Gita Govinda

A Sanskrit poem written to be sung. Jayadeva composed the Gita Govinda in eastern India in the late twelfth century, and it did something no devotional work had done before: it made the love of Radha and Krishna into a sustained lyric cycle with a plot, a quarrel and a reconciliation.

What it is

Twelve sargas, cantos, built around twenty-four ashtapadis, songs of eight couplets each, with connective verses between them. Each ashtapadi carries a named raga and tala, which is unusual and revealing: the text is not a poem that was later set to music but a composition that specifies its own performance.

The subject is the separation and union of Radha and Krishna, told with an erotic directness that the tradition has read allegorically ever since, as the longing of the soul for God, and which continues to be read both ways.

The Dashavatara hymn

The first ashtapadi, at the very opening, is a salutation to the ten descents of Vishnu, one couplet each, closing every time on the same refrain. It is not a digression. Placing the ten at the threshold establishes that the Krishna who is about to appear as a lover in a grove is the same power that took the fish, the tortoise and the boar.

That hymn is the single most important reason the ten avatars are ordered the way they are in popular memory. Puranic lists vary in membership and sequence; Jayadeva’s does not, because it is sung. If any one text fixed the dashavatara as most people know it, this is it.

Its afterlife

The poem went straight into liturgy. It has been sung in the Jagannatha temple at Puri for centuries, and the Odissi tradition, along with several other classical dance forms, takes the ashtapadis as core repertoire. Very few works of Sanskrit literature have remained continuously performed for eight hundred years; this is one.

The Sanskrit is long out of copyright. Modern English translations exist and are not.

What is not in it

Theology, in any systematic sense. There is no doctrine of avatar here, no argument about the nature of descent, no defence of Radha’s status. Jayadeva assumes all of it. The theological apparatus that later Vaishnava schools, particularly the Bengali tradition, built around Radha and around bhakti-rasa came afterwards, and it was built partly to account for a poem that had already conquered the field without explaining itself.