Ten Govardhan Poems from the Early Sūrsāgar: Journal of Vaishnava Studies

Abstract

The Sūrsāgar as popularly conceived in the present day is a mammoth collection of poems—some five thousand in the standard Nāgarīpracāriṇī Sabhā edition. And if even that seems too puny, you can travel to the Government College in Datia and see a nineteenth-century Sūrsāgar that contains almost twice that many. Yet if we turn our attention to the sixteenth century, when Sūrdās poems began to be collected and the poet himself must have lived, we discover a total of only 433 pads. Obviously the collection has
grown exponentially over time, and primarily at the hands of other “Sūrs” than the original one. The same pattern presents itself if we look at the subset of Sūrdās pads that concern the great moment when Krishna lifted Mount Govardhan. In the Nāgarīpracāriṇī Sabhā edition 140 poems appear under that broad heading, but when we go back to the sixteenth century we find only four. In the pages that follow, I will begin with these four poems, offering a few comments on each. These poems are fashioned in such a way that members of the poet’s audience can witness the mountain-lifting scene as if they had been there themselves. They cause it to occur in present time.