Sur’s Ocean: Classic Hindi Poetry in Translation

By Surdas

“John Stratton Hawley miraculously manages to braid the charged erotic and divine qualities of Krishna, the many-named god, while introducing us—with subtle occasional rhyme—to a vividly particularized world of prayers and crocodile earrings, spiritual longing and love-struck bees.”
—Forrest Gander, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

An award-winning translation of Hindi verses composed by one of India’s treasured poets.

The blind poet Surdas has been regarded as the epitome of artistry in Hindi verse from the end of the sixteenth century, when he lived, to the present day. His fame rests upon his remarkable refashioning of the widely known narrative of the Hindu deity Krishna and his lover Radha into lyrics that are at once elegant and approachable. Surdas’s popularity led to the proliferation, through an energetic oral tradition, of poems ascribed to him, known collectively as the Sūrsāgar.

This award-winning translation reconstructs the early tradition of Surdas’s verse—the poems that were known to the singers of Surdas’s own time as his. Here Surdas stands out with a clarity never before achieved.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9780674293205

Book preview

Cover: Surʼs Ocean, Classic Hindi Poetry in Translation by Surdas

MURTY CLASSICAL LIBRARY OF INDIA

Sheldon Pollock, General Editor

Editorial Board

Whitney Cox

Francesca Orsini

Sheldon Pollock

Archana Venkatesan

SURDAS

SURʼS OCEAN

Classic Hindi Poetry in Translation

Translated by

JOHN STRATTON HAWLEY

MURTY CLASSICAL LIBRARY OF INDIA

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2023

Copyright © 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reserved

Jacket Designer: Gabriele Wilson

Cover art: (Radha) Credit: Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo; (cow) Darshanam

978-0-674-29017-4 (pbk.)

978-0-674-29320-5 (EPUB)

978-0-674-29321-2 (PDF)

First published in Murty Classical Library of India, Volume 5, Harvard University Press, 2015.

SERIES DESIGN BY M9DESIGN

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Suradasa, 1483?–1563?

[Poems. Selections. English]

Sur’s Ocean : poems from the early tradition / Surdas ;

translated by John Stratton Hawley.

p. cm. — (Murty Classical Library of India)

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Suradasa, 1483?-1563? —Translations into English.

2. Krishna (Hindu deity) —Poetry.

I. Hawley, John Stratton, 1941– translator.

PK1967.9.S9A2 2014

891.4'312—dc23 2014015933

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Krishna Growing Up

The Pangs and Politics of Love

The Bee Messenger

Lordly Encounters—and Others

The Poetʼs Petition and Praise

ABBREVIATIONS

NOTES TO THE TRANSLATION

GLOSSARY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

Surdas—the exemplary poet of Krishna whose name means literally "servant (dās) of the sun (sūr)"—is considered the epitome of poetic artistry in Brajbhasha, one of the major literary strands of Hindi. The language is deeply associated with Braj, the region that stretches south from Delhi along the River Jamuna where the god Krishna is remembered as having spent his boyhood. In the following well-known couplet Sur emerges as the sun itself:

The sun is Sur; Tulsi, the moon;

Keshavdas, the stars.

Today’s poets are little more than fireflies

flickering here and there.¹

Some critics have favored poets primarily associated with other literary streams of classical Hindi—notably Tulsidas and Kabir—but Sur’s claim to primacy can be traced back to the close of the sixteenth century, when Sur himself must have lived. Sometime around 1600 the hagiographer Nabhadas composed his influential Bhaktamāl (Garland of Lovers of God), and he singled out Surdas for a special sort of praise. Other poet-saints might be lauded as exemplars of intense devotion (bhakti)—like Mirabai for personal fearlessness or like Kabir for defiance of the rules of caste and class—but when the subject was poetry itself, Surdas had no peer:

What poet, hearing the poems Sur has made,

will not nod his head in pleasure?

Turns of phrase, epigrams, assonance, description—

in each regard his standing is immense:

Speech and loving sentiment he sustains,

conveying their meaning in wondrous rhyme.

In words he expresses Hari's playful acts,

which are mirrored in his heart by divine vision:

Birth, deeds, virtues, and beautiful form—

all are brought to light by his tongue.

Others cleanse their virtues and powers of insight

by tuning their ears to his fame.

What poet, hearing the poems Sur has made,

will not nod his head in pleasure?²

Nabhadas tells us that Sur was able to put into words Hari’s playful acts. The name Hari can designate any of the aspects of divinity associated with the god Vishnu, whether or not we think of these as being formally Vishnu’s avatars. In the sixteenth century, Hari was also frequently used as a designation for God in an even more general sense—the sort of God who loved to help those who loved him, and who had designed the world as a theater in which just such activities could be performed. So Hari can mean many things, but when Nabhadas speaks of Hari in connection with Surdas, he is clearly thinking of Krishna, the deity whose trademark is his līlās, his playful acts. To be sure, Sur addressed a series of lovely compositions to Ram and his consort Sita, and he also explored other aspects of the Ramayana, yet his primary narrative métier was the world of Krishna—from his childhood and amorous youth through to his role in the epic Mahabharata. In this selection we feature that alone—except for poems of vinaya (humility), so strikingly personal in tone, which come at the end.

The Blind Poet

For many generations it has been understood that Surdas was blind, and to that is attributed the clarity of his spiritual vision. We do not know exactly when it became popular to regard Surdas in this way, but we know that the story was told in a number of forms. In one version, Sur is granted a vision of Krishna and then requests the deity to remove his faculty of sight so that nothing he might see subsequently could dilute the splendor of what he had witnessed.³ In another version, however, Sur is blind from birth.

This is the form the story takes when told by the religious community that has positioned itself at least since the mid-seventeenth century as Sur’s most influential interpreter: the Vallabh Sampraday (Tradition of Vallabh) or Pushtimarg (Path of Fulfillment). The group’s worship is focused entirely on Krishna and members revere the theologian Vallabh (or more formally, Vallabhacharya—Master Vallabh) as their founder. One of Vallabh’s grandsons, Gokulnath, is traditionally believed to have been the author of an interconnected series of religious biographies called Caurāsī Vaiṣṇavan kī Vārtā (Accounts of Eighty-four Vaishnavas), which includes the Surdas biography that everyone knows. The singing of Sur’s poetry—along with that of other poets regarded as constituting the eight seals initiated by Vallabh into the sectarian fold—is one of the central acts of Vallabhite worship.⁴

In his late seventeenth-century commentary on the Accounts of Eighty-four Vaishnavas, Hariray, the nephew of Gokulnath, makes clear that Sur was blind from birth, but a series of internal considerations argues against regarding this deeply theological text as a simple report of historical fact. Equally to the point, the corpus of poetry that circulated in Surdas’s name in the sixteenth century (rather than the later inflated corpus described below) alludes clearly to the poet’s blindness on only a single occasion, and even then, without implying he was blind from birth.⁵ In this poem, in fact, it is not entirely certain that a physical malady is meant rather than a spiritual one, but what is clear is that poems of this sort—poetry of petition and protest typically labeled vinaya—were distasteful to the Vallabhites. In their view, Sur could have uttered such poems only early in life, before Vallabh gave him a direct apprehension of Krishna’s līlās by channeling toward Sur, in a mystic initiatory instant, the true meaning of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, the great tenth-century Lore of the Blessed One revered by Vaishnavas everywhere.

As a document of faith this encounter between Surdas and Vallabh makes for a beautiful story, but at the level of fact there are multiple difficulties.⁶ For one thing, none of the Surdas poems that circulated in the sixteenth century—unlike several that were added to the corpus later on—makes any reference to Vallabh. It takes a good bit of footwork on the part of Vallabhite hagiographers to make the record look otherwise. Another important fact is that no early manuscript of the Sur corpus—what by 1640 would come to be called the Sūrsāgar, or Sur’s Ocean—places the vinaya poems at the beginning; several, in fact, do the opposite. Furthermore, none of the earliest manuscripts containing Sur’s poems is formatted according to the twelve-book plan of the Bhāgavata. Sur was far from translating the Bhāgavata into Brajbhasha, so the thought that Vallabh was the midwife of a Sanskrit-to-vernacular transformation is out of kilter in the first place.⁷

Finally, one must factor in the reality that the authorial identity called Surdas actually describes a literary tradition that was many decades, even centuries, in the making. Manuscripts that collected poems attributed to Surdas tended to expand over the years as ever more poems were added. All these carry the Sur signature in one of its several forms, but very probably they were composed by a great many poets. The story of Vallabh meeting Surdas radically foreshortens this textual reality in the course of giving it biographical form.

By the same token, any attempt to assign birth and death dates to Surdas is doomed to fail. Such dates rest ultimately on Sur’s presumed connections with Vallabh and his son Vitthalnath, and those connections are hypothetical at best. The name Surdas does appear among musicians whom Abu’l-Fazl says performed at the court of Akbar (r. 1556–1605), but it is highly unlikely that our Surdas is meant. Biographically speaking, all we can know is that this great poet lived somewhere in north India in the course of the sixteenth century. Literarily, however, we know more.

Surdas and the Sur Tradition

The oldest extant dated manuscript that contains poems attributed to Sur comes from the year 1582. It was written in Fatehpur, some 70 miles north of Jaipur (or rather, Amer, its predecessor—Jaipur did not yet exist), and it comprises 239 poems attributed to Sur, along with a number credited to other poets.⁸ 239 is a smallish number. Only later do collections of Sur’s poems assume the oceanic dimensions appropriate to the designation Sūrsāgar, as in the 1640 manuscript mentioned above, which contains 795 poems.⁹ Once applied, though, the title became very popular. Later manuscripts often adopt it, and they tend to expand this ocean of poems further and further with the passing of years. By the nineteenth century, there was a manuscript containing almost 10,000 poems.¹⁰

Who then composed this ocean? We can answer the question in one of three ways. The traditional response is to say that a single individual was responsible for generating the entire corpus: Surdas composed the Sūrsāgar. This position forces us to explain the varying sizes of different anthologies, especially the smallest among them, as the result of insufficient efforts at collecting the vast number of poems that were actually available. In the Vallabhite tradition, this number is pegged at 125,000. It may well be that each of the earliest manuscripts, written in different places and at different times, captured only a portion of the Surdas poetry circulating in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But the conviction that a single poet produced an oeuvre so massive that even today we are still trying to recover its full extent makes little sense of the fact that anthologies of poetry attributed to Sur increased in size at a more or less regular rate through the years. Moreover, why would it have been harder to remember the poet’s utterances early on, when they were fresh, than in later years? A far simpler explanation would be that as the years passed and the reputation of Sur’s Ocean grew, poets wishing to be well received or otherwise to contribute to the Surdas genre added new poems to the preexisting sea. When they did so, they spoke in the voice of Surdas, as attested in each poem’s final verse, where the poet’s oral signature (chāp, seal, or bhaṇitā, utterance) typically appears. This makes sense. The signature was intended more to attest to the genre and authority of a composition—to align it with Surdas—than to designate the historical person who gave the genre its particular shape.¹¹

Suppose we grant, then, that Sur’s Ocean is not a static thing produced by a single poet, but rather a Sur tradition, as Kenneth Bryant was the first to say.¹² What does this make us conclude about the nature of its authorship? One approach would be to abandon any sort of language that would imply the agency of a single, original Surdas—the sort of person Nabhadas had in mind. Instead, we would adhere strictly to the conditions of our knowledge, admitting that nothing like an autograph copy can exist in a body of poetry that was largely the precipitate of oral performance. Plainly a multiplicity of Surdases must have been involved in