone who feels envy rise in his chest while hearing another devotee's virtues praised only poisons his own life and forfeits the next, a caution aimed, one suspects, squarely at readers who might have envied the more celebrated names earlier in the book rather than a modest woman remembered only for loving a riverbank.

Then comes the colophon, and with it a small surprise saved for the very last moment. Nabhadas, who has spent the entire text naming other people's virtues and never once his own, finally signs his work, and the name he signs is not Nabhadas at all but Narayandas, the name his guru Agradas had given him before renaming him, the name of the ordinary man underneath the poet's title. He notes that he taught this Bhaktanaammala himself to a disciple named Govinddas, and a line of Persian is folded in beside the Hindi, a small proverb about how a composer explains his own composition well, a reminder that this text was written in a Mughal-era world where Brajbhasha devotion and Persian literary courtesy sat comfortably in the same sentence. With that, the root text, the mool composed by Nabhadas, is formally declared complete.

Priyadas, the commentator who arrives a century later to expand the garland with stories, closes his own portion in the same spirit of humility. Before he lays down his pen he praises his own guru, a rasika master named Manohardas, in verse rich enough to suggest that Priyadas loved him the way Lalmati loved Vrindavan, then names himself with startling smallness: he is, he writes, the servant of the servant of the servant of Manohardas, a man whose heart fell into the hands of Govardhannath and who, living out his days in Vrindavan, has tried to sing the combined, interwoven story of the Lord and his lovers. He admits that he has written only what he heard from the mouths of saints, filtered through his own limited understanding, and asks bluntly who could ever hope to capture the full extent of a saint's life in a handful of verses. Whatever he has gotten wrong, whatever has grown or shrunk in the retelling, he asks his readers to forgive, trusting that good people take hold only of the virtues in a story and let its faults pass by unnoticed.

The verses that follow this double colophon turn to the deepest claim the whole book has been building toward: that the love between the Lord and his devotees runs in both directions. Just as Haridas delight to hear Hari's praises sung, the text insists, so Hari delights to hear the praises of his Haridas. It recalls how Krishna himself, speaking to Uddhava, praised the excellence of his own devotees with his own mouth, and how Rama, on the very day he finally walked back into Ayodhya after his long exile, turned to Bharata and the sages around him and spoke of Hanuman and Sugriva and the vanaras with open affection, calling them, in one memorable line, dearer to him even than his own brother, because they had risked everything for his sake. A verse from the Bhagavata Purana is quoted to seal the point: the sadhus are my heart, Krishna says, and I am the heart of the sadhus, they know nothing beyond me, and I am not the smallest fraction removed from them.

As if to prove that this mutual love is not poetry but a living fact, the closing chhappays run quickly through the great grace-stories of the tradition, almost as a litany: Dhruva, who won a fixed place in the sky through a boy's stubborn longing; Prahlad, saved from his own father's fire and blade; Ajamila, redeemed at the very edge of death by a single accidental utterance of a sacred name; even Putana, the demoness who came to poison the infant Krishna and was granted liberation instead of punishment; Gajendra, the elephant pulled from a crocodile's jaws; Shabari, whose half-tasted forest berries Rama ate without hesitation because they came offered in love; and the scene at Yudhishthira's great Rajasuya sacrifice, remembered here with particular tenderness, where Krishna, Lord of the Yadus, quietly took it upon himself to wash the feet of the assembled guests and clear away their used leaf-plates like the humblest of servants. Especially in this present age of Kali, the verse insists, such proofs of grace keep appearing in plain sight, so let no one be astonished by them, and let everyone hold fast to faith rather than doubt.

And so the great garland closes, not with a king or a sage but by circling back, in spirit, to a woman like Lalmati, who has no Rajasuya to her name and no crocodile she was ever pulled from, only a lifetime of loving a riverbank, a banyan tree, a hill, and the dust under her own feet with a mother's whole heart. She is proof, standing quietly at the threshold of the book's own conclusion, that the measure the Bhaktamal finally applies to a human life has nothing to do with how eventful it looked from the outside. It asks only where the heart was kept, and whether it stayed there without wavering until the rare and difficult gift of a human body had been, in Nabhadas's own words, fully spent to its proper gain.