though general throughout Hindōstān, has since the time of Tulsī Dās adopted for poetic use the language of Oudh, called Awadhī or Baiswārī, a form of Eastern Hindī easily understood throughout the whole of the Gangetic valley. Thus these two dialects came to be, what they are to this day, the standard vehicles of poetic expression.
Subsequently to Rāmānuja his doctrine appears to have been set forth, about 1250, in the vernacular of the people by Jaidēo, a Brahman born at Kinduvilva, the modern Kenduli, in the Bīrbhūm district of Bengal, author of the Sanskrit Gītā Gōvinda, and by Nāmdēo or Nāmā, a tailor[1] of Mahārāshtra, of both of whom verses in the popular speech are preserved in the Ādi Granth of the Sikhs. But it was not until the beginning of the 15th century that the Brahman Rāmānand, a prominent Gōsāīṅ of the sect of Rāmānuja, having had a dispute with the members of his order in regard to the stringent rules observed by them, left the community, migrated to northern India (where he is said to have made his headquarters Galtā in Rajpūtānā), and addressed himself to those outside the Brahman caste, thus initiating the teaching of Vaishnavism as the popular faith of Hindōstān. Among his twelve disciples or apostles were a Rājpūt, a Jāt, a leather-worker, a barber and a Musalmān weaver; the last-mentioned was the celebrated Kabīr (see separate article). One short Hindī poem by Rāmānand is contained in the Ādi Granth, and Dr Grierson has collected hymns (bhajans) attributed to him and still current in Mithilā or Tirhūt. Both Rāmānand and Kabīr were adherents of the form of Vaishnavism where devotion is specially addressed to Rāama, who is regarded not only as an incarnation, but as himself identical with the Deity. A contemporary of Rāmānand, Bidyāpati Ṭhākur, is celebrated as the author of numerous lyrics in the Maithilī dialect of Bihār, expressive of the other side of Vaishnavism, the passionate adoration of the Deity in the person of Krishna, the aspirations of the worshipper being mystically conveyed in the character of Rādhā, the cowherdess of Braj and the beloved of the son of Vasudēva. These stanzas of Bidyāpati (who was a Brahman and author of several works in Sanskrit) afterwards inspired the Vaishnava literature of Bengal, whose most celebrated exponent was Chaitanya (b. 1484). Another famous adherent of the same cult was Mīrā Bāī, “the one great poetess of northern India” (Grierson). This lady, daughter of Rājā Ratiyā Rānā, Rāṭhōr, of Mērtā in Rajpūtānā, must have been born about the beginning of the 15th century; she was married in 1413 to Rājā Kumbhkaran of Mēwār, who was killed by his son Uday Rānā in 1469. She was devoted to Krishna in the form of Raṇchhōṛ, and her songs have a wide currency in northern India.
An important compilation of the utterances of the early Vaishnava saints or Bhagats is contained in the sacred book, or Ādi Granth, of the Sikh Gurus. Nānak, the founder of this sect (1469–1538), though a native of the Punjab (born at Talvandī on the Rāvī near Lahore), took his doctrine from the Bhagats (see Kabīr); and each of the thirty-one rāgs, forming the body of the Granth, is followed by a compilation of texts from the utterances of Vaishnava saints, chiefly of Kabīr, in confirmation of the teaching of the Gurus, while the whole book is closed by a bhōg or conclusion, containing more verses by the same authors, as well as by a celebrated Indian Sūfī, Shēkh Farīd of Pākpaṭṭan. The body of the Granth (q.v.), being in old Panjābī, falls outside the scope of this article; but the extracts included in it from the early writers of old Hindī are a precious store of specimens of authors some of whom have left no other record in the surviving literature. The Ādi Granth, which was put together about 1600 by Arjun, the fifth Guru of the Sikhs, sets forth the creed of the sect in its original pietistic form, before it assumed the militant character which afterwards distinguished it under the five Gurus who succeeded him.
2. Middle Hindī.—The second period, that of middle Hindī, begins with the reign of the Emperor Akbar (1556–1605); and it is not improbable that the broad and liberal views of this great monarch, his active sympathy with his Hindū subjects, the interest which he took in their religion and literature, and the peace which his organization of the empire secured for Hindostan, had an important effect on the great development of Hindī poetry which now set in.[2] Akbar’s court was itself a centre of poetical composition. The court musician Tān Sēn (who was also a poet) is still renowned, and many verses composed by him in the Emperor’s name live to this day in the memory of the people. Akbar’s favourite minister and companion, Rājā Bīrbal (who fell in battle on the north-western frontier in 1583), was a musician and a poet as well as a politician, and held the title, conferred by the Emperor, of Kabi-Rāy, or poet laureate; his verses and witty sayings are still extremely popular in northern India, though no complete work by him is known to exist. Other nobles of the court were also poets, among them the Khān-khānān ‘Abdur-Raḥīm, son of Bairam Khān, whose Hindī dōhās and kabittas are still held in high estimation, and Faiẓī, brother of the celebrated Abul-Faẓl, the Emperor’s annalist.
By this time the worship of Krishna as the lover of Rādhā (Rādhā-ballabh) had been systematized, and a local habitation found for it at Gokul, opposite Mathurā on the Jumna, some 30 m. upstream from Agra, Akbar’s capital, by Vallabhāchārya, a Tailinga Brāhman from Madras. Born in 1478, in 1497 he chose the land of Braj as his headquarters, thence making missionary tours throughout India. He wrote chiefly, if not entirely, in Sanskrit; but among his immediate followers, and those of his son Biṭṭhalnāth (who succeeded his father on the latter’s death in 1530), were some of the most eminent poets in Hindī. Four disciples of Vallabhāchārya and four of Biṭṭhalnāth, who flourished between 1550 and 1570, are known as the Ashṭ Chhāp, or “Eight Seals,” and are the acknowledged masters of the literature of Braj-bhāshā, in which dialect they all wrote. Their names are Krishna-Dās Pay-ahārī, Sūr Dās (the Bhāṭ), Parmānand Dās, Kumbhan Dās, Chaturbhuj Dās, Chhīt Swāmī, Nand Dās and Gōbind Dās. Of these much the most celebrated, and the only one whose verses are still popular, is Sūr Dās. The son of Bābā Rām Dās, who was a singer at Akbar’s court, Sūr Dās was descended, according to his own statement, from the bard of Prithwī-Rāj, Chand Bardāī. A tradition gives the date of his birth as 1483, and that of his death as 1573; but both seem to be placed too early, and in Abul-Faẓl’s Aīn-i Akbarī he is mentioned as living when that work was completed (1596/7). He was blind, and entirely devoted to the worship of Krishna, to whose address he composed a great number of hymns (bhajans), which have been collected in a compilation entitled the Sūr Sāgar, said to contain 60,000 verses; this work is very highly esteemed as the high-water mark of Braj devotional poetry, and has been repeatedly printed in India. Other compositions by him were a translation in verse of the Bhāgavata Purāna, and a poem dealing with the famous story of Nala and Damayanti; of the latter no copies are now known to exist.
The great glory of this age is Tulsī Dās (q.v.). He and Sūr Dās between them are held to have exhausted the possibilities of the poetic art. It is somewhat remarkable that the time of their appearance coincided with the Elizabethan age of English literature.
To these great masters succeeded a period of artifice and reflection, when many works were composed dealing with the rules of poetry and the analysis and the appropriate language of sentiment. Of their writers the most famous is Kēsab Dās, a Brahman of Bundēlkhaṇḍ, who flourished during the latter part of Akbar’s reign and the beginning of that of Jahāngīr. His works are the Rasik-priyā, on composition (1591), the Kavi-priyā, on the laws of poetry (1601), a highly esteemed poem dedicated to Parbīn Rāi Pāturī, a celebrated courtesan of Orchha in Bundēlkhaṇḍ, the Rāmachandrikā, dealing with the history of Rāma, (1610), and the Vigyān-gītā (1610). The fruit of this elaboration of the poetic art reached its highest perfection in Bihārī Lāl, whose Sat-saī, or “seven centuries” (1662), is the most remarkable example in Hindī of the rhetorical style in poetry (see separate article).
- ↑ In the Granth Nāmdēo is called a calico-printer, Chhīpī. The Marāthi tradition is that he was a tailor, Shimpī; it is probable that the latter word, being unknown in northern India, has been wrongly rendered by the former.
- ↑ It will be remembered that Akbar’s reign was remarkable for the translation into Persian of a large number of Sanskrit works of religion and philosophy, most of the versions being made by, or in the names of, members of his court.
