ઝઘડો લોચનમનનો

Dayaram is the last great voice of medieval Gujarati bhakti and its most playful — a Pushtimargi devotee of Nathdwara's Krishna who spent his life in Dabhoi turning theology into garbis and padas a whole town could sing. This pada is his wit at full stretch: a lawsuit. Something in the devotee has fallen catastrophically in love with Krishna, and the interior faculties immediately begin assigning blame. પ્રીત પ્રથમ કોણે કરી નંદકુંવરની સાથ? — who loved Nand's boy first? The mind points at the eye; the eye points back: it was by your hand.

The pleadings that follow are as sharp as anything in a real courtroom. The mind's case is entrapment: you gazed at Natwar, નેન! તેં — the pleasure landed in your account — and then you had me arrested, પછી બંધાવ્યું મુજને, setting the fire of લગન, of fixation. The eye's defense is pure metaphysics, and it is also true: listen, હું પાંગળું — I am lame; I am only your vehicle. You had already heard the scriptures' inaccessible hearsay, નિગમઅગમ કહ્યું સાંભળ્યું — you were gone before the seeing. From there the suit collapses into the real grievance, which is that each envies the other's access: the mind can dwell in the forest beside the Beloved but cannot see him; the eye saw him once and now weeps day and night while the world watches. Even the tears get litigated — the mind claims the smoke of its own smouldering heart is what stings the eye into crying. Every couplet trails off into the refrain, ઝઘડો૦, the quarrel, the quarrel, like the case being called again and again.

So they take it to બુદ્ધિ — Intellect — and her verdict is the poem's whole theology delivered in two lines: મન! લોચનનો પ્રાણ તું, લોચન! તું મનકાય — mind, you are the eye's life-breath; eye, you are the mind's body. There is no first lover because there are not two of you: joy will be joint, suffering will be joint, સુખથી સુખ, દુઃખ દુઃખથી, and the love for Shri Krishna — sealed with the poet's chhap, દયાપ્રીતમ, Daya's own Beloved — flows through both together. It is the same dispute Dayaram adjudicates from the other side in શ્યામ રંગ સમીપે ન જાવું, where the senses swear off the color black and fail, deliciously, within stanzas. Together the two padas map his singular territory: the comedy of a self at war with itself over a God it has already, completely, lost itself to.