DRAFT
The Text of Sur’s Poems
Ken Bryant
Our fantasy edition of the Sūrsāgar would have, at its heart, digital recordings of sixteenthcentury singers performing each pada, and, most crucially, an annotated musical score. I emphasize
the desirability of the recording and the score because Sur’s compositions are songs. While the
evidence now available to us is in the form of written documents, these verses were never intended
to be perused on paper. The manuscripts we draw upon were merely aids to memory for a singer.
There exist, however, no recordings and no score. Then what music can be expected here?
We would seem to have the musical equivalent of dry dinosaur bones in a museum, when we asked
for nothing less than Jurassic Park. As we shall see, the situation is not quite so bleak; there is
indeed some music to be had; but first let’s look at the bones available to us. Here is a manuscript
version of the first few lines of the first poem in our edition:
|| vilāval || bhādauṃkīrainiandhayārī | dvārakapāṭabāṭarokebhaṭa : disidisikanta
kaṃsabhaubhārī || 1 ṭeka || garajatameghamahājharalāgata : baḍhībīcajamunājalakārī |
sabataiṃihaisocaāvataura : kyauṃdurihaisisubadanaujyārī || 2 ||
You can immediately see the first, and most trivial, task of an editor: paper was not cheap in
the sixteenth century, and words were not divided on the page! Dividing the words, and dropping
some non-textual bits into a footnote, we reach the approved form for presenting a pada in a modern
book:
bhādauṃ kī raini andhayārī |
dvāra kapāṭa bāṭa roke bhaṭa, disi disi kanta kaṃsa bhau bhārī || 1 ||
garajata megha mahā jhara lāgata, baḍhī bīca jamunā jala kārī |
saba taiṃ ihai soca āvata ura, kyauṃ durihai sisu badana ujyārī || 2 ||
We note that the lines rhyme. We note that the first line is short (half the length of the others,
to be exact); and that the remaining lines are each divided by a midline caesura (yati), represented
by a comma in the modern presentation.
So are we finished now with our editor’s labors? Not quite. For when we compare that
manuscript with ten other manuscripts that also contain our Poem #1, we find a considerable variety
of readings. Here are five of the eleven versions of our line 3, for example:
A1:
B1:
B2:
B4:
D1:
garjata
garajata
garajata
garajata
bīca
megha
megha
meha
megha
nadī
mahā
mahā
prahā
mahā
tarajati
bhaya
jhara
jhara
ḍaru
jhara
lāgata,
lāgata,
lāgata,
lāgatu,
garajata,
vāḍhī
baḍhī
vaṭī
baḍhī
baḍhī
bīca
bīca
bīca
vica
aru
jamunā
jamunā
jamunā
jamunā
ati viju
ati kārī
jala kārī
jara kārī
jala kārī
cakārī
Common to all versions is a scene in a story: thunder clouds growl, there is a fearsome
downpour, the black water of the river rises. But beyond simple differences of spelling
(megha/meha, baḍhī/vāḍhī) there are significant differences of narrative detail, linking version
to version in chains of association, either of sound or of meaning: in seven of the eleven it is a
DRAFT
downpour (jhara) that strikes (lāgata), but in three versions what strikes is fear itself (ḍara), a
word that differs only by a letter from “downpour”, whereas a fourth retains “fear” but
expresses it with a word more remote in sound (bhaya). Finally, manuscript D1 begins quite
differently from all the others, in mid-river, and finishes with a unique detail--a flash of
lightning.
Note that none of these differences (except possibly the words prahā and vaṭī in B2) can
reasonably be attributed to a careless scribe. There is nothing in obvious need of “correction”.
But which version do we include in our edition? Which evolution is more persuasive: jhara >
.dara > bhaya, or bhaya > .dara > jhara? Which version is “right”, or “original”, or “better”?
Which one was sung by a man named Surdas, or might he indeed have sung all eleven, or none?
And how might we decide? And why might we care?
The traditional approach to answering such questions rests on the assumption of an authorial
original surviving in imperfect copies, which the scholar corrects so as to restore the text the author
intended. This does not apply in the case of Sur. While many manuscripts available in India today
bear the famous title, no two are remotely the same. There is in fact no "original" Sūrsāgar to be
reconstructed.
The picture that emerges instead from the early manuscript evidence is of a steadily evolving
and proliferating oral tradition. Poems were taught by singer to singer, and the corpus of poems
known to the tradition grew rapidly from generation to generation. This growth occurred through
two processes: the composition of new poems, and the accretion to the “Surdas” corpus of poems
previously ascribed to other, less famous poets. Along with the constant addition of “new” poems,
the manuscripts also reflect a ceaseless transformation of the old: each poem appears in almost as
many different versions as there are manuscripts that contain it. For the most part these versions
differ in ways that suggest, not the careless errors of scribes, but the exuberant and imaginative
improvisations of bards and singers.
Within such a tradition, the manuscripts themselves (at least the early ones, those written
within a century or so of the date traditionally given for the poet’s death) represent largely
independent transcriptions, presumably taken from the repertoire of different (but anonymous)
singers in different times and regions. Written transmission is not entirely absent: sometimes the
“original” transcription has been lost, and it is clear that we are dealing with a copy; in several cases
it is evident that a manuscript has been prepared by assembling and copying several fragments of
transcription. But the surviving manuscripts are not copies of one another, except in rare instances.
They are connected by chains of memory and imagination.
Very few manuscripts survive from the first half-century after the poet’s legendary death-date.
The earliest was completed in 1582 CE; there are two from about 1625; another three from about
1640i. One from this last cluster (U1) is the first to bear the title Sūrsāgar, but the name did not
become popular for another thirty-five years; then, suddenly, it began to appear on most collections
made.
It is difficult to overstate the diversity of those early Sūrsāgars. Each presents a distinct set of
poems, with something like a thirty or forty per cent overlap between any two manuscripts being
characteristic. Even those poems shared by two manuscripts are generally presented in radically
different orders (and, as in the example cited, in radically different forms). Some manuscripts-particularly those titled Sūrsāgar--follow the approximate sequence of the events of Krishna's life;
of these, some are divided into titled sections—“childhood,” “the onset of love,” “the pain of
separation,” etc.--but almost never with the same system of sections for any two manuscripts. In
others, including the earliest, poems are grouped by the musical rāga to which they are to be
DRAFT
performed. Still others show no concern for sequence, verses apparently having been written down
as they occurred to the memory of the compiler. In many of these collections, works bearing the
signature lines of other poets have been interleaved with Sur's poems at the whim of the compiler;
poems appearing under another poet's name in one manuscript will find themselves bearing the
name of Surdas in the next, a generation later. In a few memorable cases the interleavings have
included children's drawings, recipes for eye ointment, and shopping lists for rice and cooking oil.
Although it is meaningless then to speak of an “original” Sūrsāgar, there are certainly poems
bearing the name Surdas that can reliably be dated to the period traditionally held to be the poet’s
lifetime. One purpose of this edition is to separate out this early stratum of the “Surdas” tradition, to
the extent that the evidence permits. "Authorship”, however, is entirely beyond our purview.
Since, as noted, traditional methods of textual analysis are of limited value in treating a
tradition so fluid, manuscript date becomes a crucial issue. Under the classical model the age of a
manuscript is of relatively little importance; a very late manuscript can be a perfect copy of a very
early one. But in our case, deprived of the genealogical methods of classical textual analysis, we
have no certain way to sort out the "early" readings from the "late"; and we know that the "texts" of
this tradition evolved with astonishing speed. The only certain indicator of an early poem is
presence in an early manuscript.
The earliest surviving manuscript, J1—prepared “In Fatehpur, in the kingdom of Akbar” as
noted by the scribe— apparently links together fragments of three earlier manuscripts; of the 239
Sur padas the manuscript contains, there are about two dozen that appear twice, and even at this
early date, the two forms of each duplicated pada are substantially different from one another.ii This
is yet another measure of how quickly the tradition was evolving: our earliest snapshot already
shows a vigorously branching organism. Indeed, there is no reason to assume, despite its date, that
J1 succeeded in capturing all, or even most, of the "Surdas" poems making the rounds in the year
1582; on the contrary, there is every reason to believe that it does not. If we are to pursue at least a
few of the others, what critical procedures are we to follow?
When we move beyond the poems contained in the earliest manuscript, we move from
reasonable certainty to arguments based on probability--some poems are more probable candidates
for inclusion, others less. At each step we must choose between the conflicting demands of
inclusiveness and exclusiveness. The exclusive impulse, at its purest, would require that we restrict
ourselves to the contents of J1. The inclusive impulse, unchecked, would move us to accept every
poem included in any manuscript--on the plausible grounds that any of these might have been
present in Sur’s day. The latter, it should be noted, has been the dominant mode in previous Surdas
editions. The current standard edition contains some 5000 poems, most almost certainly composed
after Sur’s lifetime, since the earliest manuscript consulted in that edition dates from the 18th
century.iii The most recent edition increases the total of verses to 5,500.iv Perhaps the sole edition to
give serious attention to stemmatic textual criticism identified several families of manuscripts—and
declared them all to be independent lines of transmission from the original.v The editor thus
admitted any verse appearing in any two families, however recent the manuscripts -- the assumption
of independence, as we have seen, being nothing but an editorial fantasy for this tradition.
It is in this “maximalist” tradition that the present “minimalist” edition may be seen as a
corrective. This edition is primarily based on seven manuscripts dated (or datable) prior to 1642 CE,
roughly half a century after the poet’s legendary death-date, a set which gives us a wide geographic
distribution at a very early date. Two manuscripts -- Fatehpur (J1) and Burhanpur (B2) -- are the
foundation of this edition. We collated a total of 28 mss. for all poems contained in the earliest, J1,
DRAFT
and used those collations to study the familial relationships among mss. As an added filter we have,
for reasons discussed at length in other publicationsvi, chosen to require that all non-Fatehpur poems
also be included in one of our early (pre-1641) manuscripts from a geographically eastern family;
the one manuscript of this family to bear a clear location in its colophon was written in Mathura, in
1641, and the indications are that manuscripts in this “Mathura family” are representative of a
rapidly-evolving temple tradition in the Braj heartland, generating many poems which never found
their way into the more conservative tradition of the Rajput courts. While the fact that a Burhanpur
poem has also found its way to Mathura is no guarantee of a pre-1624 origin, it increases the odds.
The format in which the padas of this edition are presented requires explanation. Each page
presents the text of a (somewhat) speculative reconstruction -- a best guess at what form of the
poem was most widely known under Sur’s name, during Sur’s (reputed) lifetime. The copy text
underlying this reconstruction will almost always be J1 or one of its closest relatives (B2, B1); but
the reconstruction may deviate from that exemplar for reasons of obvious scribal error, metrical
anomaly, or the like. It is crucial to remember that we are not seeking an urtext here—we do not
believe any such text existed. Rather we seek something that might better be considered the “hit
parade” for about the year 1600.
The footnotes on each page indicate where our reconstruction deviates from our exemplar,
and gives the original manuscript reading from that exemplar. In cases where this deviation is
striking, the footnote will indicate not just one, but a cluster of mss. supporting the reconstructed
reading.
But the footnotes also serve another, equally important function; rather than displaying
“error”, they are intended to celebrate imagination, to give us a quick measure of the breadth of
variation that each poem had developed during its first half-century of evolution. For each poem the
readings in two disparate mss. will be tracked: the copytext, selected on the basis of age; and a
second early mss., selected on the basis of distance from the first, distance in both geography and
similarity. The footnotes will thus permit the reader, for each poem in the collection, to choose
from at least two manuscript readings, in addition to the editor’s reconstruction.
There are major differences between the way padas are presented in this edition and the ways
they have been presented in its predecessors. To explain these changes we need to depart from our
present theme (how to select a version) and return to the question with which we began (how to hear
the music). A first step will be to reexamine that first poem in our edition, this time scanned for
meter. Here are lines 2-4. (First lines--short lines--have, we shall see, their own rules.)
2
3
4
dvāra kapāṭa bāṭa roke bhaṭa, disi disi kanta kaṃsa bhau bhārī
¯ ˘/ ˘ ¯ ˘/¯˘/¯¯/ ˘ ˘ , ˘˘/˘˘/¯ ˘/ ¯ ˘/ ¯ /¯ ¯
garajata megha mahā jhara lāgata, baḍhī bīca jamunā jala kārī
˘ ˘ ˘ ˘/ ¯ ˘/ ¯ ˘/ ˘ ˘/ ¯˘˘ , ˘ ¯/ ¯˘/ ˘ ˘ ¯/˘˘/¯¯
saba taiṃ ihai soca āvata ura, kyauṃ durihai sisu badana ujyārī
˘ ˘ / ¯ / ˘ ¯ / ¯ ˘/ ¯ ˘ ˘ / ˘ ˘ , ¯ / ˘ ˘ ¯ / ˘ ˘ / ˘ ˘ ˘ / ˘ ¯ ¯
In the most common meters in our corpus, short syllables count as one mātrā (let's call it a
"beat") and long syllables as two. Do the math: in each line there are 16 beats before the caesura,
and 16 beats after.
DRAFT
Sixteen is a vital number for Sur's poetry, and for North Indian music as well: the most
common tāl in North Indian music, tīntāl, is built on cycles of 16, each divided into four equal
measures of four beats each. The counting of tīntāl, with accompanying gestures of claps and
waves, is usually reckoned thus (and it will be useful to have this as a metronome in our mind's ear
when we read our poem aloud):
clap-2-3-4 clap-2-3-4 wave-2-3-4 clap-2-3-4...
Think of our lines scanned above, then, as representing three lines (by rhyme) but six cycles
of tīntāl (by rhythm). The cycles, not the rhymes, will dictate the presentation of padas in this
edition: not as long lines divided by caesurae, but as vertically-stacked cycles (in most cases of 16
beats), inviting us to follow the musical logic of repeated patterns:
2
3
4
dvāra kapāṭa bāṭa roke bhaṭa
disi disi kanta kaṃsa bhau bhārī
garajata megha mahā jhara lāgata
baḍhī bīca jamunā jala kārī
saba taiṃ ihai soca āvata ura
kyauṃ durihai sisu badana ujyārī
The patterns of short-and-long syllables are considerably more complex than the four-by-four
squareness of the tīntāl ṭheka, and of course the same is true of any actual musical passage: the
four-by-four is but a metronome, a ground against which the performers create elaborate divisions
and syncopations. In the case of Sur’s 16-based padas, these variations actually all fall into one
simple but flexible strategy: a movement back and forth between two rhythms, two ways of dividing
an eight-mātrā passage. I have to come to think of these two rhythms as “square” (4-4) and “slant”
(3-3-2). Each has its variations (a 4 may be replaced by two 2's; a 3-3-4 may replace a 3-3-2 without
changing the syncopation; words longer than four mātrās, and words that are compounds, require
their own special accommodations), but in general the two rhythms give the composer five basic
templates, moving from completely square to completely slant:
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
4/4/4/4
4/3/3/2/4
3/3/2/4/4
4/4/3/3/2
3/3/2/3/3/2
The pattern 3/3/2 is in fact ubiquitous in human music.vii In Indian instrumental music it appears as
sitārkhānī, and is prominent in many forms of the common 8-mātrā tāl kaharwā.viii Throughout
Indian vocal music, both Hindustani and Karnatic, tāls of 8 and 16 are regularly performed
interspersed with passages of 3/3/2.
Before illustrating this in our sample verse, we need to clarify what those numbers between slashes
actually represent: they represent the distance in mātrās between two stressed syllables. In most
cases, this is the same as word-length, since words of the most common lengths are stressed on their
first syllables; but this is not always the case.
DRAFT
Stress is a phenomenon not often discussed for Hindi verse -- in fact the prescriptive taxonomies of
Hindi meter do not mention it -- but recent work, both my ownix and Connie Fairbanks’,x has
demonstrated that much medieval Hindi meter can best be explained by those rules of stress first
laid out by G.A. Grierson in 1895,xi and recently resurrected by Fairbanks. Words of the most
common sizes -- 2, 3, and 4 mātrās -- are, by Grierson’s rules, almost always stressed on the first
syllable; the single exception is the case of 4-mātrā words scanning ˘ ¯ ˘, which are stressed on the
second syllable. In our 3-line sample only the word “kapāṭa” falls into this category. The single 5mātrā word (ujyārī) is also stressed on the second syllable. The “stress-to-stress” pattens in those
three lines are thus:
2
3
4
4/3/3/4/2
(dvār-a ka- / pā-ṭa / bā-ṭa / ro-ke / bha-ṭa)
2/2/3/3/2/4
4/3/3/2/4
3/3/4/2/4
2/2/3/3/4/2
2/4/2/4/4
(kyoṃ / du-ri-haiṃ / si-su / ba-da-na u- / jyā-rī)
The most distinctive landmarks of the pattern are the ubiquitous “pairs of threes”, the first
three always beginning on the first, fifth, or ninth mātrā of a cycle, with the second three thus
always beginning, with the effect of anticipatory syncopation, on the fourth, eighth, or twelve mātrā
(rather than the theoretically-stressed fifth, ninth, or thirteenth beat of tīntāl).
While our very first poem displays, in all lines but the first, a metrical pattern of 16/16, this is
not the most common meter in the collection: all of the more common meters have a shortened
second segment (the most common being 16/12, 16/11, and 16/10). Arrayed in our new “vertical”
configuration, this leaves conspicuous “holes”, as here, in poem #27:
1 kuṃvara jala bhari bhari locana leta
2 bāraka badana bi-loki ja-sodā
kata risa karati a - ceta
3 chori udara tai dusaha dāvarī
ḍāri kaṭhina kara beta
3 / 2 / 2 / 2 / 4 / 3 (= 16)
4 / 4 / 4 / 4 (=16)
2 / 2 / 4 / 3 (= 11)
3 / 3 / 2 / 3 / 5 (=16)
3/3/2/3
(=11)
The first line is short, a single 16-mātrā segment; it also begins with a violation of our
principles of “square and slant”, starting with an anomalous sequence 3-2. The remaining lines
demonstrate the very common meter, traditionally titled sarasi, with lines divided 16/11. There is
thus a 5-mātrā “hole” in the final cycle of each two-cycle line. This pattern raises two questions:
Why is the first line (known as the ṭeka, and often repeated as a refrain) so odd? And what fills the
holes?
Rupert Snell provides an answer to both our questions. He bases his explanation on modern
performances in a particular context, the Radhavallabhi temples of Brindaban. His rule -- let’s call
it “Snell’s Law” -- is this: “the ṭeka corresponds in length to the first [segment] and in construction
to the second...It is the first [part] of the ṭeka which acts as a true refrain, being repeated
continuously throughout the performance.”xii He speaks of this treatment of the ṭeka as
“inversion” -- the first five mātrās moved to the end -- and while Snell does not employ our
DRAFT
framework of “square and slant”, notice that when the ṭeka is inverted in this way, it also resolves
the apparent anomaly of our first line’s pattern of stresses:
1 bhari bhari locana leta, kuṃvara jala
2 bāraka badana bi-loki ja-sodā
kata risa karati a - ceta, kuṃvara jala
3 chori udara tai dusaha dāvarī
ḍāri kaṭhina kara beta, kuṃvara jala
2 / 2 / 4 / 3 / 3 / 2 (= 16)
4/4/4/4
(=16)
2 / 2 / 4 / 3 / 3 / 2 (= 16)
3/3/2/3/5
(=16)
3 / 3 / 2 / 3 / 3 / 2 (=16)
But the inverted ṭeka leaves then the question: if this is the order intended by the poet(s), why
then would the manuscripts not present this order in the first place? It should first be said that, in
some cases, they do: there are perhaps a dozen examples in our manuscripts of ṭeka lines presented
in Snell’s inverted form, making it clear that the practise was recognized at an early date. Certainly
the uninverted form makes clearer the pattern of rhyme, and often the clarity of syntax. But many of
the performances transcribed,xiii from the only two modern performance styles which can lay any
claim to an antiquity matching that of the manuscripts (the courtly-classical drupad tradition, and
the samāja-gāyana tradition of the temples of Braj), illustrate a third, still different pattern, one
which makes sense both of the inversions of “Snell’s Law” and of the uninverted forms appearing in
most manuscripts: this is the pattern of a mukhṛā, a phrase which both anticipates (as an anacrusis)
the first beat of the first line, and completes (as a refrain) each short line. This is the form I have
employed in presenting somewhat more than half of the poems in this collection. It adds to these
poems a “line zero” to hold that anacrusis/mukhṛā:
0
kuṃvara jala
1 bhari bhari locana leta, kuṃvara jala...
2 bāraka badana biloki jasodā
kata risa karati aceta, kuṃvara jala...
3 chori udara tai dusaha dāvarī
ḍāri kaṭhina kara beta, kuṃvara jala...
The point of the elipses following each refrain is that the performer may at any point use that as a
lead-in to a repetition of the whole ṭeka.
Not all modern performances, in either style, employ a mukhṛā; the “holes” in a cycle are filled by
performers in a great variety of ways (melismas, filler words such as “māī”, “rī” etc.). Indeed, there
is no predictable congruence, in modern performance, between the chanda, or meter, of a verse and
the tāl in which it is performed: in performances in drupad style, for example, the 12-beat cautāl
predominates, regardless of the original meter. But in the absence of historical evidence, it is
hard for me to accept that the singers in an oral tradition composed their songs in one complex
rhythmic cycle, while performing them in another. It is much easier to believe that subsequent
generations evolved a virtuosity in squeezing square poems into round boxes. While the
modern singer will, and of course should, take my recommendations of mukhṛā and refrain
with a grain of salt, or ignore them altogether, it is hoped that non-singing readers of Hindi will
find that the forms employed in this edition lead them closer to the experience of the poems as
song.
DRAFT
i
Respectively J1; B2; B3, B4, J2 .
Bahura and Bryant 1982, Appendix B.
ii
Bahura and Bryant 1982, Appendix B.
iii
Jagannathdas “Ratnakar” et al. 1972 and 1976.
ii
iv
Gupta 2005.
v
Gupta and Shastri 1979.
vi
Bryant 1980: 5-16. Bryant 1983: 37-52.
vii
“The world's most famous music structure” according to J. Leake
(http://www.rhombuspublishing.com/articles/3+3+2_structure.pdf).
viii
This observation thanks to my son, Stanford biophysicist and tabalchi Dr. Zev Bryant.
ix
Bryant 1981.
Fairbanks 1981.
xi
Grierson 1895: 139-147.
xii
Snell 1991: 293-294.
x
xiii
See Thielemann 2001, Sanyal and Widdess 2004.