आमुक्तमाल्यदा (विजयनगर सम्राट् श्रीकृष्णदेवराय - गोदा देवी आण्डाल भक्ति एवं साम्राज्य-नीति)

34 Goda's Garland of Devotion
Goda Devi's hymns in the Divya Prabhandham are full of auto-
biographical intimations. Her childhood was itself a time of playful
devotion to the Lord, when she and her friends built sand castles
using tiny winnows, sand, water and pots:
Noble lion who smashed the pride
Of the elephant! One who sleeps
On the ocean with clear waves!
Don't you frighten us with your eyes,
We, who loved you at first sight!
We have sieved thin sand granules
And built these castles with care.
Don't you break them down!
Poets like Azhakiya Chokkanatha Pillai have written at length
imaginatively about the childhood of Goda Devi. Even at a tender
age the Villipputtur citizens found her unusually intelligent, a star
apart:
Aware of forms to which our eyes are closed,
Conscious of nearnesses we cannot feel,
The Power within her shaped her moulding sense
In deeper figures than our surface types.
An invisible sunlight ran within her veins
And flooded her brain with heavenly brilliancies
That woke a wider sight than earth could know.¹
Krishnadeva Raya swiftly moves towards Goda Devi's youth-
ful felicity and reserves the best flowerings of his poetic art to this
phase. As the life and hymns of Goda Devi are one long passionate
wait for the Lord's grace, there is a certain appositeness in the
poet's choosing to limn with loving care the contours of the golden
girl who is now revered as a goddess.
The twenty verses describing Goda Devi's youthful form in
Āmukta Mālyada are a splash of colourful images, all of them related
to the divine form of the Lord in some way or other. Her tresses
were a mass of bright curls as if they wished to defeat by numbers
the single curly Sudarshana in Narayana's hand. The dark curls
dancing around her face seemed to be the writings of Brahma to

1. Sri Aurobindo, Savitri (1954), p. 356.