‘Although he is little known today, Jan Gopal was an important vernacular intellectual of early modern India.’

Many nirguni Bhakti poets, write the authors of this book, have not received the attention they deserve, despite their poetic excellence and historical significance. Jan Gopal, a Rajasthani poet and storyteller of the 16th century, is one such figure. So Says Jan Gopal is an unprecedented study of his life and work.

Jan Gopal does not conform to the stereotype of a typical follower of the nirgun panth, or sect. Born into a prosperous merchant family, he chose to join a nirguni panth not because of family tradition or social location. He chose it through a conscious, personal decision, and brought not only an excellent knowledge of prosody, poetic conventions and classical Hindustani music, but also an urbane and progressive sensibility to his literary works, of which the best-known are Dadu Janma Lila, a seminal biography of his guru, Dadu Dayal (a contemporary of Akbar); and retellings of stories from the Bhagvata Purana: Prahlad Charitra, Dhruv Charitra and Jad Bharat Charitra. As the authors show, in his Hindi/Braj retellings of the Puranic stories, Jan Gopal makes them subtly ‘contemporary’, and reworks the very core of traditional theodicy by presenting bhakti with a strong egalitarian component as the way to liberation.

In addition to analysing Jan Gopal’s life and work, and locating him in the nirgun Bhakti tradition, the authors have also included in this important book, excerpts from his longer works, and twenty of his songs (pads) in Nagari script and in English translation.