Vidyāpati: Bangīya padābali; songs of the love of Rādhā and Krishna

SONGS OF THE LOVE OF RĀDHĀ AND KRISHNA TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH BY ANANDA COOMARASWAMY AND ARUN SEN WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS FROM INDIAN PAINTINGS
LONDON: THE OLD BOURNE PRESS,
15 HOLBORN, E.C.
1915.
The whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite and corrupt. This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.
— William Blake.
Be drunken with love, for love is all that exists.
— Shamsi Tabrīz.
VIDYĀPATI THĀKUR is one of the most renowned of the Vaishnava poets of Hindustān. Before him there had been the great Jāyadeva, with his Gītā Govinda made in Sanskrit; and it is to this tradition Vidyāpati belongs, rather than to that of Rāmānanda, Kabīr, and Tul'si Dās, who sang of Rāma and Sītā. Vidyāpati's fame, though he also wrote in Sanskrit, depends upon the wreath of songs ( pada ) in which he describes the courtship of God and the Soul, under the names of Krishna and Rādhā. These were written in Maithilī, his mother-tongue, a dialect intermediate between Bengālī and Hindī, but nearer to the former. His position as a poet and maker of language is analogous to that of Dante in Italy and Chaucer in England. He did not disdain to use the folk-speech and folk-thought for the expression of the highest matters. Just as Dante was blamed by the classical scholars of Italy, so Vidyāpati was blamed by the pandits: he knew better, however, than they, and has well earned the title of Father of Bengālī literature.
Vidyāpati's Vaishnava padas are at once folk and cultivated art—just like the finest of the Pahārī paintings, where every episode of which he sings finds exquisite illustration. The poems are not, like many ballads, of unknown authorship and perhaps the work of many hands, but they are due to the folk in the sense that folk-life is glorified and popular thought is reflected. The songs as we have them are entirely the work of one supreme genius; but this genius did not stand alone, as that of modern poets must—on the contrary, its roots lay deep in the common life of fields and villages, and above all, in common faiths and superstitions. These were days when peasants yet spoke as elegantly as courtiers, and kings and cultivators shared one faith and a common view of life—conditions where all things are possible to art.