Vidyāpati and Caṇḍīdāsa

Mithila in the late fourteenth century was a center of Sanskrit learning. The Navya-Nyāya school of logic was being refined there. The traditions of Mīmāṃsā and Smṛti had old roots. Pandits arrived from across the north for instruction. Into this learned air Vidyāpati introduced something new: the elevated treatment of Rādhā and Krishna in the spoken tongue, the Maithili of the streets and the inner rooms, given the formal beauty of court song.

His padas are not the simple hymns of a village singer. They are courtly. They use the conventions of Sanskrit lyric and the rhetoric of the Sanskrit poeticians, the alaṃkāras and the rasas, but they speak in Maithili. A young woman is described in the way a court poet would describe a queen: her gait, her ornaments, her glances catalogued with formal precision. Then the formality breaks. She is also a girl of the village by the river, with mud on her ankles, hurrying because dusk is coming.

The two registers, the courtly and the rural, sit together in his work without quarrel. This is the gift of his particular setting. He was not a renunciant projecting a fantasy of village life. He was a court Brahmin who had also walked those village paths and knew what the air smelled like at dusk by the Yamunā that he had never seen in person but had seen so many times in the inherited imagination of his tradition that it was as familiar to him as the river outside Mithila.

His Rādhā is therefore both the lady of romance literature and the country girl, both at once. His Krishna is both the cowherd boy and the dark courtly lover for whom the ornaments of poetry are made. The mature Rādhā that Vidyāpati gives is sometimes called parodhā in the later commentaries, a woman past girlhood, knowing, deliberate. Krishna is given as kiśora, the adolescent. The age tension between them is part of the poetry's intelligence. She knows things he is only beginning to know.

She had prepared the bed. She had gathered the flowers from the kunja the way the older sakhīs had taught her. She had made the small lamp ready and trimmed the wick. She had bathed and put on the cloth he had once said he liked. She had braided her hair the way he liked, and unbraided it, and braided it again because the first braiding had not satisfied her. The night had begun gentle and now it was more than half gone and he had not come.

Listen, sakhī. You who have known me since we were small. The lamp has burned down to almost nothing. The flowers I had chosen have begun to wilt against the cloth I am sitting on. The cloth itself is no longer fresh. The whole arrangement that I had made into a kind of offering has lost its first form. And the worst thing is not that he did not come. The worst thing is what is happening to me as I wait.

I am not the woman I was at the beginning of the night. At the beginning of the night I was a bride waiting. Now I am no longer sure what I am. I have asked the questions that the waiting always asks. Did he forget. Is another woman holding him. Has something happened on the road. Is he avoiding me. Has my own beauty failed. Each question is a small wound and I am full of these wounds now because I have asked each of them too many times.

Sakhī, do not say anything. Do not offer comfort. Comfort would be its own insult tonight. Just sit with me until morning comes. Morning will come, and the cock will crow, and the village will begin, and I will go back to my house as if nothing had been arranged. The lamp will be put away. The flowers will be thrown into the river. The cloth will be washed. Only the night I have just spent will remain, and that I will carry inside me, and Vidyāpati will know how to say what I cannot say.

He came to us with words. He came down the road from the city in his fine clothes, on a chariot that had wheels we had never seen turn in our village. He sat under the tree where Krishna used to sit and he spoke to us. He spoke for a long time. He spoke about the unborn Self that does not move. He spoke about how the love we feel is for the form, and the form is a covering, and beneath the covering is the truth, and the truth has no ornament and no flute.

We listened. We are not unable to listen. We have heard the village brahmin teach. We have heard the wandering renunciants who pass through. We know the words. We know what avidyā means. We know what nirguṇa means. The words are not new to us, friend from the city. The words have been said in Vraja before and they have been said by men more learned than you. The words are not the difficulty.

The difficulty is this. He who plays the flute is not a covering. He is the one we love. We do not love a covering and then have to be educated into loving the truth beneath. The flute itself is the truth. The dark color of his skin is the truth. The peacock feather and the yellow cloth and the way he laughs when he has just stolen butter and is not sorry, those are the truth. Take those away and what is left is not deeper. What is left is your teaching, which is a fine teaching for a man on a chariot but not for women who have already met the Lord at the riverbank.

Go back to the city, friend. Carry our greetings to the man who sent you. Tell him that we are well. Tell him that we are also not well. Tell him that the words he sent did not reach. Tell him that if he has anything else to say to us, he should come and say it himself. We will be here in the kunja, in the place where his footprints used to be, where the mud still seems to remember the shape of him.

I have heard the women in the lane talking. I have heard them stop talking when I passed. I have seen the older aunts touch their foreheads as they look at me, and I have understood what they mean. The village does not have the language for what I am doing. The village has only the words for the woman who keeps her house and the woman who has fallen.

Friend, listen. I am not the woman who keeps the house and I am not the woman who has fallen. I am a third thing. I am the one who has met him in the kunja and who, having met him, can no longer be asked to live as if I had not met him. The vow I took at my wedding was a real vow. I do not say it was nothing. I say it has been overtaken. The river that was a small stream when I crossed it as a girl is a different river now. It carries something it did not carry then.

Do not call this disobedience. Disobedience is the word of the woman who would obey if she could. I would obey if obedience and the truth were the same thing. They are not the same thing. The truth is the dark boy with the flute. The obedience is the husband I was given, who is a good man, who is not at fault, who is not the question. The question is not him. The question is whether the love that has come to me is going to be permitted to do its work.

It is not going to wait for permission. It has already not waited. The love that needs no permission is not a love that has refused permission as an act of pride. It is a love that has discovered that there is no court that has the authority to grant or deny it. The court is in itself. It calls and it answers. The poet Caṇḍīdāsa understands this, and it is because he understands it that I am willing to let him put my voice into a song. He will not turn it into a song of pride. He will turn it into a song of the simple, terrible truth.

Krishna sees her at the riverbank for the first time. She is older than him by some years and she is the daughter of a respected household. He sends Baṛāyī, the older woman who knows how to carry such messages, with words for her. The poem does not flinch at the awkwardness of this opening. He is forward. She is annoyed. She refuses him. Baṛāyī carries his second message and his third. Each time the answer is colder than the last.

Then the season turns. Rādhā walks to the river one morning and the boy is in her thoughts in a way he was not before. She has not changed her mind. She has been changed without consent by her own attention. The poem records the change without sentimentalizing it. She is irritated that this has happened to her. She had a household. She had a place in the village. She had a future that could be predicted. Now she has the boy who plays the flute by the riverbank and a Baṛāyī who keeps appearing in her doorway with another message.

The narrative does not move quickly. Whole sections are taken up with Baṛāyī's negotiations, with Krishna's elaborate complaints when he is denied, with Rādhā's sharp tongue when she answers. The Śrī Krishna Kīrtana is, in a way the later padāvalīs are not, a real story with a real tempo. It is closer to the dramatic poetry of the Sanskrit nāṭakas than to the lyric song-tradition. The personalities are full. Krishna in this poem can be petulant. Rādhā can be cruel. Baṛāyī can be tired. The divine and the all-too-human run together without apology.

By the closing sections the lovers have come together and have begun to know what the joining means. They do not know yet that he will leave Vraja. The poem does not tell us, here, what comes after. The Śrī Krishna Kīrtana ends in the middle of the story the listener already knows the rest of, because the listener belongs to the tradition that has been telling this story for centuries before this manuscript was set down on its palm-leaves.

The biographers describe what happened when these padas were sung in his presence. He would lose external awareness. Tears would not stop. The hair on his body would stand on end. He would fall, and his closest companions would catch him. Sometimes the singing would have to stop because he could not sustain the body any longer at the level of feeling the song produced.

The companions learned which padas would do this. Svarūpa Dāmodara and Rāmānanda Rāya, his two innermost associates in the Purī years, were skilled in selecting the right pada for the right hour. There were padas for the morning. There were padas for the deep middle of the night when he could not sleep. There were padas for the moods of separation that took him near the end of his life and would not lift.

Many of the padas they sang were Vidyāpati's. Many were Caṇḍīdāsa's. Some were by Jayadeva, the older Sanskrit poet of the Gīta Govinda. The three names are remembered together in the tradition because Caitanya's daily ear had been formed by them. The Goswāmīs in Vrindavan, when they assembled the great Gauḍīya padāvalī anthologies in the next generation, drew heavily from the earlier voices. The padas Caitanya had wept over became the padas the tradition memorized.

There is a question that arises here for the careful reader. The Vidyāpati attribution is unsettled in some cases; manuscripts assign the same pada to different names, and a category of vidyāpati-bhanitā songs may have been composed by later poets in his style and signed with his name. The Caṇḍīdāsa problem is even more complicated: at least two poets, possibly four, are involved. The tradition that received and treasured these songs was not always sharp on the question of authorship. What was important was the song, the bhāva it carried, and the way it lit the heart of the one who sang it. The textual scholar today must say honestly that any specific attribution is provisional. The devotee, then and now, sang the song without waiting for the textual scholar to resolve the question.