Sūrdās’ poetry in the community of Dādūpanth

Abstract

The paper examines the poetic material ascribed to the 16th-century bhakti poet Sūrdās recorded in the community of Dādūpanth. Seven Dādūpanthī manuscripts predating CE 1700 contain a considerable amount of Sūr poems not included in the Bryant and Hawley 2015 critical edition of the Sūrsāgar. This paper aims to introduce the Dādūpanthī strand in the early Sūrdās tradition by focusing on the earliest extant and so far unedited Dādūpanthī manuscript composed in Rajasthan, MS Sharma 3190, dated CE 1615–1621. The compilation represents the second oldest collection at our disposal of Sūrdās’ poetry and has not been examined in previous studies on Sūrdās’ tradition. I discuss the manuscript families established according to their geographical provenance as presented by Gupta and Bryant and introduce the Dādūpanthī codices into the stream of transmission. The paper presents the peculiarities of the Sūr section in MS 3190, scribal alterations of the content, the editorial difficulties, the thematic predilection of pads, and the arrangement of poems compared to the division into aṅgs (thematic units). Sūrdās’ section in MS 3190 is observed in relationship with several other collections, including the two earliest exemplars of the Sarvāṅgī tradition (the Sarvāṅgī of Rajab and the Sarvāṅgī of Gopāldās). I compare Sūr pads in the two Sarvāṅgīs on the level of the amount, choice, and classification of poems. I end by presenting the sequence of pads in MS AMR 875, related to Sūr poems in MS 3190.