menting the court of Lakshmana·sena.” The fourteenth-century commentator, King Mananka, attributes the stanza to Lakshmana·sena himself, making of it a royal proclamation of recognition of the talent of the poets under his patronage.

There is, however, no mention of the Sena ruler in any of the other available commentaries, and the premise that the “Gita·govinda” was composed in Sena Bengal has infuriated both traditional pandits and academically trained scholars of Orissa, who, claiming Jaya·deva as well as Go·vardhana as their own, reject the authenticity of the stanza in question. They have adamantly argued against the assumption that the Bengali ruler was Jaya·deva’s patron, insisting instead that he was a poet in the court of Ananta·varman Choda·ganga of Orissa, the king who built the Jagannath temple in Puri where the songs of the “Gita·govinda” were, from the very beginning, sung for the deity.

While those in the Bengali camp insist that Jaya·deva’s mention, in Song VII, of his place of birth as Kindu·bilva refers to Kenduli village on the banks of the Ajaya river in the Birbhum district of West Bengal, Oriya tradition confidently proclaims that the reference is to Kenduli village on the banks of the Prachi river in the Puri district of Orissa. Both villages have annual festivals in honor of the poet they consider to be their native son; the songs of the “Gita·govinda” are their village anthems. There’s yet another Kenduli village in Bihar, on the banks of the Belan river in Jhanjharpur district, and there too people are proud to hail from the place where Jaya·deva, the famed singer and Krishna devotee, was born. There are also Kenduli villages ________