The Author’s Submission

By the grace of the Lord and the blessings of saints and great souls, this book has been completed, and I naturally feel joyful. The work contains no experience of my own: it contains the experience of saints and great souls, which I have arranged as coherently as I could and placed before the reader. In the words of Saint Tukaram I may say, “My speech consists of utterances left as sacred remnants by the saints. How could an ignorant person such as I understand their secret?”

Whatever poetry exists concerning sweet worship in the literature of Rama devotion has, until now, remained largely neglected. There may be several reasons, but the principal one in my view is that the current of Rama devotional literature has been governed by the doctrine of sacred restraint. It has therefore commonly been assumed that little or no room exists within it for the development of amorous worship.

Scholars have treated the literature of this rasika worship with great neglect. Much confusion has also spread because of what Acharya Shukla wrote about it in his history. Shukla Ji was himself wholly committed to the doctrine of sacred restraint. It therefore appears that he did not have an opportunity to examine the literature relating to rasika worship in Rama devotion. He even regarded certain amorous songs in the Uttara Kanda of Goswami Tulsidas’s Gītāvalī as imitations of Surdas’s amorous compositions. In this way he imposed an individual viewpoint upon a highly developed literature extending across nearly four hundred years. It does not become a student of literature simply to declare this entire body of work transgressive and set it aside.

It seems improper to bind Lord Rama’s pure divine character and divine līlās within a fixed limit. Had Shukla Ji been able to see all this literature, he would certainly have had to revise the views he expressed concerning it.

From Swami Madhuracharya through Sri Rupakala Ji, numerous saints, great souls, and experienced practitioners expressed their experience of rasika worship in a magnificent and beautiful style. Thousands of works preserve this literature of worship, and whoever studies it will never find the effort unrewarding. To study literature one must necessarily become free of personal assumptions and private attachment and aversion. For writing literary history, neutrality and freedom from bias—