The divine couple, Radha and Krishna, comprise the essence of the Godhead. Radha is therefore acknowledged by Chaitanyaite Vaishnavas to be part of the very center of their theological doctrine, as reflected in their liturgical practices. Sacred images of the forms of Radha and Krishna, standing together side by side, are elaborately worshiped in Indian temples.
Chaitanya accomplished this by personally experiencing and exalting ‘Radha bhava’, the state of being Radha-like, which gave the cult of Radha its biggest boost. Now Radha becomes not just one of the gopis or even Krishna’s chosen partner but, indeed, the preferred way of reaching or obtaining Krishna. Wherever Radha is, Krishna must be; therefore, every devotee must not only pay obeisance to her but, in being like her, attract the attention of Krishna, indeed, enjoy Krishna as Radha herself did. Since Krishna is the Supreme Godhead, the most desirable entity in the universe, that which enables us to catch Krishna must also be most valuable, most sought after. So important did Radha become that Krishna was sometimes given second place, assumed to be implicit to the devotees’ adoration of Radha; a practice that still persists today.
So high was the general adoration for Radha during this period that even an otherwise ‘secular’ and largely erotic cycle of poems such as Bihari’s Satsai of 700 (couplets) reflects this, as demonstrated by the opening doha (distich).6 The Satsai of Bihari is arguably the most celebrated Hindi poem of what is called the Ritikal, or the age of courtly poetry. One index of its importance is that it has more than seventeen commentaries and was translated into Sanskrit twice. It was also illustrated extensively, especially by the Kangra painters, and its verses set to music. It thus came to occupy a central position in the literary and cultural life of northern India of the 17th century. That the opening doha is also used as a mangalacharan, or an auspicious invocatory verse, is quite significant. The placement of Radha in the invocatory opening verse of the most important poem of the period signifies that her apotheosis was by then complete. Radha in the early 17th century is thus a full-fledged goddess, the principal and chosen deity of the leading courtly poet of the time, and thus a central figure in the widely prevalent Vaishnavism of the times.
The meaning of the couplet is by no means simple. It is, on the contrary, complex, allusive and multilayered, thus making it difficult to render into English. The flattened and simplistic translations prevalent scarcely do it justice. For instance, consider Krishna P. Bahadur’s translation for the Penguin (UNESCO) edition of 1990 (289):
Gifted Radha, even a glimpse of you delights Krishna,
dispel my worldly sorrows I pray you.
Bahadur’s rendering fails to do justice to the complexity of the composition arising out of its triple shlesha alankara, or equivocal figures of speech, somewhat like double entendres. Several key words in the couplet can be translated in at least three different ways according to their various meanings: for example, shyam (black, Krishna, or blackness = sin) or harit duti (green lustre, removed brightness, or removed effect, respectively).7
What follows is not a very much better translation but at least attempts to explain the meaning better:
May that skilled Radha take away the suffering of my existence,
by the shadow of whose body Shyam turns lustrous green.
Or:
She who removes my existential distress is artful Radha
By the glimpse of whose body Shyama’s darkness becomes lustrous green . . .
So the second line of the couplet could also mean that the very shadow of Radha’s body: 1) turns Krishna from black into luminous green; 2) steals Krishna’s lustre; 3) removes the darkness or stain (of sin). Meaning 2) is somewhat hard to comprehend; why should Radha’s very shadow steal Krishna’s lustre? What is suggested is that Krishna is so overpowered by his attraction to Radha that even the shadow of her body can make him lose his self-possession or shine. In any case, the doha asserts the power, even supremacy, of Radha, not only in her ability to overcome Krishna, changing his colour or taking away his brightness, or removing the stain of sinfulness, but also in saving the poet himself by removing the latter’s bhava baadhaa, or existential distress. If it is admitted that all of us suffer from some version or the other of the latter, then Radha as saviour or redeemer is indeed a very attractive and opportune figure.
The colour symbolism in the couplet has been captured in a modern-day painting in imitation of the precolonial style of Indian Rajput miniatures. Commissioned by Professor Harsha V. Dehejia in 2005, this painting is by Kanhaiyalal Verma of Jaipur. What caught the painter’s imagination when he heard the verse is the fact that when yellow and blue colours are mixed the outcome is green. Krishna
is shyama, or blue-black, while Radha is golden yellow in hue; their mixture leads, literally, to the greening of Krishna, portrayed in the painting most obviously in Krishna’s face. But what of the theological implications of this colour chemistry? Clearly, colouring and dyeing are prevalent metaphors for spiritual transformation throughout medieval poetry. Falling in love and being united with one’s beloved is often spoken of as being dyed in the latter’s colours. When the devotee surrenders totally to the deity, she becomes imbued with the latter’s hue. But in this case, it is Radha who gives her colour to Krishna, again emphasizing her importance in his lifework. Krishna’s greening or blossoming is effected by Radha’s love for him. It is she who steals his native lustre only to replenish it with her own effulgence. Radha it is who is responsible for the flowering of Krishna; she fertilizes him, amplifying his power and glory as none other could.
I have translated naagari, Bihari’s unusual epithet for Radha, as skilled or artful in preference to Bahadur’s previously mentioned ‘Gifted Radha’. As we shall see, Bihari, the courtly poet, constructs Radha as Krishna’s sophisticated, skilful, urban lover rather than an artless, guileless, naive milkmaid of Vrindavana, the epitome of pastoral innocence and unfallen beauty. Radha, by the time she becomes the fully developed protagonist of Krishna leela, or the play of the dark God, acquires a somewhat dual significance as being both artless and sophisticated all at once. As Valerie Ritter observes, ‘In Braj-dialect Hindi literature (as well as other languages), Radha continued her double life as both a simple gopi and a sophisticated lover (nagari) of Krishna, in poetry comprising both popular devotional lyrics and courtly poetry’ (180). No wonder Bihari, more courtly than devotional, crafts his Radha as adroit, not only in the arts of dalliance and love, but in saving souls such as his from the distress of worldly existence (bhava baadhaa). Anyone practised in saving us from worldly suffering is surely worthy of worship.
Radha’s high status is also amply illustrated in other texts of the period, especially Surdas’s famous Sursagar. Thus, instead of using Satsai, the courtly poem, as emblematic, I could as easily have offered something more conventionally devotional, such as Surdas’s Sursagar. Here is an example, poem no. 165, from John Stratton Hawley’s edition (101):
Ever since your name has entered Hari’s ear
It’s been ‘Radha, oh Radha,’ only this mantra,
a formula chanted to a secret string of beads.
Nightly he stays by the Jamuna, in a grove
far from his friends and his happiness and home.
He yearns for you. Like a great yogi
he is constantly wakeful through hours that are ages.
Sometimes he spreads himself a bed of tender leaves;
sometimes he chants your treasure house of fames;
Sometimes he closes his eyes in utter silence
and meditates on every pleasure of your frame—
His eyes the libation, his heart the fire-oblation,
his mutterings and lapses, food for a Brahmin feast.
So has Śyam’s whole body wasted away.
Says Sūr, let him see you. Fulfil his desire.
Here, her very name becomes Krishna’s sole mantra. One meaning of Radha is the worshipful, short for aradhana, or worship. But Radha, the devotee, herself becomes t
he sole object of Krishna’s devotion. This reversal, as in the Satsai’s invocatory doha, is another mark of her supremacy, the original source of which is Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda. In this text, not only is Radha literally placed on top of Krishna in their lovemaking, but Krishna’s submission to Radha is crowned by his placing her foot on his head, ‘Dehi pada pallava mudaram’—‘Now like a diadem, crown this my head with the tender petals of your feet, a pleasurable balm for the venom of desire. And let it cure my suffering from the burning fire of desire’ (10.8; trans. Durgadas Mukhopadhyay). At the end of the poem, Radha commands him to dress, embellish and restore her make-up after their violent lovemaking (12.25; Siegel’s translation 284):
Put a pattern on my breasts, make a design on my cheeks, fasten a girdle on my hips, fix the mass of my braids with artless garlands, put rows of bracelets on my arms and jewelled anklets on my feet—thus directed the yellow-robed-one was pleased and he did so.
By the end of the poem, Radha’s triumph is thus complete.
This elevated status of Radha is prevalent to this day in the area around Vrindavana, the legendary site of young Krishna’s amorous dalliance with the gopis, or cow-girls. These artless women become the embodiments of the highest spiritual attainment and symbols of supreme devotion to the Godhead. This is India’s own pastoral paradise, an Edenic, unfallen world in which Eros is not tainted by lust, and God himself frolics with his devotees in never-ending moonlit nights of ecstasy in the charmed forest clearing. Here, Radha, as Krishna’s love interest indeed rules. Even the normal greeting of common people is ‘Radhe Radhe’.
The rise of Radha was facilitated by the widely prevalent Shakta cults in medieval India. Radha, ‘aligned and identified’ (Siegel 121) with Bhagavati, or the Supreme Goddess, attained a status higher even than Krishna. For example, in the Devi Bhagavata Purana, Narayana is shown to worship Radha (cited in Siegel 121):
Salutations to the supreme goddess, who resides at Rasamandala, who lords over the Rasa and is dearer to Krishna than his own life. Salutation to the mother of all the three worlds, whose lotus-like feet are worshipped by gods headed by Brahma and Visnu. Be propitiated, O Ocean of mercy.
Mother of three worlds, worshipped by all the male gods—these are the typical descriptions of the Mother Goddess, applied clearly to Radha, identified as the mistress of the Rasamandala. Radha as Bhagavati is a Shakta appropriation, just as Radha as Lakshmi (Sri, Kamala, Padma, and so on) was the more conventional Vaishnava appropriation.
To return to the opening verses from Satsai, one of medieval north India’s most important poems, it is easy to see how they mark the transformation of Radha from gopi to goddess, consequent upon the consolidation of the cult of Radha. Radha thus becomes Krishna’s fittest spouse in the new Krishnology. But how and why did such a radical apotheosis take place? And what might its metaphysical and spiritual significance be? Radha, it would seem, is largely a medieval phenomenon. She doesn’t exist in the classical world and doesn’t quite survive as a goddess in the harsh dawn of modernity in India. The modern Radha is anything but a love goddess—she’s the fallen woman, the exploited or abandoned woman, the seductress, or an erotic playmate, but no longer the supreme pastoral goddess and consort of Krishna.
WHY RADHA?
From the late classical to the medieval period, we notice a fundamental shift from the Advaitic orthodoxy of Shankara to the qualified non-dualism, theism and Vaishnavism of other acharyas, or founders of lineages, such as Ramanuja, Madhva, Nimbarka and Vishnuswami. Some of these schools built up a considerable devotional literature around Krishna in both Sanskrit and the vernaculars, with Krishna as the favoured avatar of Vishnu, thus worthy of worship equivalent to Vishnu. Tracing back their lineages to the Vedic period they created a new orthodoxy between 900–1300 AD, known as the Chatuh-Vaishnava sampradaya, or the four authorized Vaishnava schools. But the rise of Radha was propelled by newer and smaller groups who went even further, considering Krishna not just as the favourite avatar of Vishnu, but as the supreme Godhead, the only being worthy of worship, one who embodied all the divine perfection and grace in himself.
Between 1500 and 1600 AD, a number of newer but smaller Vaishnava sampradayas were founded or modified from previous sampradayas in the late medieval or Mughal period in which the status of Krishna was elevated further. These new movements generally favoured Krishna as the Supreme Being, over and above Vishnu, and drew even more exclusively on vernacular poetry from within their respective traditions that exalted Krishna’s childhood pastimes (Beck 71).
These groups established themselves around Braj, between Delhi and Agra, believing, after Chaitanya, that this was indeed the lost or forgotten site of the frolics of Krishna’s boyhood. They thus imagined into being a new pastoral geography for the conquered Hindus in the very heart of the Mughal power, a feat that must have involved considerable political skill and ingenuity in addition to unprecedented devotional fervour. The legend of Vrindavana was thus born for which, I would argue, the figure of Radha was the key ingredient. The heterodoxy of these groups had a definite erotic component to it to which Radha was essential. Those who contributed to the rise of Radha were thus the champions of a new Krishnology and included ‘the Vallabha sampradaya founded by Sri Vallabhacarya, the Radhavallabha sampradaya founded by Sri Hita Harivamsa, a revived Nimbarka sampradaya, the Haridasi sampradaya founded by Swami Haridas, and the Gaudiya sampradaya of Bengal inaugurated by Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’ (Beck 71). What distinguishes these sects is that they ‘extol Krishna as the supreme Absolute Truth from whom all other deities, including Vishnu, evolve, and the Bhagavata Purana is presented as the epistemological authority in this regard’ (Bryant 112).8
As the cult of Radha grew, these new Vaishnavite traditions converted Radha’s illicit or adulterous relationship with Krishna to a much higher theological principle of the indivisibility of God’s masculine and feminine aspects or of the soul’s inseparability from God. Whatever the ruse, it was Radha who was worshipped alongside Krishna in innumerable temples, not one of his legally wedded wives. The exception to this is Rukmini, who is given the pride of place in the Vitthal cult in Maharashtra, where it is Vitthal–Rakumai, not Radha–Krishna, that forms the divine pair. But even in the Vitthal sampradaya, the Devi’s temple is usually separate from the Lord’s; they are rarely conjoint as in the Radha–Krishna coupling. Thus, over time, the more disturbing or heterodox aspects of the Radha–Krishna story were smoothened out. Yet, the slightly uneasy and transgressive dimension of the relationship cannot be altogether banished. As Beck observes (71–72):
[T]he relation between Radha as ‘favourite’ and Krishna is a tentative one of lover and paramour, not of husband and wife. In the vernacular Bengali poems of Chandidas, for example, Radha is already married to someone named Ayana, and in Bengali kirtan singing that name is completed as Ayana Ghosh. In the Sanskrit plays of Rupa Goswami, Radha is already married to Abhimanyu, heightening the intensity of their illicit connection.
Later, when the ‘disassociation of sensibility’, so to speak, between the erotic and the sacred, was completed in 19th-century Bengal, outside the Gaudiya parampara, the Radha–Krishna relationship began to be used more often in a ribald and prurient sense, even to encourage or camouflage what the bhadralok, or gentle folk, considered licentious or improper conduct.
But from the 13th to the 17th centuries what the Radha–Krishna relationship represented was love that was simultaneously intensely erotic and devotional. We would be mistaken, as Lee Siegel reminds us, to see the Radha–Krishna pairing in purely symbolic or allegorical terms, at least in a text like Gita Govinda (178–79):
The Gita Govinda is not so much an allegorical work as an allegorically interpreted work . . . the Gita Govinda is literally about carnal love but it is also literally devotional. There was no contradiction . . . The need to read the poem allegorically, to interpret the sexuality as a mere analogy for the spiritual relationship, wholly differentiated from it, aris
es only when celibacy is idealized, when sexuality becomes a transgression against religious ideals.
The predominantly allegorical interpretations came afterwards, as a way to explain away what later generations saw as unacceptable or impure, quite after sexuality began to be met with disapproval. During its heyday, the Radha–Krishna relationship embodied a sex-positive mystical cult in which sexual fulfilment was very much a part of self-realization. After colonial intervention, Indian spiritual traditions took a decisive turn towards celibacy, from which we have not yet recovered fully, despite the silent but rather obvious sexual revolution that has overpowered India in recent times. Nearly every notable spiritual guru or leader including Sri Swaminarayan, Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi, Sri Aurobindo, Ramana Maharshi, J. Krishnamurti, Swami Sivananda, Satya Sai Baba, and so on, has been an open advocate or largely in favour of abstinence for serious spiritual practitioners. Some have been silent or hypocritical, saying one thing but found out practising another. Only Osho Rajneesh was openly contemptuous of the celibacy fetish; there is an impression that he was encouraging of sex as a way to superconsciousness, though that is not what he said. His followers, even those who took sanyas, or vowed renunciation, were not called upon to give up sex.
Thus, Radha not only defies the whore vs virgin-mother dichotomy that has plagued most cultures of the world in their fear and exaltation of female sexuality but she has also managed to embody an unfallen Eros, so rare in romantic traditions of the world. Unlike the other love stories of the world, the Radha–Krishna myth is not about the impossibility of perfect love on earth but rather its fullest expression and celebration. It is, however, another matter that Krishna must leave the gopis. In the story as canonized in the Bhagavata Purana, the gopis of Vrindavana have higher wisdom and status than jnanis, or knowers of Advaita (non-dualism), because, despite physical separation, they experience Krishna in their hearts and are, therefore, ever united with him. But unlike Catholic nuns, who are also supposed to be brides of Christ, the gopis have experienced physical union with Krishna, dancing in ecstasy with him in the heart of the forest on that special full-moon night that lasted a thousand years when Krishna united with each one of them physically. It is only the thus ravished gopis who have forever learned the lesson of undying union with the Lord, a wisdom higher than all other paths to know God.
Finding Radha Page 9