Sursagar

(“Ocean of Sur”) Corpus of poetry in the
Braj Bhasha language ascribed to the
northern Indian poet-saint Surdas.
Traditional versions of the Sursagar are
divided into twelve parts, to mirror the
structure of the Bhagavata Purana,
which is the most important Sanskrit
source for the mythology of the god
Krishna. Surdas was a Krishna devotee
(bhakta), and this arrangement is a way
to confer the luster of an authoritative
Sanskrit text on vernacular religious
poetry. Just as the Bhagavata Purana
lavishly describes Krishna’s youthful
exploits, the Sursagar is most commonly
associated with poems painting
intimate and affectionate pictures
of Krishna’s childhood.
Although the poetry published in
editions of the Sursagar is ascribed to
Surdas, most of it is certainly pseudonymous. The oldest manuscripts of
Surdas’s poetry have at most a few hundred poems, and the size of this corpus
roughly doubles every century, reaching
the five thousand poems in the present
Sursagar. The general tone of the earliest
poems also shows a marked thematic
difference. Although they include
Krishna’s childhood, a far greater percentage express the poet’s pangs of separation (viraha) from Krishna or complaint (vinaya) about his spiritual troubles. Even the earliest manuscripts show
no common body of poems, and it
seems likely that from the very beginning the “Surdas” poetic tradition was
drawn from the songs of wandering
singers, a characterization that fits well
with the image of the poet himself. For
673
Sursagar
further information see John Stratton
Hawley, Krishna: The Butter Thief, 1983,
and Surdas: Poet, Singer, Saint 1984; see
also John Stratton Hawley and Mark
Juergensmeyer (trans.), Songs of the
Saints of India, 1988.