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Encyclopedia of India–China Cultural Contacts v2.c10.s3.t15: Sursagar

Encyclopedia of India–China Cultural Contacts v2.c10.s3.t15

Language
English

Sursagar

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Sūrsāgar (Ocean of Music), one of the magna opera of the devotional (Bhakti) literature in medieval India. It is a collection of poems in Braj Bhasha (a dialect of Hindi), also considered as an important classic of the Hindu Religion. *‘Sūrsāgar’*

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*'Sursagar', front cover of the Hindi edition*

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was composed by Sūrdās, a blind poet who lived between 15ᵗʰ and 16ᵗʰ centuries. The accurate time of '*Sūrsāgar*’s' composition remains uncertain. The earliest manuscript is acknowledged to be edited in 1573. Based on the Sanskrit sacred text *Bhāgavata Purāṇa*, the collection depicts stories of Krishna, one of the avatars of the god Vishnu. According to different editions, the length of the collection varies from hundreds to thousands of poems.

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The synopsis of '*Sūrsāgar*': Krishna was born into the Yadava clan. His parents suffered persecution from his maternal uncle, the King Kamsa. Therefore, Krishna was raised by the cowherd couple Nanda and Yashoda. The child Krishna was, on one hand, naughty and played a lot of mischievous pranks. On the other hand, as an avatar of Vishnu, he subdued and killed a number of demons, protecting the cowherds. As a youth, Krishna flirted with many ‘gopis’ (wives and daughters of the cowherds), from which a lot of erotic verses came into being. At the age of 16, Krishna returned to his birthplace Mathura and slew the wicked King Kamsa. Thus, he rescued his birth parents, and later himself became the regent. After sometime, he decided to move his kingdom to Dvaraka and there he achieved greatness and immortality.

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‘*Sūrsāgar*’ portrays different images of Krishna during years of his growing up. It is considered as the representative work of Krishna-bhakti, which belongs to the Saguna school of the Bhakti movement in medieval India. Expressing the ardent devotion and affection towards Krishna, ‘*Sūrsāgar*’ is enormously influential and widely popular in north India.

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Study on ‘*Sūrsāgar*’ in China started in the 1980s, when for the first time in China, Professor Liu Anwu of the Department of Eastern Languages at Peking University published his essay ‘*Sūrdās, the Mahakavi of 16ᵗʰ Century India* in *Foreign Literature Studies*’, introducing the poet Sūrdās’ life and his work ‘*Sūrsāgar*’ in detail. Henceforth, in ‘*History of Hindi Literature in India*’ (1987), ‘*History of Ancient Indian Literature*’ (1991) and ‘*Indian Religious Literature in Medieval Times*’ (2011), several verses of ‘*Sūrsāgar*’ were chosen to be translated into Chinese, along with the introduction of Sūrdās’ life and works. In 2011, the project of ‘Translation and Study of *Sūrsāgar*’, led by Professor Jiang Jingkui of the Department of South Asian Studies at Peking University, was approved as the major project of key research institute of social science and humanities, Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China. For Chinese academia, it is another major project focussed on medieval Indian literature after the Chinese translation of ‘*Rāmcaritmānas*’. The project is in progress at present.

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(*Jiang Jingkui*)

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