Gīta Govinda

The opening ashtapadi. Before the love story begins, Jayadeva sets the cosmic frame. He praises Krishna as the source of the ten avatāras: Matsya, Kūrma, Varāha, Narasiṃha, Vāmana, Paraśurāma, Rāma, Balarāma, Buddha, Kalki. Each verse closes with the same refrain, keśava dhṛta-X-śarīra jaya jagad-īśa hare, where X names the body Krishna has just assumed. The hymn establishes that the dark cowherd boy of Vraja is the same Lord who lifted the Veda from the deluge, who bore the earth on his tusk, who measured the universe with three strides. The whole pageant of the Daśāvatāra is one lover, and the rest of the poem will look at him in only one of those bodies. Sung daily in Bengali and Odia traditions for eight hundred years.

The second ashtapadi continues the invocation, now narrowing from the cosmic Daśāvatāra to the figure standing in the forest. Jayadeva praises Krishna as the one who rests on the breast-orb of Lakshmi, whose body is dark as the rain cloud, whose forest garland sways across his chest, whose flute and yellow garment and peacock crown have already become the marks of the iconographic Krishna. Each verse closes with the refrain jaya jaya deva hare, glory glory to the Lord, O Hari. The poet is doing the work of the temple priest: naming the limbs and ornaments of the deity before the singing begins. By the end of this ashtapadi, the listener has been brought from the abstraction of the avatāras down to the specific lover who is about to enter the kunja.

Perhaps the most famous ashtapadi in the entire poem, sung in raga Vasanta, the spring rāga. A sakhī describes to Rādhā the spring forest where Krishna is dancing with the other gopis. The Malaya wind moves through the lavaṅga vines. The bowers are loud with bees and koels. The refrain viharati harir iha sarasa-vasante, Hari plays here in the season of love, becomes the hook line that every classical Indian dancer who performs the Gīta Govinda will at some point sing. The verse is also where Rādhā's separation begins. Until now the season has been spring. From this verse onward, spring is what hurts. The song works simultaneously as a celebration of the natural world and as an instrument of pain in the listener's heart.

The sakhī goes on with her description of the forest scene. Krishna is surrounded by young gopis who press in on him from every side. One girl draws him close with her glance. Another puts her arm around his shoulder. Another brings her face near to his ear and whispers. Each gopi in the circle thinks Krishna is hers alone, because his face turns to whichever woman is speaking to him. The poet uses the dance to give us an image of the soul that does not yet know it is one of many. Rādhā, listening, is being shown her rival in plural form. The verse is the seed of what will become her viraha. The song closes the first sarga, leaving Krishna in the center of the circle and Rādhā outside it.

The first long song that Rādhā herself sings. She has heard the sakhī's description and now her own memory rises to meet it. She sees Krishna's flute, loud with the nectar that wanders on his lips. She sees his peacock crown swaying, his earrings trembling with the sideways glance of his eye. The refrain smarati mano mama kṛta-parihāsam, my mind, my own mind, remembers him who once teased me, becomes the anthem of remembrance for the rest of the poem. The song establishes that Rādhā's love is not only for the Krishna who is dancing now in the forest. It is for the Krishna of her own private past. The grief of separation in the Gīta Govinda is not loss of presence; it is the unbearable richness of memory.

Rādhā's memory has become unbearable, and she turns to the sakhī to ask for relief. She begs her friend to go to the kunja and bring Krishna to her. She describes what she will do when he comes: she will look at him, she will speak to him, she will let him touch her face. The song is a study in the strange courage of love-pleading. Rādhā cannot go herself; she sends a messenger. The sakhī becomes the third figure of the poem's emotional triangle, standing between the lover and the beloved, carrying messages back and forth. This figure of the sakhī-messenger is one of Jayadeva's enduring gifts to Vaishnava aesthetics. The whole later tradition of mañjarī-bhāva, of devotion as service to the divine couple, descends from this ashtapadi.

The sakhī has not yet returned. Rādhā waits, and in waiting her mood turns. She begins to argue with her own heart. Why does it cling to a Krishna who is dancing with others? Why does it not rest? Why does it betray her by remembering him? The song is one of the earliest extended treatments in Sanskrit poetry of the lover quarrelling with herself. Rādhā speaks to her mind as if it were a separate person, scolding it, pleading with it, accusing it. The Vaishnava commentators read this song as the first stirring of māna, the proud refusal that will break out in full in sarga eight. For now it is only an undercurrent. The sarga closes with Rādhā exhausted, her heart still arguing.

The poem turns. Until now Rādhā has been the one in pain and Krishna has been the one dancing. In the third sarga, Krishna is alone. The other gopis have drifted away. He is in the forest by himself, and his mind has gone to Rādhā. He realizes what he has lost. The ashtapadi is a song of his self-reproach. He sees her face, he sees her body, he sees the way she looked at him last, and he understands that his own restlessness has driven her away. The Vaishnava reading of this song is theologically central: the supreme Lord, who is fullness itself, finds that he is incomplete without his beloved. The doctrine of Rādhā as Krishna's hlādinī-śakti, his bliss-energy, has its kāvya origin in this song.

The sakhī has found Krishna and seen his state. She comes back to Rādhā with news. She describes how the dark Lord sits beside the Yamunā, how he refuses food, how he refuses sleep, how he listens for one footfall that does not come. She describes how he traces Rādhā's face in the sand and then wipes it away because he cannot bear to see it. The ashtapadi is the messenger's report, given in the close affectionate detail that only a sakhī would notice. The song is the structural mirror of ashtapadi 5. There Rādhā remembered Krishna; here the sakhī is making sure Rādhā knows that Krishna is remembering her. The balance of the poem has now tilted, and Rādhā's anger begins to soften, though she does not yet move.

The sakhī continues her report. She describes the forest from Krishna's point of view. The flowers wound him. The breeze burns him. The moon blinds him. The cuckoos jeer at him. The very ornaments of spring that the third ashtapadi celebrated have become instruments of torture, because every beautiful thing reminds him of Rādhā. The song establishes a key Sanskrit kāvya pattern: the same forest that is paradise for the lover-in-union is a torture chamber for the lover-in-separation. The reversal of the spring imagery from ashtapadi 3 is deliberate. Jayadeva is showing that bhāva, mood, transforms the world. The same Vrindavana is now hell for Krishna. The sakhī is using this picture to break Rādhā's resistance.

One of the four or five most famous ashtapadis. The sakhī tells Rādhā what is happening in the kunja right now. The wind is gentle, the Yamunā runs nearby, Krishna waits in the bower. He has prepared the bed of leaves. He looks down the path. He starts at every sound, certain it must be her. The refrain dhīra-samīre yamunā-tīre vasati vane vanamālī, by the gentle breeze on the Yamunā's shore, in the forest the wearer of the wildflower garland dwells, has been set to music more times than perhaps any other single line in the poem. The song closes the fifth sarga. After this the action accelerates: Rādhā will try to walk to him in sarga six, will doubt him in sarga seven, will refuse him in sarga eight. But for one moment here, in the eleventh ashtapadi, the kunja is ready and Krishna is waiting and the listener is allowed to sit there.

The sakhī continues from the previous ashtapadi but now turns the picture into an argument. She tells Rādhā what is waiting for her: the leaf-bed, the flute, the lover's face. She lists each ornament of the kunja as a reason to come. She describes Krishna's longing in detail and then says, plainly, that to refuse him now would be to ruin both of them. The song is the most sustained piece of sakhī-rhetoric in the poem. Rādhā does not answer in words. She rises. She begins, weakly, to walk. The sarga ends with her starting on the path, the sakhī's argument having moved her finally from the place where memory and pride had pinned her. The reader knows already that her body will fail her before she reaches him.

Rādhā has tried and failed. Her legs would not carry her. The sakhī has had to leave her sitting on the path, leaning against a tree, unable to go further. Now the sakhī goes to Krishna in the kunja and tells him so. The ashtapadi is the report of Rādhā's failure to come, given in detail. Each verse describes one symptom of viraha that has rooted Rādhā to the spot: she trembles, she perspires, she cannot speak, she has fallen into a kind of half-sleep where she keeps seeing him. The song establishes that the bhakta's love can be so intense that it disables the very body that wishes to come to the Lord. The Vaishnava saints will later read this as the highest stage of bhāva, where the beloved cannot move because they have already arrived inwardly.

Rādhā, still on the path, falls into a fevered imagining. Krishna has not come for her. Therefore he must be with someone else. Her mind paints the picture in vivid detail. She sees the other gopi in his arms. She sees the way he looks at her. She supplies every ornament, every gesture, every word that she imagines passing between them. The ashtapadi is a study in the way the jealous mind constructs its own torture. Nothing in the picture is real; Krishna is in fact alone in the kunja. But the mind is so good at building this image that Rādhā's pain becomes worse than if she had actually seen it. Jayadeva is making a point that later Vaishnava poets will repeat: viraha is not absence, it is the picture the heart cannot stop painting.

The picture continues, now sharper. Rādhā imagines the rival gopi with such precision that the listener almost forgets she is invented. She gives the rival a face, a body, a particular bracelet on a particular wrist. She watches Krishna kiss this woman she has invented. She watches him ornament her hair. The song demonstrates that the Sanskrit imagination of jealousy is not a flash of feeling but a sustained creative act. The mind is composing a counter-poem to its own happiness, line by line, with the same care that Jayadeva is using to compose this ashtapadi. The Vaishnava commentators read this as the deepest moment of Rādhā's māna, where her love and her self-torment become indistinguishable.

The imagined picture has done its work, and Rādhā now turns on herself. She curses her own eyes for ever having looked at Krishna. She curses her ears for ever having heard his flute. She curses the path that brought her to him. The song is the dark side of the praise-of-the-beloved tradition. Where ashtapadi 2 had blessed every limb of Krishna, this song curses every faculty in Rādhā that ever loved him. The reversal is rhetorically perfect. The Vaishnava saints take this song as a teaching moment: even the worst imagined sin against the Lord cannot break the love beneath it. Rādhā curses everything she has, but she does not curse Krishna. The love is intact under the rage.

The seventh sarga closes with Rādhā in collapse. The fever of imagining has burned through her. She is now not even angry. She is empty. The ashtapadi is the song of that emptiness. She describes herself as ash, as the burnt wick of the lamp, as the bowstring after the arrow has flown. She is no longer making pictures. She has stopped trying. The song establishes the lowest emotional point of the poem, the moment from which only Krishna's actual arrival can lift her. Jayadeva has prepared the listener carefully: by giving four full ashtapadis to Rādhā's jealousy, he has made the eighth sarga's reversal land with full force. When Krishna himself appears in the next sarga, the listener feels the relief of his coming as much as Rādhā does.

Krishna has come. He has found her on the path and begged for her favor. And Rādhā, against every expectation, refuses him. The eighteenth ashtapadi is the great song of māna, the proud refusal that has become the model for every later treatment of the lovers' quarrel in Indian literature. Each verse begins yāhi mādhava, yāhi keśava, ma vada kaitava-vādam, go away Mādhava, go away Keshava, do not speak deceiving words. She accuses him in detail. She describes the marks of the other gopi's bangles still visible on his chest, the kohl from her eyes still on his lip, the ornament-trace of her ear still on his shoulder. The song is electrifying because it is the bhakta refusing the Lord. The Vaishnava saints read this as the supremacy of love: even God can be turned away by the lover whose love is true.

The most quoted of all the ashtapadis after the Daśāvatāra and the spring song. Krishna himself sings now, pleading with Rādhā to release her anger. The refrain is priye cāru-śīle muñca mayi mānam anidānam, beloved of beautiful conduct, release in me this groundless pride. He calls her by every endearment. He offers his head, his hand, his whole self. He says that her anger is the only obstacle that stands between them. The theological reading is unmistakable: the supreme Lord is bowing to the beloved soul. He cannot force the union; she must give it. The song is sung at countless Vaishnava festivals and in countless Bharatanatyam and Odissi recitals to this day. After this song, no Sanskrit poet could ever again present Krishna as untouchable. The plea has changed the relationship forever.

The twentieth ashtapadi continues Krishna's pleading and contains the most theologically audacious moment in the poem. Krishna asks Rādhā to place her foot on his head as ornament. Smara-garala-khaṇḍanaṁ mama śirasi maṇḍanam, dehi pāda-pallavam udāram: the antidote for the poison of love, the ornament of my head, place upon it the tender blossom of your foot. The Lord of the four arms, the Lord of all worlds, asks the daughter of Vrishabhanu to put her foot on him. Cosmic order has been inverted. The bhakta has become the higher. Five hundred years later, Caitanya Mahāprabhu would build the entire praṇaya-mahimā theology of the Gauḍīyas around this kind of moment. The Pushtimārga and Nimbārka traditions read this verse as the fulcrum of all bhakti-rasa. After this, Rādhā's resistance breaks.

Rādhā has yielded. The sakhī now becomes ritual handmaiden. She leads Rādhā into the kunja. She straightens her garments. She paints fresh kohl on her eye. She rearranges the flowers in her hair. She speaks to her gently, telling her how to walk, how to enter, how to receive the lover who has been waiting through so many songs. The ashtapadi is the song of preparation, the tender moment between two friends just before the meeting. The Vaishnava tradition treasures this song as the model for the mañjarī-sakhīs of Vrindavan, who are believed to perform exactly this office for Rādhā in the eternal līlā. The sakhī here is not a character so much as a function: she is the door between separation and union, and her hands are what make Rādhā ready.

The reunion. Krishna sees Rādhā enter the bower. The poem describes their meeting with restraint, almost shyness, as though the narrator is averting his eyes a little. Their hands meet. Their eyes meet. They do not yet speak. The sakhī has stepped back. The kunja holds them. The ashtapadi is the moment the whole poem has been moving toward since meghair meduram. Jayadeva does not crowd it with description. He gives the lovers space. The reader, who has been waiting through twelve sargas of separation and pleading, is allowed simply to witness. After this song the rest of the poem will be the play within the kunja, but the moment of arrival belongs to this ashtapadi alone.

The twelfth and final sarga is the great reversal of the poem. Rādhā now commands. She speaks, and Krishna serves. In this ashtapadi she begins to ask him for what she wants. She tells him to put on her ornaments. She tells him to braid her hair. She tells him to paint the foot whose blossom he asked her in the previous sarga to place on his head. The Lord performs each task. The bhakta who refused him in sarga eight, the bhakta who was begged for in sarga ten, now sits and is dressed by him. The ashtapadi is the most radical theological inversion in Sanskrit poetry: not just Rādhā placing her foot on Krishna, but Krishna decorating that foot with his own hand. The Gauḍīya tradition reads this as the eternal Vraja in its fullest revelation.

The final ashtapadi. Krishna, having completed each ornament, sits in fulfilled attendance at Rādhā's feet. Jayadeva closes the song-cycle here, in the moment of the Lord's exultant service to his beloved. The colophon names the sarga Suprīta-Pītāmbara, the joyful Krishna in the yellow garment. The closing verses bless the listener: whoever sings this song, whoever hears it, whoever holds it in mind will be received by Krishna. The whole twelve-sarga arc has come to rest in this last image. The eight hundred years since Jayadeva have read this ending as the eternal moment of Vraja, the moment that does not pass, the moment that the bhakta enters every time the ashtapadis are sung. The poem ends, but the kunja continues.