Gopala Campu

Gopala-campu is not, strictly, a songbook in the way most other collections on this site are — it is a campu-kavya, a Sanskrit literary form mixing prose and verse, composed by Jiva Gosvami to narrate Krishna's pastimes from His appearance in Vraja through to His eventual return there, drawing on the Srimad Bhagavatam's own account and enriching it throughout with rasa, the theology of devotional mellow that Jiva Gosvami's uncles and gurus, Rupa and Sanatana Gosvami, had already laid the groundwork for. The work is divided into two parts, Purva-campu and Uttara-campu, comprising seventy sections between them; what appears on this site under Gopala-campu are forty-seven individual Sanskrit verses drawn from within that larger prose-and-verse narrative, including a short run of four verses labelled Virudavali, eulogistic praise-verses of the kind campu-kavya traditionally embeds at dramatic high points in its narrative. Jiva Gosvami himself, born around 1513 in Bengal, was the nephew of Rupa and Sanatana Gosvami and, after their deaths, became the senior-most and most systematic of the Six Gosvamis of Vrindavana, also producing the Sat-sandarbha, the foundational work of Gaudiya Vaishnava philosophical theology. Read here as isolated verses, these excerpts inevitably lose the surrounding prose narrative that gives each one its place in the story; they are included on this site as they were catalogued in the source collection, individual verses rather than a translation of the complete work.