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Chapter Title: Did Surdas Perform the Bhāgavata-purāṇa?

Chapter Author(s): John Stratton Hawley

Book Title: Tellings and Texts

Book Subtitle: Music, Literature and Performance in North India
Book Editor(s): Francesca Orsini and Katherine Butler Schofield
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 7. Did Surdas Perform the
Bhāgavata-purāṇa?
John Stratton Hawley

An old and very rusty saw in the scholarly literature on Surdas is the
notion that Sur translated the Bhāgavata-purāṇa from Sanskrit into Hindi.
It is easy to take potshots at this idea, and I have done so quite a bit myself.1
Instead of adding to that fusillade here, however, I suggest that we frame
the issue somewhat differently and see if that might open the door to a
more interesting answer. Is it possible that Sur was not translating the
Bhāgavata, but performing it?
What does it mean to perform the Bhāgavata? Several years ago I travelled
to the ancient Shaiva pilgrimage town of Gokarn, on the banks of the
Arabian Sea. There I had a chance to talk with an octogenarian Agnihotri
Brahman named Samba Dikshita, who told me he had been performing
the Bhāgavata-purāṇa all his life and that his family had been doing so for
seven generations before him.2 For seven days in the month of karttik every
year (now his nephew has taken over the job), Samba Dikshita would recite
a portion of the section mandated by tradition. As much as he could: he
didn’t have the command of the text that his father did, he explained. His
father knew the text so perfectly, so inside out, that he was able to recite
the entire Purana in the course of seven days, as mandated by the text that

1 Most recently, The Memory of Love: Sūrdās Sings to Krishna (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2009), pp. 15-18.
2 I am deeply grateful to Vidvan Samba Dikshita for granting me interviews on 23 and
25 December 2007, and to his son Gajanan Dikshita for a supplementary conversation
on 25 December 2007.

© John Stratton Hawley, CC BY http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0062.07

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210  Tellings and Texts

celebrates this very practice, the Bhāgavata māhātmya. But Samba Dikshita
did something his father had not always done. After performing the Purana
in the morning at the pathshala just down the street, he would convene
another gathering towards evening, in which he returned to the “portion”
for the day, this time selecting from it and developing his own exposition
in Kannada. For people who did not care about the Sanskrit text in the
same way he did—perhaps because of their linguistic limitations or other
commitments—this was a significant occasion. Samba Dikshita mentioned
women particularly as belonging to this group. Maybe some children came
too. And yes, there were also the men.
Samba Dikshita explained that his family had initiated their practice of
performing the Bhāgavata those many generations ago because they knew
the efficacy of the text. His ancestor had been unable to produce a son
and therefore keep the line alive—keep the fire, quite literally, burning.
The Bhāgavata worked its magic and there was Samba Dikshita to prove
it, eight generations later.3 By my estimate, this crucial event might have
transpired sometime around the turn of the eighteenth century, and it
was precisely then, so far as we can tell, that manuscripts of the Bhāgavata
māhātmya first appeared, detailing in its sixth and final chapter the exact
conditions under which the Bhāgavata-purāṇa ought to be performed and
describing its benefits.4
I have sometimes wondered just what led to the production of this
interesting text, the Bhāgavata māhātmya, at just this point in time, and
I’ve considered whether it might have happened because there had
come to be too many of Samba Dikshita’s afternoons, so to speak, in
relation to his mornings—too much else happening in the name of the
Bhāgavata and too little in the way of its actual, proper performance from
a certain conservative Brahmin point of view. Anyone who has recently
travelled in North India will know the kind of thing I have in mind. In
Brindavan, for example, numerous billboards trumpet this or that world-
famous acharya performing shrimad bhagavat saptah. These aren’t just

3 Several years ago I heard a paper from a retired member of the medical faculty at Pune
University describing the Bhāgavata’s expertise in the field of embryology: Padmakar
Vishnu Vartak, ‘Embryology and Chromosomes from Śrīmad Bhāgavatam’, National
Seminar on “Śrīmad Bhāgavatam: Its Philosophical, Religious, and Social Themes”,
Ananthacharya Indological Research Institute (Mumbai, 28 March 2009).
4 See J.S. Hawley, ‘The Bhāgavata Māhātmya in Context’, in Patronage and Popularisation,
Pilgrimage and Procession: Channels of Transcultural Translation and Transmission in Early
Modern South Asia; Papers in Honour of Monika Horstmann, ed. by Heidi R.M. Pauwels
(Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009), pp. 81-100.

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 Did Surdas Perform the Bhāgavata-purāṇa?  211

seven-day performances as mandated in the Bhāgavata māhātmya, though

certainly the authorisation of that number by that text is basic. They are
not primarily recitations—Samba Dikshita’s “mornings”—but rather
expositions, primarily vernacular expositions involving sermon and song.
And they are not just saptahs or kathas, if the signs are to be believed, but
yajnas—in fact, mahayajnas, “great sacrifices”.
I wonder whether a similar proliferation of forms and formats claiming
the Bhāgavata as their end and origin in late seventeenth-century North
India might have led to the articulation of the stringent set of performance
standards that appears in the Bhāgavata māhātmya. These focus on an
expositor of great intelligence who is a Brahmin householder capable of
teaching the Vedas and is surrounded by other Brahmins; who is purified
by an early morning toilet, a bath, and the shaving of his head and chin,
etc. The audience, similarly, must be comprised of men who have vowed
sexual abstinence for the duration of the performance; who pledge to
sleep on the ground, survive on milk and ghi if at all possible, eschew
anger and other untoward forms of behaviour; and who will refrain from
speaking with a menstruating woman, mlecchas and shudras (i.e. impure
foreigners and low castes), and so forth.5
As to the performative environment that might have been sought to
be disciplined by this set of prescriptions, one has a great deal to choose
from in the records that have come down to us from sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century North India. In Braj, a man named Ghamandi—or
alternatively, Narayan Bhatt—is said to have created something like the
kernel of the ras lilas we recognise today—or perhaps they were already
there before these South Indian aficionados arrived.6 Guru Nanak knows
about enacted Krishna stories like this, and he does not like them one bit:

ketīāṃ kanna kahāṇīāṃ kete beda bīcāra

kete nacahi maṅgate giḍi muḍi pūrahi tāla
bājārī bājāra mahi āi karḍhahi bājāra
How many Krishna-tales there are, how many opinions on the Vedas!
How many beggars dance and, twisting and falling,
beat time with their hands!

5 I follow the text given in the Gita Press edition: Śrīmad Bhāgavata Mahāpurāṇa (with
Sanskrit Text and English Translation), trans. by C.L. Goswami (Gorakhpur: Gita Press,
1995 [orig., 1971]), 6.20-50, pp. 38-42.
6 Norvin Hein, The Miracle Plays of Mathurā (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972),
pp. 223-30.

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212  Tellings and Texts

The mercenary fellows go into the market-place and draw out

the market crowd.7

Then there are the Ahirs whose performances of the Krishna story
fascinated Malik Muhammad Jayasi, as he tells us in his Kanhāvat of 1540;
he is eager to elevate such performances to a level where they have a
chance of capturing the attention of more refined audiences.8 A decade
before Jayasi, Lalachdas “Halvai” had been active in a place he called
Hastigram, near Rae Bareilly, creating his own Avadhi shortening of the
tenth book of the Bhāgavata.9 Before the end of the century (1595), there
appeared a vernacular commentary on the eleventh book by Chaturdas,
and let us remember that when Eknath produced his famous Marathi
treatment of the eleventh book in the sixteenth century, he was sitting in
Banaras.
The Bhāgavata’s tenth book, the famous dashama skandha, must have
risen to almost canonical status at that point—particularly the five “core”
chapters describing the ras lila—since just about then Hariramvyas, in
Brindavan, was shaping his Rāsapancādhyayī, to be followed not long
afterward (c.1560-1570) by a similar composition written by Nanddas.10
Nanddas also produced what one might call an actual “translation” of
the tenth book of the Bhāgavata, his Bhāṣā dasamskandh, which he seems to
have abandoned after he completed the twenty-eighth chapter. Or perhaps
he did not stop but rather changed gears. After all, chapter twenty-nine
brought him to the section of the text that had the most obvious dramatic
possibilities—the section in which the ras lila was portrayed. Hariramvyas

7  Gurū Granth, āsā dī vār, p. 464 in the standard edition. The translation is that of Hein
(1972), p. 116. See also Norvin Hein, ‘Guru Nanak’s Comment on the Vaishnava Lila’,
in Perspectives on Guru Nanak, ed. by Harbans Singh (Patiala: Punjabi University,
1969), pp. 493-501. I am grateful to Gurinder Singh Mann for drawing the latter to my
attention and for checking the Gurmukhi original.
8 Francesca Orsini, ‘Inflected Kathas: Sufis and Krishna Bhaktas in Awadh’, in Religious
Interactions in Mughal India, ed. by Vasudha Dalmia and Munis Faruqui (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2014b), pp. 195-232.
9  Lālacdās-racit Avadhī-kāvya Haricarit, ed. by Acharya Nalinavilocana Sharma and
Shriramanarayan Shastri (Patna: Bihar-Rashtrabhasha Parishad, 1963), Vol. 1. See
also R.S. McGregor, Hindi Literature from its Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century
(Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1984), p. 96. McGregor’s treatment of related works
is valuable for the subject as a whole (pp. 96-101, 156ff.). Orsini (2014b) also discusses
the Haricarit of Lalachdas.
10 Heidi Pauwels, Kṣṇa’s Round Dance Reconsidered (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1996);
R.S. McGregor, Nanddas: The Round Dance of Krishna and Uddhav’s Message (London:
Luzac, 1973).

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 Did Surdas Perform the Bhāgavata-purāṇa?  213

had already celebrated it, as we have seen. It may be that Nanddas simply
skipped the rails at this point, moving from the simpler chaupai-doha
diction of the Bhāṣā dasamskandh into the more distinctive rola register of
his Rāsapancādhyayī, which may have seemed more suitable for a fully
literary rendition. He never returned to his earlier task.11
It seems to have been a whole century, until 1687, before we got a
complete and in this sense “faithful” bhasha version of the tenth book
of the Sanskrit original—this at the hand of Bhupati, who declares at
the beginning of this document that he is producing it in Brajbhasha.12
Bhupati’s Dasamskandh was widely copied and widely known, yet it was
not the only text of its ilk that began circulating at just this moment in
time.
Another Brajbhasha Dasamskandh, this one richly illustrated in the
Malwa or Central Indian style, shows up in two parts in 1686 and 1688. The
former gives us episodes from the first half of the tenth skandha; the latter,
from the second. Intriguingly, however, these two dated manuscripts are
not sufficiently compatible to be regarded as parts of a single project,
and other undated versions of both parts also exist; copying is involved.13
Thus the whole cluster makes us vividly aware of a performative domain
we have not yet mentioned, one in which the text of the Bhāgavata—or
its bhasha equivalent—would be displayed simultaneously in words
and pictures, whether for the pleasure of an individual reader or to
provide the basis for a show-and-tell that would require the services of a
professional reciter/raconteur. Illustrated Bhāgavatas that make use of the
Sanskrit text date back to the first half of the sixteenth century in North

11 Nanddas says he is conveying the luminosity of the Bhāgavata into bhasha: Nandadās
Granthāvalī, ed. by Vrajaratnadas (Banaras: Nagari Pracharini Sabha, 1949), 1:14-
16, Vol. 2, p. 2. On the shift from the Bhāṣā dasamskandh to the Rāsapancādhyayī, see
also McGregor (1973), p. 35. Note also that the status of the 29th chapter of the
Bhāṣā dasamskandh is not entirely clear: it is absent from the 1757 VS manuscript
that otherwise forms the principal basis for the text that appears in the Nandadās
granthāvalī, as well as in a similar manuscript that forms a part of the Kankarauli
collection, and is therefore described in Vrajaratnadas’s edition as an appendix (1949,
pariśiṣṭ, Vol. 2, p. 272; cf. Vol. 1, pp. 51-52).
12 Grahame Nieman, ‘The Bhāgavat Daśam Skandh of Bhūpati’, IAVRI Bulletin 8, 3-8;
Nieman, ‘Bhūpati’s Bhāgavat and the Hindi Bhāgavat Genre’, in Bhakti in Current
Research, 1979-1982, ed. by Monika Hostmann (Berlin: Dietrich Weimer Verlag, 1983),
pp. 257-67.
13 W.G. Archer, Central Indian Painting (London: Faber & Faber, 1958), p. 12. The
colophon page is now damaged. On the 1688 Kanoria Bhagavata and its copies, see
Neeraja Poddar, ‘Krishna in his Myriad Forms: Narration, Translation, and Variation
in Illustrated Manuscripts of the Latter Half of the Tenth Book of the Bhāgavata
Purāṇa’ (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2014).

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214  Tellings and Texts

India, and quite a number seem to emerge in the region bordered by Delhi
and Agra—greater Braj, one might say.14 But what is interesting about
our Malwa Dasamskandhs is that there, for the first time, the seemingly
elite practice of manuscript illustration is clearly linked to a Brajbhasha
version of the Bhāgavata text, not to its Sanskrit parent.
Seen from a wider angle, this may come as no surprise. From the
fifteenth century onward, numerous vernacular adaptations of the
Bhāgavata had begun to appear in various regions of India, not just in
Brajbhasha but in Kannada, Gujarati, Malayalam, Bengali, Orissi, and
Assamese.15 Then there were more distant relatives. The Maithili poems
of Vidyapati are hardly vernacular transcriptions of the Bhāgavata, but it
does appear that the poet took the trouble to copy at least a portion of the
text for his own use in the second or third decade of the fifteenth century.16
Of course, there was also a long history of literary activity around the
Bhāgavata in Sanskrit itself, as indicated, for example, by the digest of its
contents that Vopadeva prepared way back in the thirteenth century—his
Harilīlā—or the systematic marshalling of its bhakti-related passages that
he provided in his Muktāphala. And by the seventeenth century we have
various indications of Brahminical resistance to the production of written
vernacular works that could, as Sheldon Pollock has said, threaten “an
old economy of literary-cultural power based on Sanskrit and a whole
class of bilingual intermediaries”.17 The enthusiastic reception of poets
such as Nanddas and Bhupati may have caused certain groups of North

14 See Daniel J. Ehnbom, ‘An Analysis and Reconstruction of the Dispersed Bhāgavata
Purāṇa from the Caurapañcāśikā Group’ (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago,
1984), pp. 25-42; and Harsha V. Dehejia, Celebrating Krishna: Sacred Words and Sensuous
Images: The Tenth Book of the Bhagavata Purana (Ahmedabad: Mapin, 2005), pp. 54-55,
122-23, 164-67, 172-77.
15 Especially helpful for the subject as a whole is Bimanbehari Majumdar, ‘The
Bhāgavata Purāṇa and its Influence in the Sixteenth Century’, Journal of the Bihar
Research Society 47.1-4 (1961), 381-93. The range Majumdar describes is impressive, and
his perspectives are helpful as well. I know from his treatment of Surdas, however,
that one would need to evaluate some of his conclusions on the basis of further
manuscript work.
16 The date specifically claimed in the Nepal manuscript upon which Subhadra Jha
bases this assertion is lakṣmaṇ samvat 309, but there are debates about exactly when
this occurred. See Jha, Vidyāpati-Gīt-Saṅgrah or The Songs of Vidyāpati (Banaras: Motilal
Banarsidas, 1954), p. 57.
17 Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods and the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and
Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. 312. Cf.
William L. Smith, ‘The Turkish Conquest and the Dark Age of Bengali Literature’,
in Ludwik Sternbach Felicitation Volume, ed. by J.P. Sinha (Lucknow: Akhila Bharatiya
Sanskrit Parishad, 1979), Vol. 2, pp. 709-11.

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 Did Surdas Perform the Bhāgavata-purāṇa?  215

Indian Brahmins to want to reign in this vernacular efflorescence by

putting forth just the sort of performance prescriptions that we meet in
the Bhāgavata māhātmya. There may also have been a caste dimension, not
just a linguistic one. Bhupati, after all, was a Kayasth, and it was another
Kayasth, a man by the name of Asanand, who took it upon himself to
finish the Haricarit that Lalach had begun; he had made it to chapter 45 in
1614, when he stopped.18 Still another Kayasth, a Gujarati named Keshav
Kayasth, had composed a Kṣṇakrīḍākāvya in the late fifteenth century.
Against the polyglot, poly-caste backdrop that these texts suggest, did
Brahmins want to reassert their own perspective—not just the power of
the original text but the power conveyed by their own unique capacity to
perform it?
We will be trying to figure out where Surdas stands in this complicated
terrain in a moment, but let me mention a few more players on the scene
before we do. Consider, for example, the Gaudiya community, so firmly
entrenched in Braj by the latter half of the sixteenth century. Not only did
their leading theologians—Sanatana, Rupa, and Jiva Gosvami—create
an impressive set of new commentaries on the Bhāgavata, the community
also pioneered a genre in which the ever more elaborately articulated lila
format that was seen to structure Krishna’s life served as the basis for
various mappings of the life of his avatar Chaitanya.19 Think also of the
more conservative theologian Vallabhacharya, who was based in Arail
just across the sangam from Allahabad. Vallabha launched into a massive
new commentary on the Bhāgavata—his Subodhinī—which he was unable
to complete, but he did succeed in finishing book ten.20
Vallabha’s life, in turn, became the seed for the genre known as
varta—literally, “conversation”—which sometimes made reference to
his commentarial effort (as in the varta on Surdas), but was not actually
structured along the lines of the Bhāgavata in the way that happened with
the Chaitanyites. Yet that did not mean the lila idea could not be enacted
elsewhere in the Vallabhite theological imagination. The author of the
Vallabhite Caurāsī vaiṣṇavan kī vārtā depicts Surdas’s life in just those
terms. He tells us that at end of his life, Sur disappeared into the nitya lila

18 Sharma and Shastri (1966), pp. 7-9.

19 An indispensable treatment of the latter subject can be found in Tony K. Stewart, The
Final Word: The Caitanya Caritāmta and the Grammar of Religious Tradition (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2010).
20 The Subodhinī is complete for skandhas 1-3 and 10, incomplete for skandhas 4 and 11,
and lacking for the remainder of the Bhāgavata.

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216  Tellings and Texts

that brought him into the direct presence of Radha and Krishna. This was
possible because the poet had been initiated into a consciousness of that
realm when Vallabha whispered to him, in mantraic form, the entirety
of his Subodhinī commentary at the outset of his life as a religious poet—
according to Vallabhite standards, that is. His conversion from being a
poet of “simpering”, someone who sang laments and petitions, into
someone who worked out of a Krishnaite framework was accomplished
by means of his initiation, when Vallabha vouchsafed to him the true and
entire meaning of the Bhāgavata.21
This great Sanskrit text is strikingly ubiquitous in the recollections of
sixteenth-century Braj that have come down to us. (We cannot be sure Sur
lived there, but he clearly worked in its linguistic medium.) It seems Rupa
Gosvami had turned his attentions to producing a Sanskrit Uddhavasaṅdeśa
even before he met Chaitanya.22 His guru-brother Raghunath Bhatt is
remembered as having recited a portion of the Bhāgavata-purāṇa itself on a
daily basis “at the assembly of Rupa Gosvami”, as the Caitanya caritāmta
puts it, probably at the temple of Govindadev.23 The Chaitanyite leader
Gadadhar Bhatt made a similar commitment, not only to Govindadev
but to Radharaman, Gopinath, and Madanmohan.24 Elsewhere in the
sampradayik spectrum, the Vallabhite writer known as Gadadhar Bhatt
Dvivedi remarks that Keshav Kashmiri, the leader of the Nimbarka
community in sixteenth-century Brindavan, was known for his seven-
day Bhāgavata performances. Hariramvyas, who also lived in Brindavan
in the latter half of the sixteenth century, appreciated the importance of

21 Just because it is hard to accept the historicity of this account, that is no reason to
underestimate the importance of the sentiment it expresses—not in regard to Surdas
but in relation to the period (mid-seventeenth century?) and sampradaya context
associated with the writing of the text where the story appears. I discuss historical
difficulties associated with this and related varta passages in Sūr Dās: Poet, Singer,
Saint (Seattle: University of Washington Press and Delhi; Oxford University Press,
1984), pp. 14-22. On the varta’s view of the Bhāgavata as a template for the poetry of
Surdas, see also my Three Bhakti Voices: Mirabai, Kabir, and Surdas in Their Time and
Ours (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 185-88.
22 Sushil Kumar De, Early History of the Vaiṣṇava Faith and Movement in Bengal (Calcutta:
Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyaya, 1961), p. 646; see also McGregor (1973), p. 48.
23 Caitanya Caritāmta of Kṣṇadāsa Kavirāja: A Translation and Commentary, ed. by Edward
C. Dimock, Jr. and Tony K. Stewart (Cambridge: Harvard Oriental Series, 1999), 3.125,
p. 924.
24 Thanks to Shrivatsa Goswami for clarifying this matter to me. Gadadhar Bhatt’s
vow has been carried out by his descendents until the present day. See also Swapna
Sharma, Gadādhar Bhaṭṭ: paramparā aur sāhitya (Vrindaban: Vrajagaurav Prakashan,
[n.d.]), p. 31.

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 Did Surdas Perform the Bhāgavata-purāṇa?  217

“Bhakti and the Bhāgavata”, but he hated that pandits recited it for money.25
The presence of the Bhāgavata is frequently felt in various vignettes that
appear in the Caurāsī vaiṣṇavan kī vartā, a seventeenth-century text, but
we must wait until the eighteenth century before we meet the idea that
Vallabhacharya, like Keshav Bhatt Kashmiri, was known for reciting the
great text over the course of a seven-day period, as is prescribed in the
Bhāgavata māhātmya. This we learn in the Caurāsī baiṭhak caritra, a treatise
that celebrates Vallabha’s travels and worldwide fame.26
So I repeat our initial question: Should we also be making a place for
Surdas on this already crowded stage?
First of all, we must disabuse ourselves of any notion that Surdas ever
made an attempt to answer this question himself. There is plenty in the
Surdas tradition that tries to do it for him, but that is all after the fact. The
Surdas about whom I wish to speak in this essay is the Surdas who lived in
the sixteenth century—the real Surdas, if I may put it that boldly. While it
is certainly true that there is no way in principle to separate him from the
poets who contributed literally thousands of poems to the Surdas corpus
after his death, I am convinced that beneath this pile of other Surdases
also stood a single renowned poet who lived in the sixteenth century itself.
Poems that we can trace to that century, thanks to manuscript evidence
and the exacting critical edition prepared by Kenneth Bryant, are notably
tighter, more difficult, and more elegant than the more recent ones.27
Using the name Surdas (admittedly, somewhat loosely) to designate this
sixteenth-century corpus of poems, we can see clearly that nowhere does
Surdas come out and say that he is either translating or performing the
Bhāgavata. No poem that we can be sure circulated in the sixteenth century
even mentions the Bhāgavata, as a certain number of later ones do. No

25 Heidi R.M. Pauwels, In Praise of Holy Men: Hagiographic Poems by and about Harirām
Vyās (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 2002), pp. 98-99.
26 Chaurasi Baithak: Eightyfour Seats of Shri Vallabhacharya, trans. by Sham Das (Baroda,
Shri Vallabha Publications, 1985), 84, p. 83. The seventeenth-century figure Gokulnath
is traditionally claimed to be the compiler of the Caurāsī baiṭhak caritra, but this seems
impossible. See Alan W. Entwistle, Braj, Centre of Krishna Pilgrimage (Groningen: Egbert
Forsten, 1987), pp. 263-64. In an email communication of 9 April 2008, Shandip Saha
points out that the Caurāsī vaiṣṇavan kī vārtā, which is almost certainly earlier than the
Caurāsī baiṭhak caritra, makes no mention of Vallabha performing bhagavat saptah.
27 Surdas, Sur’s Ocean: Poems from the Early Tradition, ed. by Kenneth E. Bryant, trans. by
John Stratton Hawley (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). The materials,
principles, and technology underlying this edition, which seeks to reconstruct the
extant corpus of Surdas poems that can be shown to have circulated in the sixteenth
century, are substantially different from any earlier edition of the Sūrsāgar.

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218  Tellings and Texts

one has yet come along and organised Surdas padas so that they appear
to replicate the skandha-by-skandha organisation of the Bhāgavata—that
would not happen until almost the turn of the nineteenth century28—and
certainly no one has composed a poem anything like the following (NPS
225):29

śrīmukha cāri sloka dae brahmā kauṃ samujhāi

brahmā nārada sauṅ kahe nārada byāsa sunāi
byāsa kahe sukadeva sauṃ dvādasa skandha banāi
suradāsa soī kahe pada bhāṣā kari gāi
Vishnu, from his sacred mouth, explained four ślokas to Brahma;
Brahma told them to Narad, and Narad to Vyas in turn;
Vyas told them to Shukdev, setting them out in twelve books,
And these Surdas told as songs sung in the common tongue.

All of this is late, late, late. Nonetheless, it is important. It reveals the desire
of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editors to make plain a perceived
link between the great Sanskrit Purana and this prestigious vernacular
text. The Sursāgar was indeed perceived—at least by some—as a text by
that point in time, and someone felt it was essential that it be construed in
relation to the Bhāgavata-purāṇa, which was in its turn regarded by many
as the definitive commentary on and sum of all Vedic knowledge. That
claim was already being made in the sixteenth century.30
But the absence of this external scaffolding doesn’t mean that the poet
himself was either ignorant of or indifferent to the Bhāgavata. This, I think,
was not so. But how, precisely, was Sur sensitive to the Bhāgavata? And
how did he perform it?
It would certainly be wrong to suggest that every poem circulating in
Surdas’s name in the sixteenth century can be regarded as in some sense

28 Hawley (1984), p. 39. The oldest manuscripts I have seen that adopt this organisational
scheme are Nagaripracharini Sabha no. 496, dated 1847 VS =1790 CE, and NPS no.
4469 (269/26), dated 1850 VS = 1793 CE.
29 The abbreviation NPS designates the Nagaripracharini Sabha edition of the Sūrsāgar,
a critical edition that has served as the standard text of reference for the poetry of
Surdas since its partial publication in 1936 and complete publication in 1948. The
version currently available is Sūrsāgar, ed. by Jagannathdas “Ratnakar”, Nandadulare
Vajpeyi et al., 2 vols (Varanasi: Kashi Nagaripracharini Sabha, 1972 and 1976). The
critical apparatus appears only in the portion published in 1936.
30 E.g., Jiva Goswami, Tattvasandarbha 19, 22a, and 24, as given in Stuart Elkman, Jīva
Gosvāmin’s Tattvasandarbha: A Study on the Philosophical and Sectarian Development of the
Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Movement (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1986), pp. 91, 100-01, 111-12;
see also De (1961), pp. 261-65.

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 Did Surdas Perform the Bhāgavata-purāṇa?  219

a performance of the Bhāgavata-purāṇa, though the themes and narrative

episodes in the poetry do often match those in the great Sanskrit text.
Occasionally, however, we find ourselves faced with a much more direct
connection between the Bhāgavata and the words of Surdas. Let us consider
two such poems—poems that also relate to one another, in that they share
a common phrase. Here is the first:

1 mādhau kopi cakra kara līnau (Bryant §356, NPS 273)31

2 chāḍi beda bānī apanau panu jana kauṅ bhāyau kīnau
3 ratha te uteri avani ātura hvai leta carana ati dhāi
4 sahi na sakati bhū bhāra bhīta hvai capala bhaī akulāī
5 kachuka aṅga kachu adhara upara paṭu unati bāhu bisāla
6 sveda sroṇi sobhā ati tana mai ghana baraṣyau mani lāla
7 sura subhaṭṭa sameta sudarasana deṣi birañci bhramyau
8 mānahu āna sṣṭi karibe koṅ ambuja nābhi jamyau
1 Madhav, in anger, took the wheel in his hand.
2 Abandoning the word of the Veda, his own promise,
he did what would please his devotee.
3 He stepped from his chariot to earth, all astir,
and the moment his foot touched the ground he ran.
4 The earth could not endure the weight
and shuddered fearfully, as if deranged.
5 His upper garment slipped down his limbs
and as he lifted his vast, strong arm
6 It revealed a torso radiant with sweat and blood—
a thundercloud raining pearls and rubies.
7 Sur says, when Brahma saw that fine warrior
and the discus he held, called Fine Vision,
8 He fell into confusion, as if this were a new creation
and he a baby lotus-born upon an umbilical stem.

The first task that faces the audience of most Surdas padas is to identify
the narrative moment to which the poem refers. This poem is a good
example of the audience’s quandary, but the poet makes their task easier
than he sometimes does: he announces the episode in his title line rather
than challenging his listeners to deduce it on their own. On the basis of

31 The symbol § marks the position of this poem in the Bryant edition. I am grateful to
Ken Bryant for permission to quote his reconstructions of §§ 356-357 in this essay. As
previously stated, NPS refers to the standard Nagaripracharini Sabha edition of the
Sūrsāgar. In the text that follows the abbreviation Mbh will refer to the Mahābhārata
in the critical Pune edition, for which V.S. Sukthankar served as general editor. BhP
denotes the Bhāgavata-purāṇa in the Gita Press edition.

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220  Tellings and Texts

what he says, knowledgeable members of his audience will recognise

immediately that Sur is referring to events that transpired on the third
day of the great Bharata war (Mbh 6.55.83ff.). But more is involved. The
way Sur approaches his subject shows that he assumes at least on his own
part, if not also on the part of his audience as a whole, a knowledge of the
manner in which that story is reported in the Bhāgavata-purāṇa (especially
BhP 1.9.37-39). Bhishma, the aged but ever-agile commander of the Kaurav
army, was the staunchest devotee (jana, v. 2) of Krishna, who had joined
the forces of the opposite side as Arjun’s charioteer but had vowed never
to take an active role in the fighting. It was Bhishma’s fondest wish to
see Krishna arrayed against him in battle, however, and he attempted to
provoke Krishna to fight him by raining countless arrows upon Krishna
and Arjun, both of whom sustained multiple wounds. When Krishna
sensed in Arjun a residual unwillingness to retaliate against Bhishma,
who was his own elder and preceptor, he feared for Arjun’s safety and
sprang into the fray himself, thus fulfilling Bhishma’s wish. In doing so,
he broke his earlier oath, “the word of the Veda” (beda bānī, v. 2), but all
in the cause of making a countervailing vow come true—the vow of his
devotee. Bhishma had vowed that he would cause Krishna to take up a
weapon in the Bharata war, and when Krishna reached for the wheel, that
vow was complete.
The Mahābhārata is content to present this about-face in its own terms,
but the Bhāgavata is more guarded. Rather than have Krishna simply
attack with his own weapon, the sudarśan discus (cf. Mbh 6.55.83-86), it
depicts him as having been unarmed. Krishna therefore has to reach for
the wheel of the chariot he was driving (dhtarathacaraṇo, BhP 1.9.37) and
use that as if it were his accustomed discus. Surdas does not definitively
commit himself to the latter position, in that he designates the weapon
with the word chakra (v. 1), which can mean either “wheel” or “discus”,
but the fact that Krishna “takes it in his hand” (kara līnau, v. 1) does seem
to lean in the direction of the Bhāgavata. The “fine vision” (sudarśan >
sudarasana, v. 7) that Bhishma then saw was at once the gorgeously bloody
sight of Krishna that Surdas conjures up in verses 5-6 and the disc of that
name, whether in function (if it was the chariot wheel) or in essence (if
the discus itself).
The pun on sudarshan guides the poem to its completion and introduces
another startling juxtaposition. It is this. Clearly the person who sees
this vision is Bhishma, who bows before Krishna and, according to the

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 Did Surdas Perform the Bhāgavata-purāṇa?  221

Bhāgavata, delivers an extended hymn of praise describing what he sees

(BhP 1.9.32-36). Bhishma is the devotee, servant, or subject (jana, v. 2) to
whom reference is made near the beginning of the poem. Yet when the
vision has been described and the poet uses his signature to indicate that
he is about to conclude, he suddenly changes perspective by naming the
beholder of the vision not as Bhishma but as Brahma (birañci, v. 7). The
gods are often thought of as witnessing momentous events in the life of
Krishna, so Brahma’s presence makes sense to that degree, but there is a
more particular stimulus for the confused manner in which Brahma reacts
to seeing Krishna. He is disoriented by the affinity between the sight of
Krishna raising the wheel or discus on his arm and the image of a lotus
emerging from the dark waters of a lake on its stem. He finds himself in
a powerful time-warp, since he himself was emitted from the navel of
Vishnu on an umbilical lotus at the beginning of time. Considering the
vast power of Krishna’s discus for destruction, this vision of a return to
creation is a stark event, perhaps foreshadowing the new age that will
emerge from the global carnage of the great Bharata war as a whole.
In the Mahābhārata (6.55.89-90), the simile of the primeval lotus is
used to describe the appearance of Krishna’s arm and weapon at this
moment, but it is apparently Sur’s own invention to bring Brahma himself
on the scene. Once again I think it is likely that his impetus for doing
so came from the Bhāgavata-purāṇa. Although the Bhāgavata makes no
mention of Brahma, the personal deity, it does feature his antetype, the
impersonal Brahman, at just this point in the story. The Mahābhārata goes
on to describe a series of further confrontations before Bhishma actually
expires, and makes it clear that Arjun was the one who killed him. But
it is the Bhāgavata that focuses its account of Bhishma’s death on the
encounter with Krishna himself. It says this caused Bhishma to arrest his
own breathing and merge into Brahman (brahmaṇi niṣkale, BhP 1.9.44).
Where is Surdas between these two master narratives? Somewhere
in the middle. He seems to personify Brahman and thereby arrive at a
new perspective on the Mahābhārata’s navel-lotus simile, while at the
same time suggesting a close identification between the aged warrior-
sage Bhishma and the aged god Brahma. These two are made to share a
common vision, though with very different reactions. Bhishma’s calm is
Brahma’s disquietude, and Bhishma’s death is Brahma’s birth.
It is a remarkable ending, I think, a remarkable way of re-envisioning
a moment absolutely pivotal to the way in which the great Bharata

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222  Tellings and Texts

battle will unfold. This recasting is very much in the spirit with which
the Bhāgavata tells the story, yet with a spicing—or rather, to follow the
metaphor of soup, a stock—that takes us back to the Epic. Sur seems to
invite his hearers to recall that there are distinctive disparities between
the ways in which these two great authorities treat this tale, but his mode
of displaying this is not to point it out in the fashion of a commentator.
Rather, he performs his way through to a new solution. In doing so, is he
performing the Bhāgavata more than the Mahābhārata? No, in the case of
this poem I don’t think we want to be forced into making that decision. In
fact, it would be precisely false to do so.
Now let us take a look at a second performance of this same episode—
an encore, so to speak, though most likely it was originally performed
independently of the composition we have just studied. Intriguingly,
though, one verbal sequence that it contains—the first half of verse 3—
actually repeats what we have already heard in “Madhav, in anger, took
the wheel in his hand”. Here is our second poem:

1 vā paṭa pīta kī phaharāni (Bryant edition §357, NPS 279)

2 kara dhari cakra carana kī dhāvani nahi bisarati vaha bāni
3 ratha te uteri avani ātura hvai kaca raja kī lapaṭāni
4 mānahu siṅgha saila te nikase mahā matta gaja jāni
5 jihi gupāla merau panu rāṣyau meṭi beda kī kāni
6 soi ba sura sahāi hamārai nikaṭa bhae prabhu āni
1 The way his yellow garments fluttered,
2 The wheel in his hand, how swiftly he ran—
I’ll never forget how he appeared
3 When he stepped from his chariot to earth, all astir.
With bits of dust smeared through his hair he seemed
4 Like a lion emerging from a mountain lair
on sensing some great, mad elephant.
5 The same Gopal who fulfilled my vow,
who brushed aside the Vedic sense of right—
6 This is the one who’s coming to my aid:
such a Lord, says Sur, and yet so near.

This time we quickly recognise the moment. But now we see events
directly through Bhishma’s eyes; it is he who speaks. In consequence,
the principal metaphor he offers for what he sees—that Krishna’s wild
hair looks like the dusty mane of a lion moving in for the kill (v. 4)—is
more in keeping with his own dramatic situation. It is martial rather than
cosmological.

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 Did Surdas Perform the Bhāgavata-purāṇa?  223

The individual elements of this image are put forward when the
Bhāgavata-purāṇa (BhP 1.9.32-42) recounts the battle of Krishna and
Bhishma, and there too Bhishma is the narrator. In the Bhāgavata, however,
the description of Krishna’s hair being suffused with dust that horses
had kicked up (BhP 1.9.34) is at several verses’ remove from the brief
reference to his acting as ferocious as a lion faced with an elephant (BhP
1.9.37), which also occurs in the Mahābhārata. Sur displays his originality
by drawing these two into direct proximity with one another.
The vow mentioned in verse 5 refers to Bhishma’s pledge to see
Krishna standing before him as a warrior before he dies. To fulfill this
wish, Krishna must abrogate his own pledge, his Vedic oath (beda kī kāni,
“the Vedic sense of right”, v. 5) not to step upon the field of battle and take
sides in the Bharat war (BhP 1.9.37). Like the author of the Bhāgavata, Sur
depicts Krishna as a person who places the honour and desire of those
devoted to him above any other morality, even when the latter is thought
of as being sanctioned by the Veda as in the case of a promise that ought
to be kept. In both texts—the Bhāgavata and the Sursāgar—the lesson is
that with Krishna the religion of bhakti is victorious over its predecessor,
the religion of royal and martial dharma.
The poet’s use of the title Gopal (gupāla, v. 5) seems intended to
contribute to this shift of emphasis. As the darling of the cowherds and
protector of cattle, Gopal is not strictly speaking a figure who belongs in
the epic milieu where this poem is set. But once again there is a precedent
in the Bhāgavata, which allows Bhishma, in the course of a long encomium
to Krishna, to mix in a reference to the lad who had such a profound effect
on the cowherd women of Braj (gopavadhvaḥ, BhP 1.9.40). As in the case
of the lion metaphor, however, Sur achieves a sharper juxtaposition, and
one can say the same for the note on which he concludes. When Krishna
comes to Bhishma’s aid, drawing near to fulfill his vow, everyone in the
audience knows what form this help will take: death!
Here we do seem to have left the Mahābhārata behind in favour of the
Bhāgavata’s telling of the tale. But does that alter the balance sufficiently
that we can now be convinced we ought to think of Sur as specifically
“performing the Bhāgavata”, given the evidence that these two poems
provide us? Obviously not in the sense that might be expected on the
basis of the roster of Bhāgavata performers with which we began. Sur is
far too independent a poet to allow for such a characterisation. He not
only presents what he has received; he kneads it, he contests it. One might
even say he twists it.

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224  Tellings and Texts

This is hardly the only occasion on which we can see such a process
at work. The most famous is undoubtedly presented by Sur’s bhramargit
poems, where the gopis of Braj are visited by Uddhav, the messenger
Krishna has sent to console them after he has departed for Mathura. As the
Bhāgavata reports this moment, the gopis receive Uddhav’s advaita sermon
about how Krishna is always with them despite his seeming absence with
a measure of equanimity, even satisfaction. When Surdas approaches this
theme, by contrast, the gopis reject Uddhav’s message altogether. In the
Bhāgavata both they and Uddhav get a chance to say their piece; in the
Sursāgar Uddhav is practically reduced to silence.
One might think that this disparity merely reflects two storytelling
traditions that have moved apart from one another as independent
performative genres, and there must surely be an element of that. But
every so often we can see that the Bhāgavata is specifically on Sur’s mind—
or at least that certain of its distinctive phrases echo in his consciousness.
Consider, for example, the bhramargit poem in which Sur’s gopis say they
are suspicious of the message Uddhav brings because the very form of
its delivery—by a messenger they perceive as a “bee”—shows Krishna
has been consorting with a species famous for “cheating hearts” (kaitava
cita).32 In putting things this way, Sur does not repeat or “translate” the
Bhāgavata, but, rather, turns it on its head. At the appropriate point in
the Bhāgavata’s narration it is Uddhav, not Krishna, who is excoriated for
being “the friend of a cheat” (kitavabandho, BhP 10.47.12), while in the
words of Surdas that allegation, made with exactly the same term (Skt.
kitava > Brj. kaitava), is leveled against Krishna instead. Knowledgeable
members of Sur’s audience would surely have appreciated the reference
and understood its ironic relation to the poem they were hearing.
Given all this, it is perhaps fitting that we do not really know—contrary
to what we are told by the Caurāsī vaiṣṇavan kī vārtā—just what Sur’s
performative circumstances might have been. This Vallabhite text wants
him to be a straightforward temple musician, serving Krishna in kirtan at
the great shrine atop Mount Govardhan or serenading him in the mandir
of Navanitapriyaji in Gokul. Yet there is actually no reason to believe
that these temples—or any temples—were his exclusive métier. Certainly
there is no reason to believe he was a Vallabhite. Sur may indeed have
performed in temples, but it is also possible to envision him singing his

32 Bryant §268.3. The Nagaripracharini Sabha edition, which follows a more recent
manuscript tradition, loses this meaning (kaisaiṅ cita, NPS 4211.3).

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 Did Surdas Perform the Bhāgavata-purāṇa?  225

poetry in homes, in satsangs, in what Anantadas calls mahotsavs, in salons,

or in courts. And which court, if so? It seems to me unlikely that the
Surdas Abu’l Fazl mentions was the same as “our” Surdas,33 so I like the
fact that Muhammad Kabir, the author of the Afsānah-i shāhān, written
early in the seventeenth century, wants to argue instead for the court of
Islam Shah, his Afghan forebear.34 But there too we encounter a record
that can hardly be taken at historical face value.
We also do not know what Sur’s musical situation was, except that to
characterise it as dhrupad, as is often done, skirts a number of difficulties
attending that characterisation. The most striking of these is that poems
attributed to Surdas in the sixteenth century show no preference for the
four-verse pattern that seems to have been considered to be one of the
great hallmarks of classical dhrupad practice.35 In fact, such poems are rare.
Eight-verse padas, which could also be performed on a four-part scheme,
are much more numerous, but no more so than poems that contain six
verses instead; other lengths are also possible. In all this one sees that the
contrast between Surdas and Tansen or Haridas, true exemplars of the
dhrupad style, is marked.36 For Sur, the term vishnupad/bishnupad, invoked
for example in ‘Abd al-Hamid Lahori’s Pādshāhnāma (1627-1647), may be
more accurate, but we do not know exactly what it connoted—if indeed
the connotation was exact.37

33 I have argued this point in several places, most recently Hawley (2005), p. 190, and
(2009), pp. 21-23.
34 I reproduce the text from the edition of Parameshvari Lal Gupta along with Aditya
Behl’s translation in Hawley (2005), pp. 191-92; see also Hawley (2009), p. 19. See also
Gupta, Kutuban kt Mgāvatī (Varanasi: Vishvavidyalay Prakashan, 1967), p. 39; and
Mīr Sayyid Mañjhan Shattārī Rājgīrī: Madhumālatī, An Indian Sufi Romance, trans. by
Aditya Behl and Simon Weightman, with Shyam Manohar Pandey (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000), pp. xii-xiii.
35 Sahasarasa: Nāyak Bakhśu ke dhrupadoṅ kā saṅgrah, ed. by Prem Lata Sharma (New Delhi:
Sangeet Natak Akademi, 1972); cf. Richard Widdess, ‘The Emergence of Dhrupad’, in
Hindustani Music: Thirteenth to Twentieth Centuries, ed. by Joep Bor, Françoise “Nalini”
Delvoye, Emmie te Nijenhuis, and Jane Harvey (New Delhi: Manohar, 2010), pp.
117-40.
36 See Hawley, Introduction, part 2, section 5, “Performance, Past and Present”, in Into
Sūr’s Ocean: Poetry, Context, and Commentary (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Oriental
Series, 2016).
37 Françoise “Nalini” Delvoye, “The Verbal Content of Dhrupad Songs from the Earliest
Collections”, Dhrupad Annual 5 (1990), p. 98. The association between Sur and
vishupad apparently remained strong enough in musical memory that N. Augustus
Willard worked it into the taxonomy of vocal compositions he provided when writing
his Treatise on the Music of Hindoostan at the court of Banda in 1834. See William Jones
and N. August Willard, Music of India (Calcutta: Susil Gupta, 1962), p. 70.

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226  Tellings and Texts

There are also problems with raga. Early manuscripts of the Sursāgar
often associate quite different ragas with a given pada. Luckily the distance
between shabd and svar or alternatively matu and dhatu—between verbal
text and musical rendition—is sufficiently great in the genre of the pada
that we can discern something of the poet’s performative sensibility even
without knowing how it might have been expressed musically on any
particular occasion (cf. d’Hubert and Miner in this volume). As can be
judged from the Bhishma poems we have considered, the verbal logic of
these early Surdas padas is often sufficiently rigorous and tight that their
force can be appreciated without actually hearing them sung.38 Similarly,
we do not have to know where Sur himself performed or where other
early singers sang “his” padas to sense at least something of the impact
that might have been felt when sixteenth-century audiences encountered
them.
The multiple ragas that could be assigned to a given Surdas poem
in early manuscripts suggest a considerable malleability, as does the
range of performative circumstances that were imagined for them early
on, ranging from temple to court. And yet, the world in which we may
envision this poet flourishing is not infinitely diverse. If we miss the fact
that sometimes he is positioning himself in relationship to the Bhāgavata—
not just the way in which it tells the story of Krishna, but even its actual
words—we miss something quite important about the world out of which
Surdas comes and to which he sees himself as contributing. He may not
require each of his listeners to command a close knowledge of the Sanskrit
text of either the Mahābhārata or the Bhāgavata-purāṇa, but I would argue
that if they do, they are “ideal listeners” at least for poems of the type on
which we have been focusing. Not every pada that circulated in Surdas’s
name in the sixteenth century was as closely calibrated to precedent as
our two Bhishma poems seem to have been, but by contrast to the general

38 Here the classic analysis has been provided by Kenneth E. Bryant, Poems to the Child-
God: Structures and Strategies in the Poetry of Sūrdās (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1978), even though he does not restrict himself to padas that can be traced to the
sixteenth or seventeenth century. Bryant demonstrates how these poems developed
in “real” time, as against being the more or less static statements that might be
anticipated on the model of rasa theory (especially pp. 40-42). Richard Widdess has
observed, in a intriguingly parallel way, that early musical treatises on prabandha
relevant to a consideration of the historical meaning of the term dhrupad make a
strong distinction between verbal content (bani, matu) and performance realisation
(dhatu), being far more interested in the former than the latter. See Widdess (2010).

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 Did Surdas Perform the Bhāgavata-purāṇa?  227

run of padas that appear in standard editions of the Sursāgar today, the
proportion of such poems is surprisingly high. In poems like these, the
singer expected his hearers not just to experience a familiar telling of a
familiar tale but to reframe what they thought they knew, to see it all
again. Clearly, it was the function of the best performances to make that
possible, and in this regard Sur was often a master performer.39
We learn from the Bhāgavata māhātmya that when its adored parent text
is properly performed, the hearers come to life. In the frame story, Bhakti,
who has been restored to radiant youth in Brindavan, is burdened by her
two bedraggled sons Jnana and Vairagya: knowledge, that is, and the sort
of religious discipline that implies detachment from the workaday world.
The Bhāgavata māhātmya achieves its climax when, in its last chapter, Jnana
and Vairagya join their mother in hearing a seven-day performance of
the Bhāgavata-purāṇa at Haridwar. The result: they spring back to life.
Sur’s performance of the Bhāgavata-purāṇa is obviously very different. It
does not rigorously repeat—it rigorously unsettles and recovers—and in
that way it seems to do just the opposite of what the Bhāgavata māhātmya
prescribes. But note the similarity as well. Unlike what has so often been
said about the excellence of these poems, they appeal not just to bhakti but
to knowledge and discipline—a knowledge of the tradition out of which
they come, and the discipline that makes it possible, with discrimination,
to enter it all over again.
Was Surdas performing the Bhāgavata-purāṇa? Certainly not as the
Bhāgavata māhātmya leads us either to expect or to desire. Nor after the
manner of poets like Lalachdas or, in certain of their works, Hariramvyas
or Nanddas. Sur’s relation to the Bhāgavata-purāṇa is far more independent.
It may sometimes be his subject, but it is never his master. Does this
make Surdas less a performer of the Bhāgavata than these quite explicit
Bhāgavata poets? In a certain sense, obviously, yes. But if we can be more
expansive in our view, if we can let Sur engage the Bhāgavata in his own
way—inventive, ironic, sometimes even contrary—then it makes sense to
say that Sur often performs the Bhāgavata even better than they do. In
imagining such a possibility, it may be helpful to think of Sur enunciating
the Bhāgavata not just in relation to a “parent text”, something learned in
the course of a decent Vaishnava education and held in memory thereafter,

39 See Bryant (1978), especially pp. 26-39, 134-41.

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228  Tellings and Texts

but in relation to the several genres of live Bhāgavata performance with

which he was probably surrounded.40 If so, he would evidently have been
reacting to—and contributing to—this range of performative possibility
from roughly the opposite point of view than comes forward from the
author of the Bhāgavata māhātmya a century or so later. Sur was crafting,
nuancing, expanding the boundaries of the text; the Māhātmya was trying
to standardise and clamp down.
A lovely window onto the sort of tensions that may have emerged as
various performers of the Bhāgavata reacted to each other in early modern,
Brajbhasha-speaking North India comes to us from an unexpected source.
It is once again the varta literature of the Vallabha sampraday, but this
time not the original collection of eighty-four such vartas attributed
to Gokulnāth, the Caurāsī vaiṣṇavan kī vārtā, but the subsequent 252
vartas that emerged from the hand of his nephew Hariray, Do sau bāvan
vaiṣṇavan kī vārtā. In one of these vartas we hear that the Chaube Brahmins
of Mathura didn’t like the idea that Nanddas, the major Pushtimargi poet
to whom we have already referred, had set about to render the entirety
of the Bhāgavata’s tenth book into bhasha. They were sure it was going to
cut into their own storytellers’ (kathavachak) business, and they appealed
to Nanddas’s guru, Vitthalnath, to make his pupil stop. We are told that
Vitthalnath obliged.41
How is this story to be received? Does the author expect us to smile
at the self-serving anxieties of Mathura’s famously irascible old guard, or
should we be recalling that actually Vitthalnath had good reason to try to
keep the peace with these Chaubes? After all, by the time this account was
being written his sampraday was making substantial inroads into Mathura
society. Whichever the more likely scenario, it is doubtful we should take
the Do sau bāvan vaiṣṇavan kī vārtā’s story at face value, any more than we

40 To a lesser extent the same must have been true for the Mahābhārata, as well. Sheldon
Pollock has drawn attention to “the continuing importance of the auditory experience”
as hinted in the opening dohas of Vishnudās’s vernacular Mahābhārata, written at
Gwalior in about 1435 (2006, p. 306 n43). And we know that the Mahābhārata was
translated into Persian (as Razm-nāmā) at the court of Akbar during the early 1580s
and, interestingly, that the Harivaṃśa, traditionally considered to be its appendix
(khila), was included in the project. Both were handsomely illustrated; see Robert
Skelton, ‘Mughal Paintings from the Harivaṃśa Manuscript’, Victoria and Albert
Museum Yearbook 2 (1970), 41-54.
41 Dinadayalu Gupta, Aṣṭachāp aur Vallabh-sampradāy, 2nd edn (Allahabad: Hindi
Sahitya Sammelan, 1970), Vol. 1, p. 146 (pp. 140-41). Sheldon Pollock has taken note of
the significance of this passage (2006), p. 312.

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 Did Surdas Perform the Bhāgavata-purāṇa?  229

should accept its claim, offered in the preceding prasang, that Nanddas
was the younger brother of Tulsidas.42 As suggested earlier, I find it far
easier to believe that Nanddas abandoned his Bhāṣā dasamskandh for his
own reasons. After he had ratcheted up his performative gears to meet
the demands of the Bhāgavata’s celebrated chapters on the ras, as he did
in his Rāsapancādhyāyī, he may have found it unappealing to return to
the straightforward task of translation that he had earlier begun. This
seems natural enough if we think of the career of the poet himself, but
the idea of such a lapsed project on the part of one of the sampraday’s most
famous figures might well have seemed embarrassing to Hariray later on,
given his systematic temperament and devotedly sectarian point of view.
So he blamed the work-stoppage on others—the famously recalcitrant
Chaubes—while at the same time preserving the sampraday’s own claim
to agency by invoking the compassionate largess of Vitthalnath.
To Vallabhite eyes, at least in the mid- to late seventeenth century,
Nanddas and Surdas were guru-brothers. These two were very likely the
most luminous among the “eight seals” (ashtachhap) that the Pushtimargi
community claimed as its own, even if in point of historical fact Surdas
was not bound to Vallabha in the same way that Nanddas revered
Vitthalnath. Never mind. The Pushtimarg leaders felt they had to claim
Sur, and their efforts have borne impressive historical fruit: contrary to
fact though it is, few people today doubt that Sur’s inspiration came from
Vallabha. As the Vallabhites asserted their own Bhāgavata credentials,
adding to Vallabha’s foundational commentary a performance milieu that
pivoted on the ashtachhap, they crossed the boundary from Sanskrit to the
vernacular. They played an important part in baptising Brajbhasha as a
language of refinement, a “Sanskrit” of its own.
It is amusing to see the Chaubes deployed against Nanddas. If indeed
these local Brahmins stood for older modes of Braj religiosity and textual
accreditation—a Bhāgavat kathā tradition in which only the original
Sanskrit text had the right to be inscribed on the page—they ought to
have felt less anxiety in relation to Nanddas than in relation to his fictive
ashtachhap brother, Sur. Nanddas and his Vallabhite community were a
threat to the older Chaube networks, for sure, but an even greater threat
to any text-reciting expertise on the part of the Chaubes would have

42 Stuart McGregor comments on the manifest improbability of such a relationship,

observing among other things that if these two poets had been brothers, that fact
could hardly have gone unnoticed in the Bhaktamāl of Nabhadas (1973), pp. 33-34.

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230  Tellings and Texts

come from Brajbhasha poets and kathavachaks who were uninterested in

being anchored to this or that sectarian lineage. No other poet stands
more powerfully for the independence of Brajbhasha than Surdas. In this
respect he even more than Nanddas stands as a fitting symbol for the
liberal thrust of Bhāgavata performance that the Bhāgavata māhātmya seems
so eager to discipline and cap.
Given all this, it was only a matter of time until some editor cast a glance
at the Sursāgar, saw a text that had burgeoned with the compositions
of performers who took Sur’s seal as their own, and determined that
it should be aligned with the Bhāgavata-purāṇa rather than developing
in some protean fashion of its own. This moment occurred in the late
eighteenth century, a century or so after the Bhāgavata māhātmya seems
to have been composed. The editor in question grouped the Sur padas
before him in such a way that they seemed to correspond to the twelve-
skandha template by means of which the Bhāgavata itself is organised.
Some skandhas could claim very few Surdas poems, which may have
meant he had to commission several new padas to make his efforts
seem plausible. Is this enterprise to be interpreted as a stern exercise in
Sanskritic discipline or as an exuberant celebration of what vernacular
performance could achieve—a Bhāgavata of its own, one truly based on
the rhythms and practices of Brajbhasha? To me, both estimations seem
possible. Personally, I like the second.

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