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3. The Vernacular Cosmopolitan: Jayadeva’s Gītagovinda
- University of California Press
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72 t h r ee The Vernacular Cosmopolitan jayadeva’s gītagovinda Jayadeva’s work is a masterpiece and it surpasses in its completeness of effect any other Indian poem. It has all the perfection of the miniature word-pictures which are so common in Sanskrit poetry, with the beauty which arises as Aristotle asserts from magnitude and arrangement. a. b. keith Jayadeva, an author trained in music as well as the Brahmin’s craft . . . who wandered far to gain real insight into the minds of his people. His life and art were one; he had romantically wooed and wedded a beautiful wife; they continued to travel, he singing verses of his own while she danced. This was not on the same level as the ordinary country jongleur, for in their performance they exemplified the sublime love of Rādhā and Kr .s .n . a, a theme Jayadeva developed in his Gītagovinda for Laks .man . asena’s court. But in his country songs he used a more popular idiom . . . . A festival is still annually celebrated at Jayadeva’s birthplace Kenduli, not in memory of his Gītagovinda but because he introduced a new and joyouslifewithfaithinapersonalgodwhoisclosetorichandpoor. d. d. kosambi A major work will either establish the genre or abolish it; and the perfect work will do both. walter benjamin jayadeva’s gītagovinda, govinda [i.e., kr . s .n . a] in song, is an exceptional work of Sanskrit literature, in the dual sense of being uniquely celebrated and simply unique. The poem is a new genre unto itself, and for its time, almost unique in being so; it emerges in the medieval period twofold sui generis.1 The emergence of the campū (mixed verse and prose) genre in the medieval south offers only a dim parallel, for its features can be found incho9780520957794_PRINT .indd 72 9780520957794_PRINT.indd 72 01/02/14 4:28 PM 01/02/14 4:28 PM The Vernacular Cosmopolitan • 73 ate in ancient inscriptions.2 In all but the earliest periods of Sanskrit literature , new genres rarely ever emerged with such suddenness. The marvel that was Jayadeva’s poem did not go unquestioned; the remarks of the last great classicist of the tradition, Jagannātha Pan . d . itarāja, writing in the late seventeenth century, offer testimony: Jayadeva and others, in the Gītagovinda and other works, have utterly broken with a condition of propriety accepted by all connoisseurs, just as if they were wild rutting elephants. Thus it is inappropriate for someone of the present, following their example, to compose descriptions in this manner . . . . The explicit depiction, including all its attendant external signs, of the erotic love of gods being consummated, just as if it were that of humans, is improper.3 It is hard to decide whether Jagannātha objects more to the poem’s form or to its content. On the one hand, the problem seems to be what the poem is about: the erotic love of gods.4 On the other hand, the critic targets a mode of description: “explicit depiction, including all . . . attendant external signs” (sphūt .īkr . tasakalānubhāvavarn . anam). The poem’s impropriety is comprehensive in Jagannātha’s mind, implicating the structure as well as the spirit of the work. Form and content reflect on and implicate each other. The present chapter takes its cue from the above: the last great Sanskrit poet’s implicit concept of the Gītagovinda as internally reflecting on itself. In what follows I try to understand the poem’s inseparable form and content in terms of each other, and conduct a deep internal comparison within the work itself. My central question is how form and content inform and reflect on each other. In the metrically and aesthetically peculiar songs of the Gītagovinda, we can read an appropriation of the vernacular literary logic that was beginning to dawn in South Asia at the beginning of the second millennium. The songs are encircled, though, by verses of the purest classical grandeur. We can identify here, on the level of form, a consolidation of two distinct literary registers. On the level of content, we can read the juxtaposing of a pastoral/folk erotic scenario (the adolescent Kr . s .n . a tale) with the trappings of a classical courtly (urbane/cosmopolitan) eroticism, parallel to what we find in the work of Jayadeva’s greatest contemporary, Govardhana.5 The cosmopolitan and the vernacular strategically coincide in Jayadeva’s poem, and the Gītagovinda thus represents...