Person · Sanskrit poet of the Gita Govinda
Jayadeva
/dʑɐjɐˈdeːʋɐ/
Also known as Jayadēva, Jayadev, Jaydeva, Jaydev, Jaideva, Jaidev, Bhagat Jaidev
Jayadeva was the twelfth-century Sanskrit poet of the Gita Govinda, a sequence of songs on the love of Krishna and Radha that names the raga and tala for each song. Little of his life is certain, and three regions claim his birthplace. The poem has been sung nightly in the Jagannath temple at Puri, and two of his hymns stand in the Guru Granth Sahib, which makes him the earliest dated author in the Sikh scripture.
- Date
- c. 1170 – c. 1245
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered
Worth knowing
At the Badasinghara, the night ritual at Puri, the deities wear the Gita Govinda Khandua, a cloth with lines of the poem woven into it in ikat, traditionally supplied by the weavers of Kenduli Sasan.
His birthplace, Kindubilva, has been identified with Kenduli Sasan near Puri, Jaydev Kenduli in Birbhum and a Kenduli in Mithila. Odisha inscriptions place his schooling at Kurmapataka near Konark, while the Lakshmana Sena article names him among that Bengal king's court poets. The tradition that he married the dancer Padmavati at Puri is not supported by early commentators.
Connections (5)
- Devotional corpus onJagannatha Temple, Puri
Every night, at the Badasinghara, the last ritual of the Jagannath temple at Puri, the Gita Govinda is sung to Odissi ragas and talas such as Mangala Gujjari, a practice the temple traces to Jayadeva himself. Singing it became a mandatory seva of the maharis, recorded in inscriptions and the Madala Panji, and the earliest commentary on the poem, Udayanacharya's Bhavavibhavini Tika, was written in Odisha around 1190, soon after its composition.
- Court associationLakshmana Sena
Lakshmana Sena, who ruled Bengal from 1178 to 1206 and wrote Sanskrit verse himself, gathered Jayadeva, Dhoyin and Sharan as his court poets, alongside Halayudha Mishra and Umapati Dhara. He was a devoted Vaishnava who took the title Paramavaisnava, a fitting patron for a poem on Krishna and Radha. The Odisha account of Jayadeva's life at Puri and Kurmapataka sits uneasily beside this Bengal court, and both claims are still argued.
- BirthplaceJaydev Kenduli
The Gita Govinda names the poet's village as Kindubilva, and Jaydev Kenduli in Birbhum is one of three places that claim it, alongside Kenduli Sasan near Puri and a Kenduli near Jhanjharpur in Mithila. William Jones's 1792 translation took Cenduli in Kalinga as his origin, and several sixteenth-century texts call Jayadeva a man of Utkala. The Birbhum claim is a living tradition rather than a settled fact.
- Scriptural inclusion inHarmandir Sahib (Golden Temple)
Two hymns by Jayadeva, in a mixture of Sanskrit and eastern Apabhramsha, are included in the Guru Granth Sahib, whose first rendition, the Adi Granth, was installed in the Golden Temple at Amritsar on 1 September 1604. That makes a twelfth-century Vaishnava poet the earliest dated author of hymns in a scripture compiled centuries after his death. Accounts also record that his work deeply affected Guru Nanak when the first Sikh guru visited Puri.
- TransmissionSir William Jones
The first English translation of the Gita Govinda was made by Sir William Jones in 1792 and published by the Asiatic Society at Calcutta. F. H. van Dalberg turned Jones's English into German, and that is the version Goethe read; Friedrich Rückert began a German verse translation in 1829. Jones's version also fixed an early European view of the poet's origin, naming Cenduli in Kalinga, ancient Odisha, as his birthplace.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Jayadeva"; "Gita Govinda"; "Lakshmana Sena"; "Guru Granth Sahib". Barbara Stoler Miller (tr.), Love Song of the Dark Lord: Jayadeva's Gītagovinda (1977).
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