The Vernacular Cosmopolitan

Abstract

This chapter reads the Giītagovinda's form and content inseparably in terms of the other, conducting a deep internal comparison within the work itself. In its metrically and aesthetically peculiar songs, we can read an appropriation of the vernacular literary logic that was beginning to dawn in South Asia at the beginning of the second millennium. The songs are encircled, however, by verses of the purest classical grandeur. We can identify here, on the level of form, a consolidation of two distinct literary registers. On the level of content, we can read the juxtaposing of a pastoral/folk erotic scenario (the adolescent Kṛṣṇa tale) with the trappings of a classical courtly (urbane/cosmopolitan) eroticism, parallel to what we find in the work of Jayadeva's greatest contemporary, Govardhana. The cosmopolitan and the vernacular strategically coincide in Jayadeva's poem, and the Giītagovinda thus represents a great and ingenious mediation of the units of analysis developed by Pollock in his seminal histories of cosmopolitan and vernacular in premodern India and beyond. Beginning with the intriguing parallelism and interplay of form and content, the chapter branches out to the work's immediate social context: the literary salon at the court of King Lakṣmaṇasena in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Bengal.

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