Did Assam's great saint-artist Sankardev really live about 120 years?
Tradition says Srimanta Sankardev was born in 1449 and died in 1568, a lifespan of about 120 years. The scholar Baniprasanna Misra argues that biographers double-counted stretches of his travels and early life, and proposes he was born around 1483, a figure far more in keeping with an ordinary human life.
The 1449 date does not appear in contemporary sources. Seventeenth-century biographies record only when he died; the birth year seems to have been settled in eighteenth-century devotional writing, as accounts of the guru grew more elaborate and more miraculous. The earliest biography, by Daityari Thakur, even claims he met Chaitanya, a meeting now rejected. Misra points out that Sankardev's own writings never suggest an unusually long life.
Whatever the dates, the output was enormous. Sankardev was a poet, playwright, dancer, actor, musician and painter, and he is credited with creating a devotional song form called Borgeet, the Ankia Naat theatre, the Sattriya dance and a literary language, Brajavali. Raised by his grandmother after losing both parents young, he reportedly wrote his first verses at school before learning all his vowels, and legend has him swimming the Brahmaputra in flood.
Grief seems to have turned him outward. After his first wife Suryavati died months after their daughter's birth, he handed his estate to relatives and in 1481, aged 32, set out on a twelve-year pilgrimage with seventeen companions, visiting Puri, Mathura, Vrindavan, Dwaraka and Rameswaram. In 1488 at Badrikashram he composed his first Borgeet. Back home, a scholar from Mithila recited the Bhagavata Purana to him in full, and that encounter shaped the faith he went on to preach, Ekasarana Dharma, devoted to Krishna alone. He staged a dance-drama for which he painted scenery of seven heavens and played the instruments himself.
Conflict with the ruler Biswa Singha and neighbouring Kacharis pushed him across the Brahmaputra in 1516 to 1517 and later into the Ahom kingdom. The assemblies of devotees he gathered grew into Sattras, monasteries that still anchor religious and cultural life in Assam.
Source: Sankardev
