In the post-Gupta period India, Hindus worshipping Visnu came to be known as Vaisnavas, and those worshipping Siva, Saivites. The Vaisnavas predominated northern India and the other sect the south.
A significant development of Vaisnavism was the Krsna cult which grew round the love of Radha and Krsna. Jayadeva, the court poet of Laksmanasena (twelfth century), gave a highly sensual account of this love in his poem, the Gitagovinda. An even more erotic narration was given in the Brahma-Vaivarta Purana. Caitanya, the mystic saint of India, was also a Krsna devotee, but of the spiritual kind. He attached no significance to caste or community, and one of his prominent disciples was a Muslim. There were many Vaisnava saints in the south, for example Ramanuja, Nimbarka, Madhava, Vallabha, the Alvars and the Kartabhajas. All ot them were for the worship of a god with form. Rama, another incarnation of Visnu, also had worshippers, some of whom like Ramasakheji considered him as much as Jayadeva conceived of Krsna. These devotees were known as rasikas.
Of the Saivites there were the Virasaivas who believed in the complete union of the soul with god through the power called sakti, and the Saivasiddhantas who recognized the reality of the world and the plurality of souls. Midway between the monoism of Sankara and the dualism of Ramanuja, there was Srikantha who believed that karma (action) decided a man’s fate, but it was subject to god’s grace.
The (devotional) movement, which swept over the greater part of India at this time, also found many followers. Some of the bhakti sects, like the Radhavallabhas, gave Radha a position superior to Krsna. They believed the only male in the universe was Krsna (purusa), all the others being females (prakrits). The followers of the sect imagined they were friends of Radha. They put on a woman’s dress, took feminine names and behaved like women. Some of them favoured extra-marital love too.
Others of the bhakti school, like Ramananda, Ravidasa, Kabir, Jnanesvara, Namadeva, Ekanatha, Tukarama and Ramadasa, most of them being of humble origin, were purely spiritual in their devotion.
The later medieval period of Hindi poetry (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) was that of the ritikala poets (also called srngara-kala, from srngara meaning ‘love’ and kala meaning ‘age’). The poets of this period, of whom Bihari was one, wrote mainly about love in all its aspects. Hindi poets of this period termed the lover as a nayaka (literally ‘an eminent person’), and the loved woman as a nayika (literally ‘a beautiful woman’). But they made many minute classifications of the nayakas and nayikas they wrote about, particularly of the nayikas. These were mainly on the basis of the woman’s nature, condition and intensity of her passion. The poet Kesavadas mentions eight kinds of nayikas and Bharatamuni fourteen. Broadly speaking, they were classified under three main heads, the svakiya, the parakiya and the vesya or sadharani. Their characteristics were mentioned as follows :
The svakiya was the highest type of womanhood, sharing the yearnings, inclinations, pleasures and sorrows of her lover. She was spontaneously ready for love-making and had no fear of public censure beacuase she observed all the social conventions in her love relations.
The parakiya, on the contrary, had fear of being censured because she was unconventional. If a man loved a married woman who was not his own wife, that woman was called a parakiya. Clearly the parakiya’s love was illicit, and the stronger her longing the greater was bound to be her fear of wagging tongues. Of the parakiyas there were two kinds-the kanya who was younger, less experienced and more secretive about her love, and the prautha who was older, adept in love-making, lustful and shameless, and carried on openly with her lover, caring little for what people might say. It wouldn’t be wrong to call her a woman.
Other ritikala poets like Sur, Nandadasa, Krparama, Rahim and Ghananda, had still more minute distinctions. These were on the basis of intensity of love, qualities, and moods. According to the intensity of love, women were classified as jyestha and Kanistha, i.e., the former having intense love and the Kanistha kind somewhat less. On the basis of qualities the classification was three-fold, namely uttama, madhyama and adhama (good, middling and low). From the aspect of mood there were as many as eight kinds of nayiks. It is beyond the scope of this brief introduction to go into the details of the characteristics of each of these.
The nayakas were not given much importance inasmuch as we do not find such a detailed classification of them in Hindi love poetry.The poet Kesavadasa mentions just four types, viz. the agreeable, the dexterous, the deceitful and the brazen.Ritikala poetry was a departure from the devotional one which had become popular from the mid-fifteenth century to the mid-seventeenth, and of which Tulsi, Sur, Kabir and Mira were exponents. The ritikala poets turned from the spiritual to the sensuous, from introspection to the pursuit of external beauty. It was not a break from the past, but rather a transformation of it. The love they wrote about was sublime, not coarse. Very few of their women were wantons. They glanced shyly at their lovers from behind casement windows. Very little of their love-making was narrated in all its details. It was suggestive and symbolic. The art of the ritikala poets, however, was not only circumscribed-though within that limit they were superb-it was also short-lived. Spiritualism had been the soul of Indian culture right from the Vedas. To transform the spiritualist into the voluptuary was as vain as to erase an indelible ink mark. The ritikala poets wrote in a characteristically ornate style, putting the entire battery of embellishment, figures of speech, metrical variations, rhetoric and poetic artifice to their task. But while they charmed the minds of their readers they could not tug at their heartstrings. In this the bhakti poets held their ground. So the ritikala poets had to bring in Radha and Krsna to sanctify their sensuality. That was not difficult, for Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda and the Bhagavata Purana gave them a ready-made background.Bihari strikes the entire gamut of ritikala poetry, the ornateness of language and diction, the sensuous concept of beauty and the voluptousness of love. He describes the beauty of adolescent and youthful girls, and sometimes of middle-aged women. Occasionally it is a lovely rustic belle flaunting her robust charms, wearing a necklace of beads or of strikingly colourful seeds. The beauty of nature and of the seasons is also described by Bihari with equal charm. But most of his verses are naturally about love and love-making and the bewitching charm of lovely women, for these form the backbone of srngara. The nayika in all her moods – amorous in love-making, angry when wronged, sorrowful in separation and thrilled by the union with her lover – form the core of his love poetry.
Bihari put love on a high pedestal. For him it did not mean just sex. He prized equally the sweet strains of music, the haunting melody of song, and the ecstasy of verse. But the overpowering passion of youth, he believed, carried everything before it, like a river in flood. Bihari was what the Hindi poets call a rasika. This implies one who has a deep emotional response to beauty, not only in the human form, but in everything, as for example in nature or the arts, a moving strain of music, a haunting melody, or a glorious sunset. It is not only that which stris the heart which is beautiful, but also that which elevates the mind and the soul. So was it with love also.
In one of his verses he says, ‘That sublime ocean which connoisseurs of beauty and love can’t fathom, even after diving in it a thousand times, seems to be a mere ditch, easily crossed, to people with carnal minds’. His object was to elevate love and beauty to a point where they turn from the coarse to the sublime, and this was not an easy task.
Bihari says: ‘The spoken words are of no account, because they are false. That’s why perhaps Brahma (the Creator) has made eyes for expressing what lies in the heart.’
The concept of Beauty in Bihari’s Poetry
A notable feature of Bihari’s descriptions of human beauty is the quaintness of the imagery he uses. Describing the adolescent girl he says, ‘Youth swells out some parts of her body at the cost of others which it makes slender, like a rapacious official depriving those who are not in his favour, of their wealth, to enrich his favorites.’ The ornaments a girl wears are ‘as a doormat for onlookers to wipe their glances on, so that her body retains its shine’! The slightly raised breasts of an adolescent girl can be seen by peering carefully at them ‘as the abstruse meaning of a poem revealed only by close study’. The swelling breasts of a woman make men abandon their virtue as ‘travellers avoiding a bandit-infested hill road. A woman’s chin is so charming that strangled by the noose of her smile, her admirer lies dead in its hollow.
Indian poets often describe a woman’s beautiful limbs in exaggerated terms. Bihari sometimes uses this device. About the slenderness of a woman’s waist he says, ‘People gather she must have a waist because they hear she has one. No one has actually seen it’! ‘The glances of men who look at the slender waist of another woman described, remain stuck to it as birds stuck fast in birdlime’! ‘The feet of a woman are so tender that blisters are liable to appear on them if they are rubbed clean with a brush of roses’! A barber’s wife who comes to apply red lacquer dye on a girl’s feet finds them so charming and rosy that she thinks it is pointless dyeing them red.
Bihari’s nayikas, like those described by other Hindi love poets, adorn themselves and wear ornaments on various parts of their body. Speaking of a girl’s eyes darkened with lamp-black, he says ‘who are these bandit-like eyes of yours about to rob ?’ In another verse he eulogizes the crimsom mark on a girl’s forehead. A girl’s lover is fascinated by the tip of her little finger reddened with henna dye. The usual traditional forms of adornments like the bindi (beauty mark on a girl’s forehead), henna, and so forth, are frequently mentioned. All the various kinds of ornaments worn by Indian women are described, for example the ear ornament and the nose-ring. Not infrequently the nayika’s natural beauty is so great that ornaments are of no use in enhancing it; indeed they may even mar it, as the case of the girl on whose body they are ‘as rust on a mirror’s face’!
The srngara poets were fascinated by the girl passing from childhood to adolescene. They wrote enthusiastically about such a girl’s lengthening eyes, shy sidelong glances, budding breasts, slimming waist, and the three folds appearing below her navel. Bihari, too, has many such descriptions. Girls are also depicted bathing in ponds and rivers or sporting in the water in pools in their mansions, or swinging on a wooden plank suspended from the branch of a tree in their garden.
(to be continued..)
