Literally, “By my guilt, [she wasn’t] stopped by me by fear” – i.e., “I didn’t even stop her, out of guilt and fear”. By a deft use of the tṛtīyā (instrumental) case, the poet makes a statement using mainly adjectival nouns, giving it both a dense, descriptive flair and a natural rhyme.
Context
To place today’s phrase in context, we’ll follow a somewhat circuitous route. The reader would surely have encountered a “map of connections” like the one below:
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Now imagine we drew a “map of inspirations” for the world of Indian arts. Each point would be a great artist, and lines going out of the point would mean causing inspiration while lines going in would mean receiving inspiration. Someone like Kalidasa would be the center of a dense network, but mostly within the realm of literature. While he is perhaps Sanskrit’s greatest poet, his influence is relatively little outside of literature. Someone like Bana would have a dense “incoming” network from every imaginable field of art – his alankaras alone are enough to index several facets of classical art forms of his time, but his active ‘outgoing’ influence is again quite within literature.
If we did indeed draw such a map, one poet-point would be resplendent above all others, having actively influenced, sometimes evenshapedmyriad art forms ranging from music to dance to painting to sculpture. A modern chronicler would unfailingly see in his work the first ‘viral hit’ of the subcontinent, unleashing the creativity of readers with scant regard to the constraints of time and space. This ever-shining beacon of Sanskrit literature is Jayadeva, and his medium was the Gita Govinda.
Jayadeva was a poet of the 12th century, hailing from today’s Orissa. His Gita Govinda is a work of Sanskrit love poetry and song, centered around its most famous components, 24 Ashtapadis (songs with 8 couplets). These Ashtapadis are about different moods in the love between Krishna and Radha – some are almost hymns, listing Krishna’s achievements in this and earlier births; some are glimpses into Krishna’s or Radha’s minds at times of separation, anger or reconciliation; some others are the words of messengers sent to each other, urging mercy and to swallow pride. There is a nod to the concept of ‘Ashta-nayika’, an idea from Bharata’s Natyashastra about 8 situations a heroine in love finds herself in. There is, naturally, a spiritual interpretation to all this, with Radha as the jivatma and Krishna as the paramatma, adding a wholly new dimension to Krishna sporting with several gopis.
These Ashtapadis are not particularly distinguished for theirliteraryqualities – the samāsas, sentence structure and figures of speech are all quite common, sometimes even ordinary. But a very alluring mixture of context, melody, simplicity, and really, a certainje ne sais quoihave made them Sanskrit literature’s greatest cross-platform blockbuster hit. From the easternmost corner of Manipur and Assam, where it spawned a tradition of dance and singing; to Bengal, where this was an essential element of Sri Chaitanya’s movement; down to Orissa, where even today virtually every art form from Odissi dance to music to temple sculpture revolves around it; to Andhra, where it is the soul of several Kuchipudi dance compositions; down to Tamil Nadu, where Carnatic music rejoices in newer and newer tunings of its lyrics, tens of Sanskrit treatises elaborate on how it can be performed in dance, Tanjore paintings celebrate its scenes, and temple traditions make Bhajans out of it; to Kerala, where the dance form Mohiniattam derived great inspiration, and an entire genre of music, Sopana Sangeetham, was born as these Ashtapadis were sung on the temple stairs; up to the coast of Karnataka, where it inspires Yakshagana dances to this day; up to Maharashtra and Gujarat, where it was a key nucleator of the Krishna-Bhakti traditions; to Rajasthan, the central territories and the Gangetic plain, all the way up to Kashmir where several hundred derivative works have appeared in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and local languages. To even comprehend the Gita Govinda’s reach would require some level of mastery of every facet of Indian art! What’s more, a large portion of this conquest happened within just a century after its composition. Political and geographical fragmentation seems to have been a trivial barrier for this cultural unity to envelop the whole of the subcontinent!
Today’s phrase is from the 7th Ashtapadi, often titled “Mamiyam Chalita” or “Hari Hari”. It reads almost like a diary entry of a very disturbed Krishna. Radha saw him playing with a whole group of gopis, and stormed away in anger. He was too afraid to stop her then, and now he’s worried what she’ll do. A pensive Krishna thinks to himself:
मामियं चलिता विलोक्य वृतं वधू-निचयेन । सापराधतया मयापि न वारिताऽतिभयेन ॥
mām iyaṃ calitā vilokya vṛtaṃ vadhū-nicayena | sāparādhatayā mayāpi na vāritā’tibhayena ||
“She saw me surrounded by gopis, and stormed away, oh dear!
AndI didn’t even stop her, riddled as I was with guilt and fear.”
For a change, Krishna’s the one agitatedly debating with himself what to do!
If this seems much simpler than phrases we’ve featured before, hold that thought. The real beauty of the Gita Govinda is in its music. The lyrics are written in such a way that a talented composer can fit a large number of tunes to them and fully express his creativity, letting the music speak even more than the words. The words split easily, there are no harsh half-consonants (in today’s phrase, there are none!), and internal rhyme is consistent. We wanted to give a glimpse of this and began collecting different renditions of a few Ashtapadis; this snowballed into an all-out effort, and we’ve made a blog with the ambitious aim of collecting all major renditions of all Ashtapadis here: http://gitagovinda.wordpress.com
To kick off, we invite the reader to check out Dr. M. Balamuralikrishna’s version of today’s Ashtapadi; compare then against Varagoor Narayanan’s Carnatic Bhajan version of the same song here:http://gitagovinda.wordpress.com/2012/11/22/ashtapadi7/
Now that we’ve got you started, #11 “Dheera Sameere”, is a great next step. Compare Pandit Raghunath Panigrahi’s immortal rendition with Ghantasala’s strongly Carnatic version, and P. Unnikrishnan’s very well melded Pop version:http://gitagovinda.wordpress.com/2012/11/22/ashtapadi11/
Three’s a good number :-) #19 “Priye Charusheele” is also an all-time favorite. Compare Dr. M. Balamuralikrishna’s version with Njerlath Harigovindan’s percussion-heavy Sopana Sangeetham version here:http://gitagovinda.wordpress.com/2012/11/22/ashtapadi19/
We’ve come this far, we can’t resist just one more. Vikrīte kariṇi kim aṃkuśe vivādaḥ?:-) Just to see how incredibly vibrant these songs remain, check out the fusion version of #8, Nindati Chandanam, by Haraprasad; compare with the more traditional versions above it here:http://gitagovinda.wordpress.com/2012/11/22/ashtapadi8/
The blog is still a work in progress, and we very much appreciate your feedback and suggestions. Please feel free either to write to us, or to comment on the blog. If you know of a rendition you think we should put up, we’d be very grateful if you could let us know.
Thought for today
कश्चिद्वृक्षस्तिष्ठत्यग्रे तस्मिंस्कश्चित्सर्पोऽप्यस्ति ।
नीरसतरुरिह निवसति निकटे तदुपरि विलसति कुटिलभुजङ्गः ॥
kaścid vṛkṣas-tiṣṭhatyagre tasmiṃs-kaścit-sarpo’pyasti |
nīrasa-taruriha nivasati nikaṭe tad upari vilasati kuṭila-bhujaṅgaḥ ||
There has long been an allegation that for all its allurements to the mind, Sanskrit is a very harsh language to the ear. Prakrit poets have even compared the sound of Sanskrit to the crackling of dry reeds being burnt in a blaze. The melody of Jayadeva’s work is a resounding retort to this suggestion. Today’s thought has a nice, related (apocryphal) story. The great prose poet Banabhatta was on his deathbed, and his magnum opus Kadambari was still unfinished. His two sons came forward to complete the work, but how was Bana to know which one would do the most justice to his legacy? He called them both to his bedside, pointed them to the yard outside and asked them to describe what they saw.
The elder one composed the first half of this verse in the Panjarika metre (2x8 matras in each of the 4 lines), and the younger one the second half. They both roughly mean the same: “There’s a tree in front, and on it a snake”. The first one sounds harsh, uses up all its matras quickly with low-value words like kascit, api and asti, and has no microtones in meaning: it literally means “Some tree stands in front, in it is some snake”. The second one, in contrast, has not a single half-consonant, and actually says more in the same space: “Adrytreelives**close by, and on itsportsawilysnake”. All the italics are in the meaning of the second line, and not in the first. The tree is dry, yet lives; The ‘vilasati’ and ‘bhujanga’ (’that which moves on its shoulders’, a snake) give a moving picture.Quite needless to say, the younger one, Bhushana Bhatta, was awarded the task of completing the Kadambari. Commentators are unanimous that while no one can expect the once-in-a-kalpagenius of Bana to be matched, Bhushana Bhatta did as fine a job as possible, and gave a satisfactory conclusion to Sanskrit’s greatest prose work.
