- Lived:
- dates badly disputed — tradition says 1483–1563 or 1483–1573; one standard reference even prints a birth year of 1258; the sixteenth century is all that is safe. Born, by rival traditions, at Sīhī near Delhi or Runakta near Agra → lived at Gaughāṭ on the Yamunā and at Parasolī beside Govardhan hill, in Braj, the Krishna country around Mathurā
- Field:
- bhakti poetry and temple song in Brajbhāṣā; by tradition the chief of the Aṣṭachāp, the eight poet-singers of the Puṣṭimārg
- The Big Idea:
- He made God a toddler you could scold — Krishna caught with butter on his face, lying about it beautifully — and the village dialect he sang in became, for three hundred years, one of India's great literary languages.
- In their words:
- "Mother mine, I didn't eat the butter." (maiyā morī, maiṁ nahiṁ mākhan khāyo — the most famous opening line in Hindi devotion)
- If you remember one thing:
- A blind singer taught a civilization to hold God on its hip — and so many later poets wanted to sing in his voice that his "ocean" of songs grew ten times larger than anything one man composed; both the man and the ocean are real, and this chapter is about each.