Subsequently to Ramanuja his doctrine appears to have been set forth, about 1250, in the vernacular of the people by Jaideo, a Brahman born at Kinduvilva, the modern Kenduli, in the Birbhum district of Bengal, author of the Sanskrit _Gita Govinda_, and by Namdeo or Nama, a tailor[11] of Maharashtra, of both of whom verses in the popular speech are preserved in the _Adi Granth_ of the Sikhs. But it was not until the beginning of the 15th century that the Brahman Ramanand, a prominent _Gosain_ of the sect of Ramanuja, 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 Galta in Rajputana), and addressed himself to those outside the Brahman caste, thus initiating the teaching of Vaishnavism as the popular faith of Hindostan. Among his twelve disciples or apostles were a Rajput, a Jat, a leather-worker, a barber and a Musalman weaver; the last-mentioned was the celebrated KABIR (see separate article). One short Hindi poem by Ramanand is contained in the _Adi Granth_, and Dr Grierson has collected hymns (_bhajans_) attributed to him and still current in Mithila or Tirhut. Both Ramanand and Kabir were adherents of the form of Vaishnavism where devotion is specially addressed to Raama, who is regarded not only as an incarnation, but as himself identical with the Deity. A contemporary of Ramanand, Bidyapati Thakur, is celebrated as the author of numerous lyrics in the Maithili dialect of Bihar, 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 Radha, the cowherdess of Braj and the beloved of the son of Vasudeva. These stanzas of Bidyapati (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 Mira Bai, "the one great poetess of northern India" (Grierson). This lady, daughter of Raja Ratiya Rana, Rathor, of Merta in Rajputana, must have been born about the beginning of the 15th century; she was married in 1413 to Raja Kumbhkaran of Mewar, who was killed by his son Uday Rana in 1469. She was devoted to Krishna in the form of Ranchhor, and her songs have a wide currency in northern India. Entry: 1
By this time the worship of Krishna as the lover of Radha _(Radha-ballabh)_ had been systematized, and a local habitation found for it at Gokul, opposite Mathura on the Jumna, some 30 m. upstream from Agra, Akbar's capital, by Vallabhacharya, a Tailinga Brahman 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 Bitthalnath (who succeeded his father on the latter's death in 1530), were some of the most eminent poets in Hindi. Four disciples of Vallabhacharya and four of Bitthalnath, who flourished between 1550 and 1570, are known as the _Asht Chhap_, or "Eight Seals," and are the acknowledged masters of the literature of Braj-bhasha, in which dialect they all wrote. Their names are Krishna-Das Pay-ahari, Sur Das (the Bhat), Parmanand Das, Kumbhan Das, Chaturbhuj Das, Chhit Swami, Nand Das and Gobind Das. Of these much the most celebrated, and the only one whose verses are still popular, is Sur Das. The son of Baba Ram Das, who was a singer at Akbar's court, Sur Das was descended, according to his own statement, from the bard of Prithwi-Raj, Chand Bardai. 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-Fazl's _Ain-i Akbari_ 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 _Sur Sagar_, 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 _Bhagavata Purana_, and a poem dealing with the famous story of Nala and Damayanti; of the latter no copies are now known to exist. Entry: 2
_Dialects._--The only important dialect of Eastern Hindi is Awadhi, spoken in Oudh, and possessing a large literature of great excellence. Chhattisgarhi and Bagheli, the other dialects, have scanty literatures of small value. Western Hindi has four main dialects, Bundeli of Bundelkhand, Braj Bhasha (properly "Braj Bhasa") of the country round Mathura (Muttra), Kanauji of the central Doab and the country to its north, and vernacular Hindostani of Delhi and the Upper Doab. West of the Upper Doab, across the Jumna, another dialect, Bangaru, is also found. It possesses no literature. Kanauji is very closely allied to Braj Bhasha, and these two share with Awadhi the honour of being the great literary speeches of northern India. Nearly all the classical literature of India is religious in character, and we may say that, as a broad rule, Awadhi literature is devoted to the Ramaite religion and the epic poetry connected with it, while that of Braj Bhasha is concerned with the religion of Krishna. Vernacular Hindostani has no literature of its own, but as the _lingua franca_ now to be described it has a large one. Panjabi has one dialect, Dogri, spoken in the Himalayas. Entry: HINDOSTANI
Although the Vaishnava sects hitherto noticed, in their adoration of Vishnu and his incarnations, Krishna and Ramachandra, usually associate with these gods their wives, as their _saktis_, or female energies, the sexual element is, as a rule, only just allowed sufficient scope to enhance the emotional character of the rites of worship. In some of the later Vaishnava creeds, on the other hand, this element is far from being kept within the bounds of moderation and decency. The favourite object of adoration with adherents of these sects is Krishna with his mate--but not the devoted friend and counsellor of the Pandavas and deified hero of epic song, nor the ruler of Dvaraka and wedded lord of Rukmini, but the juvenile Krishna, Govinda or Bala Gopala, "the cowherd lad," the foster son of the cowherd Nanda of Gokula, taken up with his amorous sports with the _Gopis_, or wives of the cowherds of Vrindavana (Brindaban, near Mathura on the Yamuna), especially his favourite mistress Radha or Radhika. This episode in the legendary life of Krishna has every appearance of being a later accretion. After barely a few allusions to it in the epics, it bursts forth full-blown in the Harivansa, the Vishnu-purana, the Narada-Pancharatra and the Bhagavata-purana, the tenth canto of which, dealing with the life of Krishna, has become, through vernacular versions, especially the Hindi _Prem-sagar_, or "ocean of love," a favourite romance all over India, and has doubtless helped largely to popularize the cult of Krishna. Strange to say, however, no mention is as yet made by any of these works of Krishna's favourite Radha; it is only in another Purana--though scarcely deserving that designation--that she makes her appearance, viz. in the Brahma-vaivarta, in which Krishna's amours in Nanda's cow-station are dwelt upon in fulsome and wearisome detail; whilst the poet Jayadeva, in the 12th century, made her love for the gay and inconstant boy the theme of his beautiful, if highly voluptuous, lyrical drama, _Gita-govinda_. Entry: HINDUISM
Sri Lallu Lal was a Brahman, whose family, originally of Gujarat, had long been settled in northern India. What was done by the other Fort William authors for Urdu prose was done by Lallu Lal almost alone for Hindi. He may indeed without exaggeration be said to have created "High Hindi" as a literary language. His _Prem Sagar_ and _Rajniti_, the former a version in pure Hindi of the 10th chapter of the _Bhagavata Purana_, detailing the history of Krishna, and founded on a previous Braj-bhasha version by Chaturbhuj Misr, and the latter an adaptation in Braj-bhasha prose of the _Hitopadesa_ and part of the _Pancha-tantra_, are unquestionably the most important works in Hindi prose. The _Prem Sagar_ was begun in 1804 and ended in 1810; it enjoys immense popularity in northern India, has been frequently reproduced in a lithographed form, and has several times been printed. The _Rajniti_ was composed in 1809; it is much admired for its sententious brevity and the purity of its language. Besides these two works, Lallu Lal was the author of a collection of a hundred anecdotes in Hindi and Urdu entitled _Lataif-i Hindi_, an anthology of Hindi verse called the _Sabha-bilas_, a _Sat-sai_ in the style of Bihari-Lal called _Sapta-satika_ and several other works. He and Jawan worked together at the _Singhasan Battisi_ (1801), a redaction in mixed Urdu and Hindi (Devanagari character) of a famous collection of legends relating the prowess of King Vikramaditya; and he also aided the latter author in the production of the _Sakuntala Natak_. Mazhar 'Ali Wila was his collaborator in the _Baital Pachisi_, a collection of stories similar in many respects to the _Singhasan Battisi_, and also in mixed Urdu-Hindi; and he aided Wila in the preparation in Urdu of the _Story of Madhonal_, a romance originally composed in Braj-bhasha by Moti Ram. Entry: 4
BIHARI-LAL, a name famous in Hindustani literature as the author of the _Sat-sai_, a collection of approximately seven hundred distichs, which is perhaps the most celebrated Hindi work of poetic art, as distinguished from narrative and simpler styles. The language is the form of Hindi called _Braj-bhasha_, spoken in the country about Mathura, where the poet lived. The couplets are inspired by the Krishna side of Vishnu-worship, and the majority of them take the shape of amorous utterances of Radha, the chief of the Gopis or cowherd maidens of Braj, and her divine lover, the son of Vasudeva. Each couplet is independent and complete in itself, and is a triumph of skill in compression of language, felicity of description, and rhetorical artifice. The distichs, in their collected form, are arranged, not in any sequence of narrative or dialogue, but according to the technical classification of the sentiments which they convey as set forth in the treatises on Indian rhetoric. Entry: BIHARI
The worship of Krishna, especially in his infant and youthful form (which appeals chiefly to women), is widely popular in the neighbourhood of Mathura, the capital of that land of Braj where as a boy he lived. Its literature is mainly composed in the dialect of this region, called Brajbhasha. That of Rama, though general throughout Hindostan, has since the time of Tulsi Das adopted for poetic use the language of Oudh, called Awadhi or Baiswari, a form of Eastern Hindi 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. Entry: 1