Gīta-govinda

Author: Jayadeva

Jayadeva's lyric drama (12th century, Bengal): twelve sargas, 289 verses and twenty-four aṣṭapadī songs, each named with the rāga and tāla it is sung in. It opens with a household errand — Nanda asks Rādhā to take Kṛṣṇa home, since it is dark and the boy is timid — and the walk home turns out to be a whole book long. Kṛṣṇa plays among the cowherd women and Rādhā withdraws in jealousy; then he leaves them all, repents on the bank of the Yamunā, and the friend carries messages between the two. The tryst fails: the appointed hour passes empty, and the night ends in reproach and separation. That separation is set down as an illness, symptom by symptom, in the language of physicians: fever, trembling, sleeplessness, fainting, with sandal, moonlight and the Malaya wind — every remedy for heat — burning instead of cooling. Only in the eleventh sarga does Rādhā cross the threshold of the bower; the last two sargas are the union, where the Lord asks for her foot on his head as an ornament and then obediently ties her girdle. The poem is still sung in the temple of Jagannātha at Purī.