SURDAS

Surdas was born blind and hence received harsh treatment from his family during his early childhood. One day at age 6, when he heard a group of devotional singers passing by his home, he simply followed them, and left home forever.

At age eighteen, Surdas met his future guru, the sant Sri Vallabhacharya on the banks of river Yamuna. Vallabhacharya took him under his tutelage and thus began Surdas's teaching in prevalent Bhakti Shuddha advaita (Non-dualism philosophy), as Vallabhacharya was the founder of the Pushti sect (Pushtimarg) in India.

Soon Surdas memorized the entire Shrimad Bhagvat and started reciting it to throngs of people, and immersed himself into deep devotion to Krishna. Subsequently he went on to write some of greatest works in Hindu philosophy and Bhakti literature, the "Sur Sagar" (Ocean of Melody), Sur Saravali and Sahitya Lahiri.

Surdas was never married, and made a living by singing bhajans and giving discourses on religious subjects, and lived all these years in Braj.

Surviving poems in current editions

A different view of Sur's career appears in some recent scholarly publications. In this interpretation, the "ocean" of poetry attributed to the name "Surdas" continued to grow after the poet's death, with contributions honoring his name made by many anonymous poets of later centuries. All of these poems appear in countless different variations in manuscripts from different regions and different eras, with the differences resulting from the embellishments and elaborations made by many different singer-poets. Manuscripts are seen in this view as representing singers' repertoires, collected haphazardly by many devotees in different times and places. Some 1500 poems bearing his name appear in manuscripts dating within a century of the poet's death. Scholars find a core of some 400 poems appearing so widely distributed through this corpus that they may convincingly be said to have dated from his lifetime. In this scholarly perspective, the facts of his life, or of the "original" composition of any given verse, are simply unknowable. All we have for certain is a "Sur tradition", reflecting a vibrant and dynamic effort by many oral poets over a period of centuries.

Compositions

Surdas was a very prolific composer. He is best known for his "Sur Sagar" (Ocean of Melody). This magnum opus is said to originally contain 100,000 poems or songs; however, today only 8,000 have survived. These songs on the life and adventures of Krishna were dictated by him to an assistant, who had to write faster than the poet could dictate. Endowed with an inner vision, the poet dictates as if he is seeing the exploits of Krishna directly.