Surdas - Indian Poet

करत करत अभ्यास के, जड़मति होत सुजान रसरी आवत जात ते, 

सिल पर परत निसान.हरी दर्शन की प्यासीअखियाँ हरी दर्शन की प्यासी (३)

देखियो चाहत कमल नैन को..निसदिन रहेत उदासीअखियाँ निसदिन रहेत उदासी..

अखियाँ हरी दर्शन की प्यासीआये उधो फिरी गए आँगन..

दारी गए गर फँसी..अखियाँ हरी दर्शन की प्यासी..

अखियाँ हरी दर्शन की प्यासी..

केसर तिलक मोतियाँ की माला..

ब्रिन्दावन को वासी..अखियाँ हरी दर्शन की प्यासी..

अखियाँ हरी दर्शन की प्यासी..

कहोके मंकी कोवु न जाने..

लोगन के मन हासी..

अखियाँ हरी दर्शन की प्यासी..

अखियाँ हरी दर्शन की प्यासी..

सूरदास प्रभु तुम्हारे दरस बिन..

लेहो करवट कासी..

अखियाँ हरी दर्शनदरसन की प्यासी..

अखियाँ हरी दर्शन की प्यासी.. 

The group of 16th-century Hindi poets, four of whom were disciples of Vallabha, and four of his son and successor, Vitthala.

The greatest of the group was Surdas, a blind singer whose descriptions of the exploits of the child-god Krishna are the highlights of his collection of poetry, the Sursagar, is admired throughout the Hindi-speaking areas of northern India. 

It is particularly rich in its details of daily life and in its sensitive perception of human emotion, the parent's for the child and the maiden's for her lover.  Other members of the Astchap group were Paramananddas, Nanddas, Karsandas, Govindswami, Kumbh-andas, Chitaswami, and Chaturbhujdas. What is commonly spoken of as Hindu is actually a range of languages, from Maithili in the east to Rajasthani in the west. 

The first major work in Hindi is the 12th-century epic poem Prthviraj Rasau, by Chand Bardai of Lahore, which recounts the feats of Prithviraj, the last Hindu king of Delhi before the Islamic invasions. 

The work evolved from the tradition maintained at the courts of the Rajputs. 

Noteworthy also is the poetry of the Persian poet Amir Khosrow, who wrote in the Awadhi dialect. 

Most of the literature in Hindi is religious in inspiration; in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the reform-minded Kabir, for example, wrote sturdy short poems in which he sought to reconcile Islam and Hinduism. 

The most celebrated author in Hindi is Tulsidas, who renounced the world early in life and spent his days in Benares as a religious devotee. He wrote much, mostly in Awadhi, and focussed Hinduism on the worship of Rama. 

His most important work is the Ramcharit-manas, which is based on the Sanskrit Ramayana. More than any other work it has become a Hindu sacred text for the Hindi-speaking area and annually has been staged in the popular Ram Lila festival. 

Outstanding among the followers of Vallabha, philosopher and bhakti advocate of the Middle Ages, is the blind poet Surdas (died 1563), who composed countless bhajans (chants) in praise of Krishna and Radha, which are collected in the Sursagar. 

While many of the bhakti poets were of modest origin, an exception was Mira Bai, a princess of Jodhpur, who wrote her famous lyrics both in Hindi and Gujarati; the quality of her poetry, still very popular, is not as high, however, as that of Surdas. Significant also is the religious epic Padmavati by Jayasi, a Muslim from former Oudh state. Written in Awadhi (c. 1540), the epic is composed according to the conventions of Sanskrit poets. 

The 18th century saw the beginning of a gradual transformation from the older forms of religious lyric and epic to new literary forms influenced by Western models that began to be known. The new trends reached their pinnacle in the work of Prem Chand (died 1936), whose novels especially Godan and short stories depict common rural life; and in the work of Harishchandra of Benares (died 1885), honoured as Bharatendu, who wrote in the Braj Bhasa dialect.

Some of the modern Indo-Aryan languages have literary traditions reaching back centuries, with enough textual continuity to distinguish Old, Middle, and Modern Bengali, Gujarati, and so on. Bengali can trace its literature back to Old Bengali charya-padas, late Buddhist verses thought to date from the 10th century; Gujarati literature dates from the 12th century Shalibhadra's Bharateshvara-bahubali-rasa and to a period when the area of western Rajasthan and Gujarat are believed to have had a literary language in common, called Old Western Rajasthani. 

Jñaneshvara's commentary on the Bhagavadgita in Old Marathi dates from the 13th century and early Maithili from the 14th century, Jyotishvara's Varna-ratnakara, while Assamese literary work dates from the 14th and 15th centuries Madhava Kandali's translation of the Ramayana, Shankaradeva's Vaisnavite works. Also of the 14th century are the Kashmiri poems of Lalla Lallavakyani, and Nepali works have also been assigned to this epoch. 

The work of Jagannath Das in Old Oriya dates from the 15th century.Amir Khosrow used the term hindvi in the 13th century, and he composed couplets that contained Hindi. In early times, however, other dialects were predominant in the Madhya-desha as literary media, especially Braj Bhasa, Surdas' Sursagar, 16th century, and Awadhi, Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas, 16th century. In the south, in Golconda, Urdu poetry was seriously cultivated in the 17th century, and Urdu poets later came north to Delhi and Lucknow. Punjabi was used in Sikh works as early as the 16th century, and Sindhi was used in Sufi (Islamic) poetry of the 17th-19th centuries. 

In addition, there is evidence in late Middle Indo-Aryan works for the use of early New Indo-Aryan; e.g., provincial words and verses are cited. The creation of linguistic states has reinforced the use of certain standard dialects for communication within a state in official transactions, teaching, and on the radio. 

In addition, attempts are being made to evolve standardized technical vocabularies in these languages. Dialectal diversity has not ceased, however, resulting in much bilingualism; for example, a native speaker of Braj Bhasa uses Hindi for communicating in large cities such as Delhi. 

Moreover, the attempt to establish a single national language other than English continues. This search has its origin in national and Hindu movements of the 19th century down to the time of Mahatma Gandhi, who promoted the use of a simplified Hindi-Urdu, called Hindustani. 

The constitution of India in 1947 stressed the use of Hindi, providing for it to be the official national language after a period of 15 years during which English would continue in use. When the time came, however, Hindi could not be declared the sole national language; English remains a co-official language. Though Hindi can claim to be the lingua franca of a large population in North India, other languages such as Bengali have long and great literary traditions--including the work of Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore, and equal status as intellectual languages, so that resistance to the imposition of Hindi exists.