Jagat

I have been asked by some to shorten my posts--when I make them. It is tough for me and I often leave posts unpublished because I don't want to post anything that is incomplete or trite. This is why I have so many unpublished posts languishing. Sometimes I go back and just post them as they are and I will probably go and do that with my backlog one of these days, when the inspiration hits me. Right now, the Gopāla-vijaya is presenting its own challenges. I wanted to finish the section on Dāna-līlā yesterday, but I am finding the language a bit difficult. There is a great deal of archaic vocabulary, and even though there is a good glossary in the back, there are times when neither this glossary, nor the dictionary, nor the glossary in SKK (the language of which is very similar and probably from the same region of Bengal), are helpful. There are also occasional syntax problems. On their own, these might not be too disruptive, but sometimes there is a series of verses in which in...

The Gopāla-vijaya by Devakinandan Singh Kavishekhar is an interesting work for several reasons, but mostly because it seems to represent a response to Radha Krishna and the Bhāgavatam in Bengal which is roughly contemporary to Chaitanya Mahaprabhu without necessarily being directly influenced by him. As is often the case, we have sparse historical information that can reliably pinpoint the author’s dates. So, Durgesh Bandyopadhyaya, the editor of this fine critical edition (Shanti Niketan: Vishwa Bharati, 1966) goes through an extensive discussion of the author’s dates without giving sufficient weight to the one piece of hard evidence: Devakinandan Singh, known for his literary skills as Kavishekhar, worked in the courts of both Hussein Shah (1493-1519) and Nusrat Shah (1519-1533). This makes him an exact contemporary of Chaitanya and a neighbor of Rupa and Sanatan at about the time that they leave for Vrindavan. But since he is not named as an associate of Chaitanya, we must co...