The interrelation of bhakti and rīti

The prevalent Hindi historiographies define early modern Hindi literature (fourteenth to mid-nineteenth century) by categorizing the poetry in two thematic timeframes as bhaktikāl (period of devotion, 1318–1643) and rītikāl (period of mannerism, 1643–1843). While the project of writing histories of Hindi literature started in the nineteenth century (noteworthy are De Tassy Reference De Tassy1870–71; Sengar 1967 [Reference Sengar and Gupta1878]; Grierson Reference Grierson1889), however, the tendency of designating different eras under certain themes emerged and was consolidated in the twentieth century (three principal accounts are: Miśra et al. Reference Miśra1972 [1913]; Śukla Reference Śukla1988 [1929 and 1940]; and Tripāṭhī et al. Reference Tripāṭhī1973). In these histories – of which Śukla's is the most popular and influential – poetry pertaining to bhakti (that is devotional or religious literature) is said to have flourished earlier than the rīti- period, when “mannerist”, “secular”, or “courtly” poetry was written in Brajbhāṣā – the language of the Braj region adopted not only by Kṛṣṇa devotional poets but which was also prominent in the court circles of early modern north India. The bhakti-rīti binary in these historiographies goes far beyond a simple temporal sequence. They are construed as opposites in theme, style, social imagination, and patronage. Bhakti poetry was considered spiritual and spontaneous: it spoke of personal devotion to god and, being expressed through the vernacular languages, it made religious experience more inclusive and participatory for people of all social strata. However, rīti poetry (rīti literally means custom or tradition, but more specifically the tradition of poetic ideals and compositions) was described as lacking originality (mauliktā) since it took much of its inspiration for composition from Sanskrit poetics (kāvya). Rīti poetry, for example the works of Keśavdās discussed in detail in this essay, was also considered to be ornate, eroticized, and hyperbolic in praising the courtly elites who patronized and appreciated such literature. Thus, rīti poetry finally came to designate a kind of literary culture that was representative of the decadence of Hindu princely states under the Muslim Mughal rulers of north India.

Scholars have rightly questioned the rigidity of this timeframe and the assumptions of nationalist historians in evaluating the literature of this era on the grounds that such a schematic classification hampers our understanding of the Hindi past. Many poets do not fit into either of the “tropes” about bhakti versus rīti under which early modern Hindi poetry was largely understood. Several rīti poets flourished during the so-called bhakti period, and there are other poets who can be described as having both bhakti and rīti sentiments in their poetry (Busch Reference Busch and Horstmann2006: 42–5). Similarly, many devotional poets worked during the so-called rīti era when devotional communities themselves grew immensely. Scholars have therefore largely come to understand bhakti and rīti as modes of poetic expression rather than as fixed identities for poets to inhabit. For example, Rupert Snell (Reference Snell1994: 153–70) has shown that Bihārīlāl's (born early 1600s) deeply felt devotion to Kṛṣṇa is inseparable from his highly cultivated poetic technique. In the same way, the poetry of Ānandghan (d. 1757), who flourished in the rīti period, was enjoyed in both courtly and religious centres. It appears that Ānandghan spent the early part of his career – although the sources are rather less reliable for these early years – in courtly circles, while later in life he lived as a devotee in Vrindavan (or Braj), the primary centre of Kṛṣṇa pilgrimage. Ānandghan masterfully weaves mundane and divine love in his poetry. The reception of Ānandghan's multifaceted poetry presents an interesting case of contested identities of a poet: over time the compilers of Ānandghan's poetry considered him either a Vaiṣṇava (devotee of the god Viṣṇu and his incarnations), or a lover-poet encompassing all aspects of human love in his ornate rīti-style quatrains (Bangha Reference Bangha2001; Reference Bangha2007). A case similar to that of Ānandghan can also be seen in Heidi Pauwels’ study of king Sāvant Siṃh of Kishangarh (1699–1764), who wrote under the pen name of Nāgarīdās. His oeuvre presents an excellent example of the “loving embrace” of scholastic (i.e. rīti style) works, devotional motifs like Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa sporting in Braj, as well as Sāvant Siṃh's yearning to settle in Vrindavan. Although Sāvant Siṃh abandons his courtly affairs and settles in Vrindavan in the later period of his life, we cannot describe an early courtly and later devotional phase in his poetic life as we can for Ānandghan. These themes were intertwined in his poetry throughout his literary career, and the devotional references to Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa served as a way for him to construct his personal life (Pauwels Reference Pauwels2005).

Thus, recent scholarship has questioned the rigid binaries presented by earlier historians in their portrayal of the Hindi literary past, and in doing so has opened new ways of studying early modern Hindi poetry. The majority of the poets discussed by these scholars, however, either lived in courts or were kings themselves. Their inclinations towards the rīti or “courtly” mode of expression might therefore be seen as a function of their social identities. To complement these studies, this paper examines a poet of a very different social identity: a poet-saint or a sant from the nirguṇ tradition of bhakti. Sundardās (1596–1689) – a prominent disciple of Dādū Dayāl (1544–1603) – is considered to be an expert in poetic art of the saint tradition (the sant paramparā), and illustrates how a devotional poet could engage with topics that are traditionally considered to be favourites of the poets of rīti style.

Sundardās: Life and works

Sundardās became a disciple of the poet-saint Dādū Dayāl at an early age. Dādū Dayāl's sect is called the Dādūpanth (the path of Dādū) and its main abode is in Rajasthan. The Dādūpanthī Rāghavdās (1965), in his Bhaktamāl (garland of devotees, 1660: vv. 419–22), writes that Sundardās was from the merchant caste, a Sāhūkār (Vaiśya) of “būsar” lineage. Similarly, Sundardās calls himself būsar in his poetry. The būsar lineage is a branch of the present day Khaṇḍelvāl Vaiṣṇava community and connects itself to its ancestral village “Khaṇḍelā” located in the Shekhawati region of north-eastern Rajasthan. Rāghavdās writes that at the age of 11, Sundardās abandoned his house and left for Banāras (Varanasi or Kashi), where he studied vedānta and the purāṇas. In Banāras, Sundardās received training not only in the prominent philosophical knowledge systems, but possibly learned poetic skills as well. From Banāras, Sundardās returned to Rajasthan and settled in Fatehpur-Shekhawati (north-eastern Rajasthan), which was ruled by the Kāyamḳhānī kings (a small gentry under the Mughals) during his time. It was in Fatehpur that Sundardās probably wrote most of his works.

Sundardās's entire corpus expands up to almost 1,000 published pages. His oeuvre was critically edited by the master textual critic and scholar of bhakti traditions, Purohit Harinārāyaṇ Śarmā, in 1937. Much of our knowledge of Sundardās's life and works is based on the erudite introduction that the editor wrote for this edition, which is the culmination of his lifelong research on Sundardās. This paper relies on the Śarmā edition for Sundardās's works. Rameścandra Miśra published an edition of Sundardās's works in 1992, and editions prepared by the modern-day followers of Dādū Dayāl have made Sundardās's works more widely accessible. Monika Horstmann (Reference Horstmann1983) has translated a chapter on bhakti from Sundardās's scholarly poem Gyān Samudra (the ocean of knowledge) and a shorter poem Gurukṛpā-aṣṭaka (eight verses (or verse-sets) of gurus' blessings). Horstmann has also written a chapter that helpfully situates Sundardās in the larger sant tradition and examines the Sufi influences that are intertwined in his two short poetic compositions (Horstmann Reference Horstmann, Dalmia and Faruqui2014).Footnote ¹ In general, however, Sundardās has not received a great deal of scholarly attention in English-language scholarship.

The lifespan of Sundardās – most of the seventeenth century – bridges the bhaktikāl and rītikāl as traditionally conceived, and the same can be said for his oeuvre. In his fundamental orientation, Sundardās was a sant. Throughout his corpus he honours his guru Dādūdayāl and proudly situates himself in the tradition of sants like Nāmdev (fl. thirteenth–fourteenth century) and Kabīr (fl. fifteenth century). He also composes a good portion of his poetry in sākhī (couplets) and pad (lyrical songs), which are the representative genres of sant poetry. Along with these staple sant genres, Sundardās wrote a text entirely in quatrains, i.e. in Savaiyā and Kavitt metres. This text is named as the Savaiyā, often called Savaiyā Granth (hence SG in quotations) or Sundarvilās (the joy of Sundar) by modern editors. Both of these metrical forms (savaiyā and kavitt) are much more a characteristic of rīti poetry. The Savaiyā Granth has become the basis for Sundardās's fame in modern north India, where it has appeared widely in print since the late nineteenth century. While the savaiyā and kavitt metres were also employed by other devotional poets such as Tulsīdās and Raskhān as well as by Dādūdayāl's disciple and Sundardās's close ally Rajab (fl. sixteenth century), Sundardās's virtuosic use of this metre put him in conversation with his contemporary courtly or rīti poetic circles, where writing poetry in multiple forms of savaiyā metres was highly prized. Sundardās's deep interest in the metrical tradition and using multiple metrical forms to craft devotional and philosophical poetry for the sant audience is also seen in his scholarly poem, the Gyān Samudra (GS in quotations), written in 1653. The Gyān Samudra also shares many features with the so-called rītigranths (handbook of poets or poetic theories) which is a defining genre of rīti poetry. Some of the metrical forms Sundardās uses in the Gyān Samudra were rarely seen in earlier Hindi bhakti poetry.

I will argue, primarily on the basis of Sundardās's Savaiyā Granth and Gyān Samudra (with relevant examples from his collection of couplets: sākhīs), that, despite the many features his poetry shares with the rīti poetic tradition, he contrasts starkly with the rīti poets in his motives for composing poetry. Sundardās registers his criticism with tropes like śṛṅgāriktā (the erotic sentiment) and nāyikā bheda (types of heroines in poetry), nakh-śikh (head-to-toe descriptions) which were prominent in the rīti tradition. These tropes of rīti poetry with which Sundardās and other sants – who engaged with the tradition of poetics considerably – express their disagreements would later be enshrined as the representative tropes of the diverse rīti poetic tradition, and when the pioneers of nationalist historiography wrote about them, they connected these tropes with poets living in the age of courtly decadence. Although the categories of bhakti and rīti were not always conceived in the schematic and oppositional way that nationalist historians of literature conceived of them, it is not the case, either, that the categories themselves were fashioned in the modern period. This paper aims to show that the distinction was both known to Sundardās and his contemporaries, and also structured the way they thought about the landscape of literature in their own time.

A sant's response to rīti poetry

Monika Horstmann (Reference Horstmann, Dalmia and Faruqui2014: 233–63) writes that the sants were extremely proud of having shown the “middle way” (madhi mārga) between Hinduism and Islam. It should be argued, then, that Sundardās was far more invested in establishing another sort of middle way. While Horstmann rightly indicates that Sundardās carved a niche for himself with respect to saguṇ Vaishnava orthodoxy, this was not his only concern as a poet. Sundardās was also interested in participating in the evolving scholarly discourse on metre and structural poetic devices that is now commonly referred to as rīti, and he sought to appropriate the conventions, themes, and techniques of this emerging classical poetry for the sant-bāṇī tradition. This was his most prominent “middle way”.

Sundardās was finely attuned to the discourse on aesthetics that is often called rīti in modern scholarship, but he used it for purposes radically different from those that modern characterizations of rīti would lead us to expect. He borrowed from earlier traditions of rīti poetry and Sanskrit poetics (kāvya) in order to cater to the needs of a new and decidedly non-courtly audience: the sants, whose modes of literary production (bāṇī or sant-bāṇī: sayings of the sants) are often understood to contrast with those we call rīti kāvya. Although it is erroneous to designate the sant-bāṇī that predated Sundardās as not having literary qualities, like the way early literary historians such as Rāmcandra Śukla characterized sant poetry, it is certainly true that Sundardās transformed it by engaging with the classical and courtly poetic discourses of his time.

Sundardās treats the traditional topics of poetics, such as prosody, with remarkable humour while presenting them to a non-scholarly audience. He avails himself of kāvya discourses in the project of creating a bāṇī that is not just religiously sensitive but aesthetically well-formed. He writes in the following verse that poetry written in uneven metres hobbles along like a lame man (khuṛāvata nara) and agitates poets and connoisseurs:

The particular anthropomorphic metaphors used here are found in Sanskrit and Apabhramśa sourcesFootnote ⁴ and in a text that is closer to Sundardās in terms of time and language. It is striking how closely the imagery and terminology that Sundardās employs in this verse evoke a similar discussion of “flawed poetry” (sadoṣa kavitta) that appears in the Kavipriyā (beloved of poets, 1601) of the major rīti poet Keśavdās:Footnote ⁵

As we see, then, Sundardās agrees with Keśavdās on metre: poetry that does not follow metrical rules falters like a lame man and garners no respect among connoisseurs. Yet the two poets diverge fundamentally when it comes to their opinion about the proper motives that ought to generate poetry, thereby giving it its jīv or soul. Keśavdās, harkening back to the Sanskrit kāvya tradition, says that the life of poetry is meaning (artha),Footnote ⁸ but for Sundardās its life comes from extolling Hari's fame (harijas).Footnote ⁹ By designating harijas as the life force of a poem, Sundardās was constructing a way for devotional poetry to be accommodated within the conceptual world of kāvya. As long as the poetry fulfils this objective of harijas, he says, the poetry in question will live on. Likening poetry to a temple and harijas to the image of the deity within it, Sundardās says:

In Sanskrit kāvya, the question of the jīva or ātman (soul or essence) of literature was discussed in terms of concepts of poetics (e.g. rasa, alaṅkāra, guṇa), but Sundardās introduces a distinctly devotional concept into this role. Despite Sundardās's emphasis on the significance of aesthetics to the efficacy of the bāṇī, the above couplet makes it clear that devotion to the Lord is of paramount importance.

Sundardās's exposition of poetics

Sundardās's Savaiyā Granth and Sākhīs are grouped according to the themes of the poems, called aṅg or chapters. This thematic classification was a common anthological practice within the sant-bāṇī tradition, one that arguably began with the Dādūpanthī poet-saints. There were two major anthology traditions of the Dādūpanth that compiled the work of a diverse array of bhakti poets using the thematic model: the Sarvāṅgīs and Pañcvāṇīs. The Sarvāṅgī tradition (Iraqi Reference Iraqi1985; Callewaert Reference Callewaert1993) compiles the works of more than a hundred poet-saints and the Pañcvāṇī tradition (Callewaert and de Beeck Reference Callewaert and de Beeck1991) compiled works of five poet-saints specifically: Kabīr, Dādū, Ravidās, Nāmdev, and Haridās. Many themes (aṅg), such as finding a true Guru, separation (vichoha or viraha), illusions (māyā) and so on are identical in the Pañcvāṇī and Sarvāṅgī traditions and for that matter in most anthologies of Sant poetry. Sundardās introduces new themes such as vacan vivek (discerning speech) in his Savaiyā Granth and Sākhīs to discuss the importance of poetic aesthetics in the ongoing sant-bāṇī tradition and thus exert an influence on sant communities that resulted in a greater concern with poetics and aesthetics.

In the thematic chapters on vacan vivek, Sundardās talks about sant-bāṇī in the abstract, before providing concrete contexts from social life to help laymen understand his exposition. He emphasizes the importance of ornate poetry well equipped with poetic figures (alaṅkāra) and metres. Sundardās all but forbids substandard bāṇī, i.e. poetry that either lacks a proper metre or rhyme scheme, or that it is not sung beautifully:

After setting the criteria for acceptable bāṇī, Sundardās proceeds with a lengthy exposition whose purpose is to associate this discourse on aesthetics with the social contexts and literary tropes his audience knew and preferred. In the following sākhī, for example, Sundardās uses a metaphor to describe people who know in aesthetic terms what a good bāṇī should be. He likens such people to experts who know prized horse breeds, and relegates those who speak subpar bāṇī to the status of boors – those whose knowledge goes no farther than mules:

In the vacan vivek section of the Sākhīs, Sundardās goes on to assert three classifications of bāṇī, giving them a hierarchical order:

Alluding to the threefold classification of kāvya common in Sanskrit,Footnote ¹⁰ Sundardās associates these three types of bāṇīs with contemporary poetic trends. Personifying poetry as a woman was a long-established tradition inherited from Sanskrit literature, and often adopted in rīti poetry. But for Sundardās there were limits. While he may have agreed with Keśavdās's general thoughts on the relevance of aesthetics in poetry, he eliminates from bāṇī the erotic sentiment, a major theme not only in Keśavdās's corpus but also one of the largest single types of content in high vernacular poetics (kāvya) at the time. To gain a sense of what Sundardās rejected, let me offer the following dohā (couplet), where Keśavdās personifies poetry as a woman using the art of the pun (śleṣa):

Sundardās uses similar vocabulary and retains the parallel between speech and womanhood, but he clearly excludes the eroticized element from his description of what good speech should be:

Sundardās asserts that bāṇī well equipped with rhetoric (bhūṣaṇ), proper rhymes, and metres, garners respect among clever ones and connoisseurs (catur pravīn), but bāṇī spoken against one's wellbeing (viparīt) and not properly crafted (phāṭe ṭūṭe ambar) is of a low standard. Even though he adopts this classical metaphor of comparing poetry to a woman, he excises the erotic sentiment. We see this especially in his description of the third sort of bāṇī. This acrid bāṇī (caṭpaṭī), as he calls it elsewhere in his Sākhī Granth (collection of couplets, 17: 15), is the sort in which there is a discussion about śṛṅgār (erotic sentiment) that may please ordinary folk but is deeply frightening to the sentiments of the sants (santani ko bhai sī hai). Sundardās's diction is crucial to his śleṣa in this third category, because he refers specifically to a woman's śṛṅgār. The word śṛṅgār is multivalent: on the one hand it is synonymous with bhūṣaṇ (ornament), as used in Keśavdās's dohā above, on the other it carries the baggage of śṛṅgāriktā (erotic sentiment) and its evident associations with eroticized rīti literature. On this account Sundardās warns his audience – in his words, the sant community – about the negative effects of śṛṅgārik poetry. The intertextual reference and careful diction attest to both Sundardās's familiarity with Keśavdās's oeuvre, and his ability to use those very same categories to caution against the temptations to which language such as Keśavdās's may lead.

Composing didactic poetry with literary excellence enabled Sundardās to preach to a like-minded audience yet simultaneously refine it. Being aware of the literary culture that existed beyond the borders of sant literature in his own time, Sundardās criticized some of the major genres and works of rīti literature. He connected the nāyikā-bheda aspect of rīti poetry with the popular nārī-nindā (denouncing or censuring the women) theme of sant-bāṇī, in which a woman is traditionally compared to worldly pleasures (māyā) and forsaken for the path of devotion:

Here Sundardās uses a pun (śleṣa) on words like rasikpriyā (the connoisseur's beloved) in the first and last lines and on rasmañjarī (bouquet of emotion), śriṅgār (erotic sentiment) and viṣaiṁ (topics or desires) throughout the verse. Each of these words relates generally to heroines and aesthetics in kāvya. The first three words serve as the title of a specific text in the rīti genre such as Keśavdās's Rasikpriyā (1591) and the Sundar-Śriṅgār (1631) composed by Mughal emperor Shahjahan's court poet Sundar-Kavirāy. Rasmañjarī in Sundardās's verse refers to Bhānudutta's Sanskrit treatise on the nāyikā-bheda composed in the 1500s and also its vernacular adaptations, the earliest in this tradition is the Rasmañjarī of Nanddās (fl. sixteenth century), one of the eight great poets associated with the bhakti sect of Vallabhācārya. This shows that Sundardās was clearly reading and critiquing these major treatises. Sundardās satirizes the scholarly texts prominent in courtly circles, primarily because these poets rhapsodize about women with cunning wit (caturāī kari … sarāhaiṃ nakha-śikha nārī). He cautions his sant audience about listening to glorified nakh-śikh descriptions, warning that they might kindle sexual desire. This criticism of Sundardās of such texts did not go unnoticed by the later generation of poet-saints. However, the poetic device of punning that Sundardās used in naming these texts becomes simpler later when the Niranjanī poet-saints in Rajasthan as well as the Swāminārāyaṇī poet-saints in Gujarat express their disapproval of the same texts for their imagined sant communities and likeminded audience.Footnote ¹² The poet-saint Harirāmdās (fl. eighteenth century) of the Niranjanī Sampradāy – the community flourished in proximity with the Dādūpanthīs in Rajasthan (Williams Reference Williams2014) – thought about Keśavdās and his corpus:

Though underpinning the importance of Keśavdās’ oeuvre, which might have served as a model for Harirāmdās himself as he wrote treatises on metres and rhetoric, he still places Kabīr above Keśavdās for primarily being a poet-saint of devotional orientation.

It is important to note that bhakti themes are not absent from the world of rīti poetry and it is rightly said that the developments in Vaishnava aesthetics – prominently by the disciples of Caitanya Mahāprabhū (1486–1533) – in the sixteenth century contributed to the emergence of the courtly rītigranth genre (Busch Reference Busch2011: 33) – a genre that describes “methods” of poetry. Describing the Kṛṣṇa-gopīs rās-līlā (love plays of Kṛṣṇa and the cowherd ladies) based on the models of nāyikā bheda was not only prevalent in the literature of Kṛṣṇa-worshipping communities but also attracted poets who were devoted to Rāma in the early modern period (Burchett Reference Burchett2018). However, in their engagement with the long-established kāvya traditions, the sants liked nāyikā bheda, nakh-śikh and elaborate depictions of śriṅgār far less.Footnote ¹³ Amatory themes in sant-poetry deal mostly with the separation (viraha) motif, where the poet-saints take the persona of women (signifying the soul separated from god) and long for a union. The depiction of love in union (saṃyog śṛiṅgār), which is the major theme in poetry focused on Kṛṣṇa and the gopīs and had a major influence on the nāyikā bheda descriptions in early modern Hindi poetry, had limited scope for the sants. Therefore, the sants were giving their poetry a different character from even the saguṇ Vaiṣṇava literature written on Kṛṣṇa-Gopī love-plays. The Niranjanī poet-saint Harirāmdās starkly criticizes the poetry that draws on the Kṛṣṇa-gopī love plays themes of the Bhāgvata Purāṇa (Baid Reference Baid2013: 127–8). In the same vein, considering texts such as Rasikpriyā and Rasmañjarī as titillating (jāgai madana pracaṇḍa), Sundardās demands his audience strive for knowledge and well-articulated speech by providing a set of revised poetic manuals. His criticism of the nāyikā bheda and the sensual aspect of rīti poetry is not mere reproach on the part of a sant, but a different vision of which Sanskrit texts one should study and what poetic devices could play a role in crafting meaningful bāṇī. Although he certainly endorsed some structural features of Keśavdās's literary science on aesthetics, Sundardās intended to replace the content of these rīti texts with a different type of poetry handbook, one that catered to the prospective sants. It was in his Gyān Samudra that he constructed an alternative to the courtly rītigranths. The Gyān Samudra matches them point for point – in metrical discourse, narrative strategy, language, and register – and yet it supplies quite a different content, one borrowed from different knowledge systems that suit the sants’ ideology: that is bringing the philosophies of Yoga, Sāṃkhya, and Advaita Vedānta into conversation with bhakti.

Crafting a poetic handbook for the Sants

The rīti-granths are Brajbhāṣā scholarly texts that teach “the tradition of poetic art” (kāvya-kalā kī rīti) for the proper enjoyment of poetry. Having a strong foundation in traditional Sanskrit poetics, these rītigranths comprised a major genre of the literature that emerged from early modern Brajbhāṣā courtly circles (Busch Reference Busch2011: 102–4). As textbooks on literary science, these rītigranths adopted a “description and example” (lakṣaṇ-udāharaṇ) technique to describe topics like nav-rasa (the nine sentiments of kāvya), nāyikā bheda (types of heroines and their descriptions from “head to toe” (śikh-nakh), prosody (chanda), rhetoric (alaṅkāra), and so on. In Sundardās's Gyān Samudra we observe several of the structural features that arise in these courtly rītigranths. Sundardās arranges his text as a Sāṅg-Rūpak (metaphor with all of its elements) – a common method of presenting theoretical texts in Sanskrit and vernaculars – where the “ocean of knowledge” (Gyān Samudra) contains the five waves (ullāsa) of Guru, bhakti, Yoga, Sāṃkhya, and Advaita Vedānta. In this ocean, poetic metres are like oysters that hide the pearls of meaning (arth), and one must be a true diver (marjīvā) to obtain them:

While the Rāmcaritmānas of Tulsīdās may precede the Gyān Samudra in its use of the “oyster and pearl” image,Footnote ¹⁴ Sundardās tailors it to his own special purpose. To see how he does this in vivid terms we might turn to the opening chapter of the Gyān Samudra. There he ambitiously claims to have composed this poem in “metres of all types”. By this, Sundardās seems to mean that he incorporates the metres of Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Bhāṣā (vernacular), such as bhujaṅgī, troṭaka, roṛā, savaiyā, chappay, and so on. Therefore this text is important, as Sundardās makes it so, not only for the philosophical content but also for its style of composing and introducing metres of various types to a vernacular audience. The language of the Gyān Samudra is heavily Sanskritized and full of technical terms. This style is characteristic of the rītigranth handbooks and appears less frequently in bhakti poetry but gained prominence among the sant communities such as the Dādūpanth and Niranjanī Sampradāy in the seventeenth century. What we see in Sundardās is an effort to bring the two traditions together. The descriptions of the Guru, bhakti, Yoga and Advaita Vedānta are underpinned by Sundardās's knowledge of the Bhagavad Gītā, Bhāgvata Purāṇa, Adhyātma Rāmāyaṇa, Haṭhyoga Pradīpikā, and the Upaniṣads. He sometimes presents a Brajbhāṣā version of what is written in Sanskrit and often re-contextualizes the original Sanskrit texts, tailoring them to suit his innovative purposes. Observe, for example, how he presents his “description of the Guru” (guru-lakṣaṇ):

The second line of this verse, tripta gyāna vigyāna acala kūṭastha birājay, forms an exact Brajbhāṣā translation of a phrase from the Bhagavad Gītā. While the Bhagavad Gītā version ascribes these characteristics to a yogi, Sundardās re-contextualizes the phrase so that it describes the Guru. The śloka (couplet) in the Bhagavad Gītā reads as follows:

In the fifth line of his Guru-lakṣaṇ, Sundardās similarly reframes the verse that describes the encounter with Brahma from the Upaniṣads, fashioning the verse which takes up this encounter so that it describes not Brahma but the Guru instead. The phrase “puni bhiddyante hridi granthi kauṁ chiddyante saba saṁśayam”, (in his heart illusions are pierced and all doubts are torn asunder) is a Brajbhāṣā and “popularized” Sanskrit rendition of the following line from the Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad: “bhidyate hṛdayagranthiś chidyante sarvasaṁśayāḥ”.Footnote ¹⁶ In the two lines we have just considered, Sundardās thus “traditionalizes” his teachings by seeking parallel expressions in Sanskrit philosophical works, explaining in effect that Brahma or a yogi can represent the Guru (of sant poetry), but in doing so, paradoxically, he introduces an important innovation into sant ideology – a scholastic oneFootnote ¹⁷ – as this kind of direct reference to Sanskrit śāstra was less frequent in sant poetry prior to Sundardās's writings.

This kind of effort is by no means confined to the Gyān Samudra’s early verses. Sundardās's language register becomes even more sanskritized and filled with philosophical terminology in the later three chapters of the Gyān Samudra. There he describes Yoga, Sāṃkhya, and Advaita Vedānta. Consider what happens when he explains the process of doing various yogic postures (āsana) in verse. For much of this description he quotes the Sanskrit text Haṭhayoga Pradīpikā directly:

This transformation of śāstra-based knowledge so that it became accessible to the sants and the vernacular audience had a great deal to do with making the Gyān Samudra an early modern classic. The Sanskritized register of Brajbhāṣā that Sundardās created made the text more widely accessible than would have been the case otherwise. It became less vernacular, less regional, and more capable of wide circulation. This accomplishment did not go unnoticed. Within the Dādūpanth, Sundardās came to be accorded the title “the next Śaṅkarācārya” very soon indeed. That phrase occurs in the Bhaktamāl of Rāghavdās,Footnote ¹⁸ which was composed only seven years after the Gyān Samudra itself. But that was not the end of Sundardās's fame. About a century later the Rāmsanehī Sampradāy, another sant community, would recognize the importance of Sundardās's treatise on ornate poetry in their own Bhaktamāl.Footnote ¹⁹ The abundant presence of Sundardās's Gyān Samudra manuscript in various Rajasthan Oriental Research Institute (RORI) libraries throughout Rajasthan suggests that this text was read by a broad range of audiences – by communities of sants and courtly circles as suggested by the colophons and catalogue descriptions.Footnote ²⁰ The popularity of this poem also led to its transcriptions into Gurmukhī script.Footnote ²¹ And in 1749, when a Brajbhāṣā school was established in Kutch, Gujarat by the ruling elite, to inculcate in the minds of future court poets the learned and refined poetic art of that time, the texts assembled included not only rīti-poetry, which was certainly predominant, but also the two texts discussed in this essay: Sundardās's Gyān Samudra and his Savaiyā Granth.Footnote ²² What could better vindicate the project on which he had embarked?

Declaration of Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.