सूर भ्रमर गीत

Sūrdās’s Bhramar Gīt

Sūrdās’s Brajbhāṣā retelling of the Bhāgavata’s bee-song, sung in Pushtimārga temples for five centuries

16th c. Brajbhāṣā · Sūrdās · Pushtimārga

Sūrdās was a blind Pushtimārga saint of the sixteenth century who sang Krishna in the speaking voice of the village. The Sūrsāgar, the great body of poetry that bears his name, runs to thousands of padas and accreted over generations of singers. J. S. Hawley’s manuscript work argues that roughly four hundred of the padas in the older manuscripts are authentic to the historical Sūr. The rest are the songs of his lineage. Both Sūrs sing.

Within the Sūrsāgar, the Bhramar Gīt is the section in which the gopis address the bumblebee that Uddhava the philosopher has unwittingly brought along on his errand from Mathurā. The Bhāgavata gives the same scene in two Sanskrit chapters, the tenth canto’s forty-sixth and forty-seventh. Sūrdās expands those chapters into a long song-cycle in Brajbhāṣā, the language of the actual cowherd country. The gopis speak in the idiom of women in a village. The philosopher hears Sanskrit and answers in Sanskrit and is, by the end of the song, broken open by what he has heard.

The renderings on this page are not translations of specific Brajbhāṣā padas. The Brajbhāṣā is hard to verify outside the critical editions, and the manuscript tradition is variable. Each section here is a faithful prose reading of a movement in the song, written for a contemporary reader. The Pushtimārga’s reading of the Bhramar Gīt as the founding charter of mādhurya bhāva is preserved. The vernacular warmth and humor of Sūr is preserved. The pada numbers behind the curtain belong to the editors. The song belongs to the courtyards.

सप्त

Movement 1· ऊधो सन्देश

The Setting: Krishna Sends Uddhava with the Yoga Teaching

Sūrsāgar, prologue padas to the Bhramar Gīt sequence

Krishna has gone to Mathurā. The flute is silent. Yashoda still leaves food at the door at the hour he used to come home. In Mathurā, surrounded by his uncle's politics and his cousin's enemies, Krishna calls his closest friend, Uddhava, the philosopher, and asks him to carry a message back to Vraja.

Krishna says: Go to my mother. Tell her I am well. Tell my father I am well. Tell the cowherd boys I have not forgotten the games. And then, when you have done all of that, go and find the gopis. They will be at the well in the morning. They will be on the path to the river. Tell them the news the Vedas teach. Tell them the soul is unborn. Tell them the body that loved me is a passing thing. Tell them the absolute is everywhere and the river of separation can be crossed by the boat of knowledge.

Uddhava bows. He has been a yogi all his life. He has steadied his breath in the cave on the mountain. He has watched his thoughts rise and set like clouds. He believes what Krishna is asking him to teach because he has practiced it. He sets out the next morning in the chariot with the message folded inside him like a clean cloth.

Krishna watches the dust of the chariot leave the city. He does not say what he is thinking. The text does not record whether he smiled. Sūrdās, singing several centuries later in the courtyards of Vraja, will tell us by the end of the song what Krishna already knew when he sent his friend on the errand. The yogi was about to walk into the one classroom where his lesson would not stand.

Sūrdās begins the Bhramar Gīt where the Bhāgavata begins it: with the man Krishna trusts most carrying the teaching Krishna himself has just stepped out of. The whole song that follows is the slow demonstration that this teaching, true everywhere else, has no purchase in Vraja. Vraja is not a place where the soul wishes to be reminded that it is unborn. Vraja is the place where the soul wants to be told the cowherd is coming home tonight.

Movement 2· गोपी क्रोध

The Gopis' First Reaction: From Confusion to Hostility

Early padas of the sequence, the meeting of Uddhava and the gopis

Uddhava arrives in Vraja. He goes first to Yashoda and to Nanda. He delivers the message. Then he walks toward the river to find the gopis. He sits under a tree on the bank and waits. They come, one and another and another, with their pots on their heads, and they stop when they see him.

At first they think he is Krishna. The cloak in the wind, the dark form against the tree, the moment the heart needs only the smallest cue. They drop the pots. They run forward. They stop again when they see the face. It is not him. It is a man who looks like him from a distance because he has spent his life beside him.

They circle him slowly. They ask after Krishna. They ask whether he has eaten today. They ask whether he remembers the small games. They ask whether he sleeps well in the palace bed. They are starved for any small detail. Tell us his shirt is washed, they say. Tell us his hair is combed. Tell us anything.

Uddhava clears his throat. He has been waiting for the moment to deliver the teaching. He begins. The soul, he says. The unborn. The pure consciousness behind the play of names and forms. The gopis listen for one minute. They listen for two minutes. They look at each other.

Then their faces change. The grief that had been soft becomes hard. They are not confused women receiving a difficult lesson. They are women who have just realized that the man they sent to the city has sent back, in his place, a stranger with a sermon. The hostility comes up like the temperature of water about to boil. They have not yet said a word, but Sūrdās has already given us, in the lift of an eyebrow and the tightening of a hand on a hip, the entire weather of the song to come.

Sūrdās's gopis are not the abstracted devotees of later theology. They are women in a village standing beside a river, and the man in front of them has just told them that their grief is metaphysically unnecessary. The shift from confusion to hostility happens in the space of a single pada. Sūrdās is a poet of the speaking voice. He hears how a woman's tone changes when she has decided, halfway through a man's sentence, that she will not be lectured.

Movement 3· भ्रमर आगमन

The Arrival of the Bee

The famous opening pada of the Bhramar Gīt proper

While Uddhava is still talking, a black bumblebee comes humming through the grove. It lands on the garland one of the gopis has left on a stone. She turns to it. She has found her addressee. Uddhava becomes, at this moment, a witness who is no longer being spoken to. The whole sermon dies in his mouth.

She turns to the bee with something like relief. Here, at last, is a creature she can speak to without having to be careful. The bee is dark like Krishna. The bee moves restlessly from flower to flower like Krishna. The bee will not stay long. The bee makes a low, sweet sound that is almost a flute. Everything about it offers itself to the conversation she has been waiting all morning to begin.

Listen, black one, she says. You move so easily from flower to flower. Are you a relative of the cowherd in Mathurā, or are you only a beggar wearing his colors? Tell me, since you fly so freely in this grove, whether you have any news of the boy who left this grove and did not come back. Tell me whether the city has changed him into someone who sends his philosopher friend home with messages instead of coming himself. Tell me, since you are dark and beautiful and going from flower to flower, whether all dark and beautiful creatures are alike in the matter of staying.

The bee, of course, says nothing. The bee continues to drink from the flower. But the gopi has now found the form her grief was looking for. She has a creature to address. She has a screen onto which she can project the absent beloved and the present philosopher both. For the next many padas she will not stop talking, and Uddhava, sitting two paces away with his prepared sermon, will become smaller and smaller in his own seat.

The bee is the small genius of this song. It allows the gopi to speak without speaking to Uddhava. It allows her to address Krishna without admitting she still loves Krishna enough to address him. It allows her to teach the philosopher a lesson he cannot interrupt because the lesson is not officially being taught to him. Sūrdās, like the Bhāgavata before him, knows that the indirect address is the most powerful kind. The whole vernacular tradition is in love with the obliqueness of this moment.

Movement 4· दस सम्बोधन

A Series of Gopi Addresses to the Bee

The core of the song, the citra-jalpa registers

What follows in the song is a series of speeches, sometimes attributed to one gopi, sometimes to several. The bee is the addressee in all of them. Rūpa Goswāmī, writing in Sanskrit a century after Sūrdās's lifetime, will name ten emotional registers in this kind of speech and call them the citra-jalpa, the variegated babble. Sūrdās is not classifying. He is singing.

First register, mockery. Ah, black one, she says. You and your master are clearly trained in the same school. He goes from gopi to gopi the way you go from flower to flower. He drinks the sweetness and is gone before the petal closes. Tell him, since you and he have such similar manners, that the flowers of this grove have learned to recognize the family.

Second, accusation. Tell him, when you see him, that we know what he is. We saw what he did to Kubjā the hunchback in Mathurā. He bent down to her. He straightened her back with his hand. He took her into the inner room. We hear about it from every traveler who passes through. Tell him a forest of women here is wondering what kind of straightening she required that the rāsa-dance did not.

Third, false praise. Oh, but he is so clever, your master. So many wives in Dvāraka and so many children. Sixteen thousand wives and a son for each, the singers say. We are happy for him. We are pleased that the boy who used to sit on the milking-stool has grown into a king with full inventories. Tell him our compliments. Tell him we are sure his accountant is busy.

Fourth, a sudden dropping of the mask. And tell him. Tell him that the woman who is speaking to you is not the woman she was. Tell him that I sleep two hours a night and that the two hours are filled with him. Tell him that the body that danced has stopped dancing. Tell him I will not blame him for any of it. Tell him only that I want to know whether he ever, in any of his sixteen thousand rooms, in any of his political afternoons, in any of his sleeping hours, remembers a single one of us.

Fifth, the cycle resumes. She gathers the mockery again. She gathers the false praise again. She circles back to the accusations. The bee continues to drink. Uddhava continues to sit. The afternoon turns. Sūrdās's voice in the courtyard turns the wheel of the song. There is no straight line in this part of the Bhramar Gīt. The grief turns and turns on itself, finding new tones and old tones and tones it had forgotten it had.

Rūpa Goswāmī will later name ten registers. The names are useful for theologians. The thing the singer hears, sitting in the courtyard with the audience around him, is the turning. Grief in this song is not a thing that progresses in a line. It is a wheel. It comes back. It is mockery and then false praise and then bare confession and then mockery again. Sūrdās is not constructing a sequence. He is following the actual contour of how a heart, which has decided to speak, speaks.

Movement 5· योग विफल

Uddhava's Failed Yoga Teaching

Padas where Uddhava attempts to insert his teaching

At intervals in the song, Uddhava tries again. He waits for a pause in the gopis' speech. He clears his throat. He attempts the lesson he was sent to deliver. Each time, the lesson fails differently. Sūrdās treats these attempts with the gentle humor of a man who knows exactly which battle the philosopher is losing.

First attempt. Sisters, says Uddhava, the soul is unborn. It does not come and it does not go. Krishna is not in any one place because he is in every place. They look at him for a long moment. One of them says: Then he is in this place too. Then call him, if your soul-talk is so powerful. Make him come out of this tree. Make him stand at this gate. We will wait. The tree does not produce Krishna. The gate does not produce Krishna. Uddhava lowers his eyes.

Second attempt. He tries the language of meditation. Close your eyes, he says. Find him in the heart. The breath itself is a teacher. The mind quieted is the mind that knows. They laugh. We close our eyes, says one of them, and he is there. We open our eyes, and we go looking for him. We do not need to be taught how to close our eyes. We need to be taught how to keep them open without seeing him in every dust-storm and every black bird and every shadow of a tree.

Third attempt. He tries philosophy. The world is appearance, he says. The forms you loved are forms only. The substance is the unchanging consciousness. They hear him out. Then one of them, kindly, takes his hand. Brother, she says. We respect what you have learned. We are sure your teacher gave it to you because you needed it. Take it back to your teacher. Tell him it is in good condition. Tell him it did not fit any of the shapes here.

By the end of the song, Uddhava has become quiet. He has stopped clearing his throat. He sits on the bank with his hands in his lap and watches the women he was sent to teach. Something is happening to him that the curriculum at the cave on the mountain did not prepare him for.

Sūrdās does not humiliate Uddhava. Sūrdās is too good a poet for that. He shows the philosopher running into a country where his philosophy, true elsewhere, will not stand, and he shows the philosopher beginning to hear what the country is teaching him in return. The yogi who came to teach is becoming, pada by pada, a student. The transformation is the actual subject of the song. Without it the song would be only mockery. With it the song becomes scripture.

Movement 6· ऊधो विनती

Uddhava's Reversal: A Creeper in Vraja

The closing padas of the sequence, Uddhava's final speech

Days have passed. Uddhava has stayed in Vraja longer than he meant to. He has watched the gopis at the well, at the river, at the door of Yashoda's house. He has watched them not eat. He has watched them not sleep. He has watched their love refuse every container he tried to pour it into. On the morning of his departure he stands by his chariot and addresses the women he came to teach.

He says: I came here as a teacher. I see now that I have been a student. I came with the message and the message has been turned around and given back to me with everything I came to teach broken open in the giving.

I have been a yogi all my life. I have sat in the cave. I have steadied my breath. I have known the soul to be unborn. I have known the world to be appearance. I have rested in the silence behind the mind. None of it, I see now, equals one hour of what is happening to the women of this village.

Therefore, listen to my prayer. Let me come back. Let me come back not as a man and not as a yogi. Let me come back as a creeper at the foot of one of these trees. Let me come back as a blade of grass on the path the gopis walk to the river. Let me come back as a small, unnoticed plant in the courtyard of one of these houses. Let the dust of their feet fall on me when they pass. Let the breath of the cows move my leaves in the morning. Let me be in this country in any form, however small, however brief, however unlearned. I do not want to be reborn as a teacher. I do not want to be reborn as a sage. I want to be reborn here, where the women weep, where the love is the kind that cannot be straightened by any teaching, where the absent cowherd is the whole air.

He climbs into the chariot and turns it back toward Mathurā. He carries the gopis' message to Krishna. The message is not what Krishna sent him to receive. The message is that the philosopher's curriculum has been overturned by the curriculum of the village, and the philosopher is grateful.

This is the song's heart. The Bhāgavata gives Uddhava his prayer in two famous Sanskrit verses. Sūrdās gives it in the speaking voice of Brajbhāṣā, which is the voice of the actual courtyards where the song was sung. The reversal is total. The teacher has become the student. The man who came with the highest knowledge of the upaniṣads has asked to be a creeper. The Pushtimārga reads this passage as the founding charter of mādhurya bhāva: the love of the gopis, untheorized, vernacular, unyogic, is the highest reality the texts know how to point to.

Movement 7· गोपी अन्त वचन

Closing: The Gopis' Final Word

The very last padas of the sequence

Uddhava is gone. The gopis stand on the path where the chariot left. The dust settles. They turn to walk back to the village. One of them, the text does not say which, speaks the song's final lines.

She says: We have sent the philosopher home. He came with knowledge and he is leaving with grief, and that is the right direction for any traveler in this country. We do not begrudge him the grief. We have plenty of it. We can spare him a portion.

She says: As for the cowherd, he is wherever he is. He sits in the city or he sits on a throne or he stands at a window looking at the road we used to walk. We do not know. We will not pretend to know. We are women who used to walk to the river to fill our pots. We still walk to the river. We still fill the pots. The water is the same water. The pot is the same pot. The walk is not the same walk because there is no one watching us from behind the kadamba tree, and the absence of that watching is the whole shape of our days.

She says: Let no one come here again with a teaching. We do not need a teaching. We have learned everything our hearts can hold. The next person who comes through this grove and tries to instruct us about the unborn soul will be sent home faster than the philosopher was. Tell the cowherd, if he is listening, that we are not waiting for him. Tell him also that we have not stopped waiting for him. Both of these are true. The texts will have to choose which one to record. The lived thing is both.

And with that, she lifts her pot back onto her head, and she walks toward the village, and Sūrdās lets the song end on the small clay sound of the pot settling on her hair, and the courtyard is quiet, and the temple lamp burns down a little, and the singer puts his fingers on the strings and waits before beginning the next song in the day's program.

Sūrdās closes the Bhramar Gīt without consolation. The gopis are not reunited with Krishna in this song. The grief is not resolved in this song. What has changed is that the philosopher has been sent home, the village has retained its language, and the love of the women has been recognized, by the highest yogi in the texts, as the country in which his own learning fails. That recognition is the song's gift. The Pushtimārga sings the Bhramar Gīt every year because the recognition needs to be renewed, generation by generation, in the speaking voice of the courtyards where the temple of Śrī Nāthji opens at dawn.

← Previous

Bhramara-Gītā

भ्रमर-गीत

The Gopi's Song to the Bee

Brahma Saṃhitā

ब्रह्म संहिता

The Govinda Hymn

All Eleven Texts

Veṇu-Gītā·Gopi-Gītā·Bhramara-Gītā·Sūrdās's Bhramar Gīt·Brahma Saṃhitā·Gopāla-tāpanī Upaniṣad·Rādhopaniṣad·Nārada Pañcarātra·Skanda Purāṇa·Hāla's Gāhā Sattasaī·Daśaślokī·Śikṣāṣṭakam·Caitanya Caritāmṛta·Gīta Govinda·Hit Caurāsī·Rādhā-Rasa-Sudhā-Nidhi·Premavāṭikā and Sujān Rasakhān·Padma Purāṇa·Govinda-Līlāmṛta·Yugala-Śataka·Kelimāla·Narottama Dāsa's Prārthanā·Radha in the Sources·Brahmavaivarta Purāṇa·Garga Saṃhitā·Devī Bhāgavata Purāṇa·Rādhā-Sahasranāma·Krishna-Karṇāmṛta·Stava-Mālā·The Rādhāṣṭakams·Vidagdha-Mādhava and Lalita-Mādhava·Vilāpa-Kusumāñjali·Bṛhad-Bhāgavatāmṛta·The Five Sampradāyas·The Aṣṭa-Sakhīs·The Eight Watches·Mañjarī-Bhāva·Bhakti-Rasāmṛta-Sindhu·Ujjvala-Nīlamaṇi·Sat-Sandarbhas·Hari-Bhakti-Vilāsa·Bhaiji·Theological Threads·Vidyāpati and Caṇḍīdāsa

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The Bhramar Gīt has been sung for five centuries in the temples of the Pushtimārga and beyond. The renderings on this page are doors. The reader who wants the Brajbhāṣā itself should consult J. S. Hawley’s critical work and the Nāgarī Pracāriṇī Sabhā edition of the Sūrsāgar. The song behind the door keeps on opening for as long as a singer is willing to begin again.

ऊधो मन न भये दस बीस

ūdho, mana na bhaye das bīs · the heart, Uddhava, does not come in tens and twenties