The Dasa Kirthanas are paeans to the Gods. They are poetic efforts to render the abstract and ineffable into concrete and personal. The abstract and unseen can be an imagined wonder, a distant source of governance. But when Gods are personalised, we get to know them even as we think they know us.
For Purandaradasa or Kanakadasa or any other Dasa, Krishna or Rama were their father, mother, lover, child and friend. The moods in their devotion can range from marvelling at his indefinable, ungraspable transcendence and infinite glory to freely chiding him for his pranks, rebuking him for his mischief and blaming him for playful elusiveness.
