Keshavdas

Keshavdas Mishra (1555 – 1617), usually known by the mononym Keshavdas or Keshavadasa, was a Sanskrit scholar and Hindi poet, best known for his Rasik Priya, a pioneering work of the riti kaal (procedure period) of Hindi literature.

Keshavdas Mishra was a Sanadhya Brahmin, born in 1555 probably near to Orchha at Tehri. There were many pandits among his ancestors and inferences from his writings suggest that, as would be typical of a pandit, the preferred language of his family, and that to which he was exposed as a child, was Sanskrit. Those ancestors included Dinakara Mishra and Tribikrama Mishra, who had both been rewarded by Tomara rulers in Delhi and Gwalior, as well as his grandfather, Krishnadatta Mishra, and his father, Kashinatha Mishra, who had both served as scholars to the rulers of Orchha kingdom. His elder brother, Balabhadra Mishra, was also a poet.

Despite the familial connection to Sanskrit, Keshavdas adopted a vernacular style of Hindi, known as Brij Bhasha, for his writings. The self-deprecation that was consequent upon this momentous shift — he once described himself as a "slow-witted Hindi poet" — belies his significance, described by Allison Brusch as "a decisive milestone in North Indian literary culture". His decision meant abandoning a highly formalised, stylised and accepted genre that was considered to be a de facto requirement of any poet, let alone one wishing to work within the royal courts of the time. It was not that Hindi poetry was new, since it had long been propagated, mostly orally and in particular by religious figures, but rather that it was deprecated. In particular, it was disliked by the pandits themselves. In the eyes of the critics, according to Busch, "To be a vernacular writer was to exhibit both a linguistic and an intellectual failing".

A large part of the success of Keshavdas can be attributed to the paradox that he used the Sanskrit tradition in his vernacular poetry. The literary status of Brij Bhasha was already becoming accepted among the common people in the generations immediately preceding him, in large part because of the Bhakti movement that sought to revitalise Vaishnavite Hinduism and which was centred on the towns of Vrindavan and Mathura. This movement of religious reclamation led to the building of many new temples and those who propagated and accepted Brij Bhasha at that time considered it to have been the language that was spoken by Krishna. Bhakti poets such as Swami Haridas produced new vernacular devotional works that abandoned Sanskrit, which had been the traditional language of religion and of the Brahmins, and their songs were sung communally rather than in isolation.

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