Love Songs of Vidyapati

Love is the mental condition which sanctions the search for, an enduring relationship, most frequently on the physical plane, between a man and a woman. It has always been a favourite theme with the poets in all ages, and is the most dominant feeling in the lyrics of Vidyapati.

Vidyapati (1375-1448) lived at the court of Raja Shiv Singh of Mithila, composed eleven books in Sanskrit, two in Apabhramsha and chose Maithili, the language of everyday life, for his love lyrics. These lyrics are his masterpiece and even if he had written nothing else he would have claimed a niche in the temple of poetic genius. These lyrics are marked with such intensity of feeling and vibrant heart appeal that Chaitanya Mahaprabhu would fall into a trance singing them. He included them in his ‘kirtan’ and gave them wide currency throughout the Northern India.

A lyric is a short poem in which a single emotion or idea is expressed in rhythmic melody. It has no connection with the preceding or the following verses and is capable of arousing poetic experience by itself. The most splendid specimen of lyrical poetry in Sanskrit is Jayadeva’s “Geeta Govinda”. He has sung of love and romance and amorous sports of Radha and Krishna in a language marked by spontaneous delicacy and rhythmic felicities

The Theme of Vidyapati’s Lyrics

Vidyapati has sung of the love of Radha and Krishna in more than five hundred lyrics. His Radha and Krishna are legendary figures modelled mainly after Jayadeva, but he drew freely, on other popular amatory works of his time. His Krishna is not the politician of the Mahabharat, nor is he an object of worship belonging to a school of ‘Bhakti’. He is a man of the world, a pleasure-seeker and a luxury-lover. He is a man by nature and dallying with young minds, among whom Radha is the chief, is his sole pastime. He plans and arranges meetings with her on the banks of the Jamuna, at her own house or in the woods and pleasure gardens. He strokes while she is fast asleep and stealthily watches her bathing in the pond, her wet sari sticking to her body.

It was an auspicious day, I watched the maid bathing in the pond.

Water dripping from her tresses, like pearls from a dark cloud.

She unties her undergarment, ‘I am fulfilled’, cries out Vidyapati.

But Krishna is not always wanton, nor are his actions gross and indecent. Sometimes he behaves like a true and sincere lover: plays softly on his flute under a ‘Kadamba’ tree, waiting anxiously for Radha to come. He is overwhelmed by her beauty and is willing to follow her wherever she goes.

Krishna is always seen making merry with Radha who is beauty and youth personified. Vidyapati has excelled in the description of a woman’s form and figure. He has exhausted all his skill and craftsmanship in painting most bewitching pictures of Radha’s enchanting beauty.

Vidyapati’s Radha is an adolescent dairy maid on the threshold of youth of which she is slowly growing conscious. Although adorned with all the traditional attributes, the poet’s genius has endowed her with a personality of her own. She possesses comely grace, is tall and slender but her shapely breasts are hard and round. She slyly glances over them and covers them under her sari with a coy smile.

Her eyes are large and black and she evinces great interest in prurience. She is learning to be coquettish and her charm and fascination grow with her youth. She meets Krishna, winks at him and invites him to love. Vidyapati has painted innumerable pictures of these meetings each more exciting than the other and has lavishly described their fun and frolic and playful activities. He has depicted Radha on a physical plane, who excites lust rather than reverence and flirts with handsome Krishna. She is an object of sensual gratification and represents the feudal taste.

The Two Aspects of Love

1. Love in Union: Vidyapati has described both the aspects of love: love in union and love in separation. Radha is blossoming into youth and meets Krishna on the way. They gaze at each other and still they gaze and still the wonder grows. Cupid shoots his arrows thievishly and they fall in love at first sight. She lets her sari slip from over her breasts, winks smilingly at him and encourages him to love. She can’t endure a moment’s separation from him. When she learns that he is about to leave for Mathura her heart brims with fear and anxiety and she coaxes her maid to ask him to postpone his departure. But when the maid fails to prevail on Krishna to do so, she flings away all bonds of modesty and etiquette and boldly gives vent to her feelings. So intense is her love for him.

Krishna leaves the place while she is fast asleep at night and when she wakes up to learn of this her heart breaks. The poet has beautifully compared her to a female partridge whose mate has flown away and who cries painfully in his absence. The parrot, the cows and all her maids and playmates are moved with sympathy for her. A palpable silence falls about her and the banks of Jamuna where she used to meet Krishna and dallywith him are enveloped in loneliness. The poet has faithfully recorded her most transient feelings and moods and gestures.

2. Love in Separation: Separation tests the endurance of love. The physical distance between the lovers burns the dross and taint of lust and true love purified of all its carnal concomitants shines forth. The heart of the lovers is a scene of expectancy and despair and Vidyapati has delineated these feelings in a masterly manner.

While presenting pictures of love in union, the poet has a tendency to display his learning and becomes pedantic. The descriptions often cross the limit of decency and verge on obecenity. But in his pictures of separation Radha emerges as a true paragon of love and faith and her intense suffering melts the poet’s heart and carries off the kindred reader.

Radha feels a strong repulsion for making herself up, the idea of it nauseates her in the absence of Krishna. “Whom should I adorn myself for?” asks she peevishly. She wipes the vermillion mark off her forehead, and casts her pearl necklace into the Jamuna. Sandalwood paste and soft moonlight scorch and burn her like hot summer winds and aggravate her pain and agony. The cool fragrant breeze of Sawan stings bites her and enkindle her passions. She fondly hopes to meet Krishna in a dream but the Almighty is so cruel-hearted that she fails to get to sleep. And when, perchance, she drops off for a moment and sees Krishna in her dream she wakes up disturbed and writhes with pain. She spends the night restlessly tossing about on her bed.

A crow’s cawing gives her great solace and comfort for according to popular belief it lignifies the return of her lover. She promises the crow a bowl of milk-rice and assures it to gild its beak.

Sometimes the descriptions are a little hyperbolic. Radha has been reduced to skin and bone and her maids fear to fan her with a lotus leaf lest she should be blown away with the puff of breeze. This is the height of poetic fancy. When her maids prompt her to forget such a callous lover who has renounced her and gone away, she regrets her inability to do so, for her very existence is bound up with his memory. The moment she drives him off her thoughts she would cease to exist. She is reluctant to die as she has no one in mind to whom she can bequeath Krishna.

Vidyapati has described the ten stages of love in separation set by poetic convention, yethe is not mechanical. He has made them striking by the introduction of new elements and choice of diction and wealth of fresh phrases. A judicious use of poetic figures adds to their intensity and poignancy. Radha is haunted by the memory of Krishna. She wistfully remembers the days spent in his company. She wishes she had the wings of a dove and could fly and meet him. She fondly asks,

When shall I get rid of this endless sorrow?
O,when shall I re-enjoy the moonlight
and play with the lotus like a bee?

She recalls his qualities and recounts them to her maids. Her anxiety grows every moment. She longs to meet him. “When will he be and stroke my breast and kiss and caress me and fulfil my desires?” asks she. Her condition deteriorates, she has fainting fits and even the cool and fragrant breeze fails to revive her. Nothing less than the touch of Krishna’s hand can save her now. Her suffering reaches its climax when she becomes delirious and forgetting her identity imagines herself to be Krishna and invokes the name of Radha. Then a feeling of tedious numbness overtakes her. Her eyes are bedimmed and she wails listlessly:
Madhava, no longer can I live without you,
You have gone to Madhupur.
Oh! how shall I cast this mortal bond and fly unto you.....?

Radha’s love is not unreciprocated; Krishna is equally afflicted with separation from her. In these yearnings of Radha and Krishna to meet each other the devotees have seen the individual soul’s yearning to meet the supreme soul.

Vidyapati has also given a marvellous description of the cycle of seasons and shown how the changing scenes of nature torment Radha and add to her misery. This description, though marked by ornate extravagances and occasional vulgarities has been so masterly and fascinating that it has set a tradition in Hindi poetry and became an inalienable part of the description of love in separation. Jayasi and Surdas who later elevated it to perfection are indebted to Vidyapati for their inspiration.

Vidyapati writes what he feels and he feels with his heroine all the pangs of love in separation. His feelings are intense and he has not missed even the minutest thought that may cross the mind of the love-lorn heroine. His lyrics are replete with a spirit of romanticism and are a wonderful product of conscious art. Elements of genuine folk songs survive in the refrains, repetitions and interjections contained in these lyrics. He is at once strong and restrained in the expression of elemental passions. He is unexcelled in dainty sweetness, grace and movement. He weaves variations of metaphor and music round a single statement and repeats sonorities to arouse incantatory rhythm. He rounds off every single line with finished care without ever sacrificing the organic unity of the entire poem. He favoured classical conventions but never allowed his scholalship to chill his creative imagination which is always ardent and marked byluxurious fancy and joyous abandon. His lyrics have all the freshness and charm of youth, they are better and more directly sensual and exhibit the lighter and more fanciful side of his genius. The form, the idea, the development from start to finish are bee beautifully fashioned and correlated. They present a curious and piquant combination of an ardent romantic imagination and an outlook essentially worldly and matter of fact. In technique he is admirable and while displaying, in no small measure, of the charm and grace of the Sanskrit lyrists, he infuses them with innovations of his own.

His innovations are not confined to poetry alone, but in the matter of language also his courage is noteworthy. Flouting the traditions of his age he chose Maithili, the dialect of the people as a vehicle of his lyrical effusions. In this sense he was a true revolutionary poet and had an unswerving confidence in the power and capacity of his language and diction to charm the popular ear. He elevated Maithili from a local dialect to the language of poetry and rightfully became its first poet and singer.