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 Geeta Govindam was written by Jayadeva in the 17th century A. D. Jayadeva hailed from Orissa and he wrote Geeta Govindam in Sanskrit, on the devotional love between Radha - and all the other Gopikas and - Lord Krishna. All the verses are set in a romantic mood and speak of the divine through a seeming
srngara bhava. While the complete work is known as Geeta Govindam, the individual verses are called
ashapati because each verse consists of eight stanzas. Every stanza is composed of four metrical lines. There are 24 verses and 12 subdivisions in
ashtapati.
The bhava in each
ashtapati is woven around the eight different kinds of
nayakis that we discussed earlier. (See:
Abhinayam) Jayadeva has composed all the ashtapatis with particular ragas but since they are very old and in some cases not known in the present days, they are sung in the ragas of Hindustani or Carnatic that we know now.
 However, attempts are on to sing the
ashtapatis in the same ragas that Jayadeva set the verses to. The ragas that Jayadeva used are from the folk music of Orissa. Research work is going on to identify the ragas that are found in the verses of Jayadeva, from Orissa’s folk songs. Some of the ragas have been identified and are sung in the original raga in which Jayadeva set them.
Though the verses sound like the differing moods of sweethearts - sweet nothings, mock anger, wooing, intimate moments etc. - they cannot be taken for their surface meaning, for the main character is the Lord Himself. They carry the esoteric connotation of the relationship between jivatma and
Paramatma, their duality in the initial stages and how they unite in the end.
It is not easy to perform to ashtapati. The dancer should be mature enough to understand the true sense of the verse and be sincere to what the Poet conveys. And the depiction differs from time to time. The depiction of a verse when it is performed to by a young girl - may be in the age group of 10 to 15 - and by a blossoming woman in her early twenties would differ, certainly. It would get another dimension when a still more mature woman performs. This is true, even if the dancer doesn’t change. A dancer who performed to
ashtapati at a very young age may not look at it with the same eyes at a later date, say, after ten years. It would vary with the passage of
 time and with the understanding that the dancer gains.
If a talented dancer with rich imagination performs to an
ashtapati, elaborates it, brings out all the possible messages that underlie in each verse, the performance may last even a whole night. He or she will be able to express the verse from many different angles, levels, strata and deeper import that each verse has in it.
When performing to a verse from the ashtapati, the
sanchari bhava can be expressed only in relation to what is contained in each line of the verse. There is not much scope to express the emotions of a past time and branching off into stories related to the incidents contained in the lines of the verses. (For a detailed discussion on
sanchari bhava, see: Padha
Varnam)
Krishangini - Neeraja Nagarajan
Postures by Neeraja Nagarajan
Translated by Hari Krishnan
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