Udaya

Gita Govinda

गीतगोविन्दम्

Also Ashtapadi, The Song of Govinda.

Poetry Sanskrit Twelfth century

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What it is#

Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda is a cycle of songs on the love of Radha and Krishna, their separation and their reunion, and it is the text that put Radha at the centre of Krishna devotion where the Bhagavata had barely named her. It is erotic without apology and devotional without qualification, and the tradition has never managed to separate the two, which is the point. It is sung at the Jagannath temple at Puri every night, and it is the literary source of Odissi and of a great deal of Indian painting.

Its shape#

Twelve sargas, cantos, containing twenty four songs of eight couplets each, which is why the songs are called ashtapadis, the eight footed. Each song is set to a named raga and tala, making it one of the earliest Indian texts with its music prescribed. Linking verses in various metres carry the narrative between songs. It is short, a few hundred verses, and is usually read or sung whole.

What it argues about#

These are not settled texts

The argument is about what it is for. Read plainly it is a love poem with explicit physical description. The devotional traditions read Radha as the individual soul and Krishna as God and the separation as the condition of the devotee, and have produced commentaries doing so since within a century of its composition. Both readings are held by the same people at the same time, which outsiders have found hard to credit and which the tradition does not experience as a contradiction. At Puri the question is settled administratively rather than theologically: the text is temple liturgy, sung before the deity nightly, and no other poem has that standing.

Episodes worth knowing#

The line Jayadeva could not write

Composing the song in which Krishna asks Radha to place her foot on his head in apology, Jayadeva is said to have stopped, unable to write a god abasing himself that far, and went to bathe. The tradition says Krishna came in his form, wrote the line, ate the meal and left, and that when the poet returned and found the line already on the palm leaf he understood. The verse stands. Whatever the story is worth, it records the tradition’s own awareness that the poem goes further than it should.

Sung at Puri every night

The Gita Govinda is part of the prescribed nightly ritual at the Jagannath temple, sung by the devadasis historically and now by singers appointed for it, before the deity is put to bed. An inscription of the fifteenth century orders that no song other than the Gita Govinda be performed there. A love poem written by a court poet became, within three centuries, the one text permitted in the temple at the hour of sleep, and it remains so.

Whose telling#

There is no single text

Jayadeva
A poet at the court of Lakshmana Sena of Bengal in the twelfth century; Bengal and Odisha both claim his birthplace and the argument is not settled.
Puri temple liturgy
Sung nightly before Jagannath, with a fifteenth century inscription restricting the temple’s music to it.
Ashtapadi in the south
Sung in Carnatic concerts and in Kerala’s Sopana tradition, and used in Bharatanatyam and Mohiniyattam abhinaya.
Painted versions
Illustrated in Pahari, Rajput, Orissa pattachitra and Mewar painting; the Basohli and Kangra sets are among the great achievements of Indian painting.

Where the regions differ#

  • Tamil
  • Kerala
  • Telugu
  • Kannada
  • North
  • Maharashtra
  • Bengal
  • Punjab
  • Assam
  • Sri Lanka
  • Nepal
  • Gujarat
  • Odisha
  • Mithila
  • Kashmir
  • Tulu Nadu
  • manipur
  • rajasthan
  • konkani
  • sindhi
  • jharkhand
  • himalayan
  • kodava
Where it is kept: 4 of the 23 traditions this app follows. The filled one is where it is from.
Odisha
Sung nightly at Puri by temple appointment, the literary source of Odissi, and painted in pattachitra; Odisha claims Jayadeva as its own.
Bengal
Claimed as a Bengali poet, central to the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition, and sung in kirtan.
Kerala
The ashtapadis are sung in Sopana style at the temples and are part of the Mohiniyattam repertoire.
Tamil Nadu
Sung in Carnatic concerts as a standard part of the lighter repertoire and danced in Bharatanatyam abhinaya.

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