The story of Radha and Krishna, at least in the Gita Govinda, is one of found–lost–found love, not of found and lost, or even, lost and found, love (Siegel 160):
[U]nion-separation-reunion is the conventional pattern in Indian erotic literature. But it is also the archetypal structure in Indian ontology . . . For the individual liberation is reunion, a return to the primordial Unity, a recovery of the unborn Self . . .
The poem ends with the supreme joy of oneness and physical rapture, not with tearful separation or sorrow, but with the promise of eternal union in the hereafter as either in Romeo–Juliet or Saleem–Anarkali, to name two different but equally powerful takes on romantic love on earth. Even in representations of Islamic or Sufi romantic love the last stage is fana, or death, often interpreted as the death of the separate self but usually depicted in physical fatality at the end of the story, whether in the legend of Laila–Majnu, Shirin–Farhad or Heer–Ranjha. It is only in the Persian story of Yusuf–Zulekha that the lovers enjoy earthly fulfilment after all their trials, but that too because the transfiguration of Zulekha, who represents the earthbound soul, happens on earth itself, when her good looks and youth are restored by God because of Yusuf’s good offices. The story stresses her exceptional good fortune because ordinarily such a transformation or translation could only be possible in heaven, after her death. The traditional pattern in Christian love stories is also ‘the separation of lovers, both temporarily and through various obstructions and permanently through death’ (Siegel 137). The Radha–Krishna story, unlike all these, takes place on earth, in the enchanted space of Vrindavana, in a peculiarly bold and unprecedented kind of pastoral, available perhaps only in India, a world that is not prelapsarian, but radically unfallen, even infallible, because of the power and glory of the supreme Godhead sporting with his creation in a perfected human form. What has been effected is a reversal of the Platonic schema, with the idea instantiated here and now, right in our midst, though in sacred and mythical time, while even the heavens, ordinarily endowed with unearthly perfection and immortality, end up looking pale and second-best in comparison. The pastoral God-child, Krishna, defies Indra, the King of Heaven, several times, thus upturning the Vedic cosmology and hierophany. Earth is now superior to heaven; Krishna, or Vishnu in his perfect human embodiment, is superior to the gods in their heaven; the provisional delusion of separation which allows us to enjoy God is superior to non-dualistic monism, which is not only monochrome but without rasa, or relish.
Radha–Krishna shows us God as an object of sensual enjoyment in a way that such an experience at once turns suprasensual, defying the normal structure of human sensual experiences. What we see is neither an assertion of the supremacy of sense experience as the logical positivists might uphold, nor God as the transcendental signified, above and beyond all sense data. It is intense, pure-hearted and transformative love, such as the gopis felt for Krishna, that came to be concentrated in the single unique person of Radha, God’s paramour, and that was endowed with the strange alchemy that could turn the suprasensual into the sensual and back again into the suprasensual, thus erasing the boundaries between them.
Unlike the shame of Adam and Eve on eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, discovering their nakedness and covering themselves when they appeared before God, the gopis, bathing in the lake, though full of shame, consciously, deliberately and lovingly emerge from the lake to be utterly nude before God, thus not only losing their shame but gaining dignity and self-realization through such exposure to the divine gaze. Their love makes them pure and innocent, quite unlike the fallen Adam and Eve. It is not a case of innocence lost but rather of innocence regained. Loving surrender to God gives us back our pristine purity instead of making us fallen in our own eyes.
The male gaze, in this case, Krishna’s, is not prurient, objectifying or oppressive, but elevating, innocence-bestowing, turning the merely carnal into the spiritual, destroying, in effect, the difference between them. It is this erasure or dissolution of the difference that truly ends duality, turning us ordinary mortals into gods and goddesses. Such is the potential and the power of human, sensual, even physical, love as demonstrated by Radha and Krishna. Such love purifies the passions and emotions, taking us beyond possessive, selfish and destructive desires to the highest levels of self-realization. The ill effects of the extreme jealousy, possessiveness and fidelity of the gopis are thus not just negated but reversed when the object of their attentions is God himself. The desideratum is simple: love with all your heart and it would be like loving God himself, even if the ostensible object of your devotion were a mere man or woman. To put it differently, love God as man and man as God. That is the secret of love as revealed in the story of Radha and Krishna.
The Radha–Krishna story is of loving attachment, rather than detached loving. The latter has been the preferred choice for the spiritually inclined in most cultures, but here we see the rare reversal in which attachment itself leads to God-realization. As Siegel points out (41–42):
The religious system aims at release; but human love is bondage and aims at bondage, attachment. In Krishna the paradox of love is realized: bondage is release; the profane dimensions of love are wholly sacred.
This reversal is effected by means of a ruse: we must be attached to God with all our hearts, leaving no room for anything else. It is a special kind of monomania, which, in the end, is not so different from the way of renunciation. Yet, for the attachment-inclined, here is the way. The trick, of course, is that being attached to God or Krishna is not quite the same as being attached to an ordinary man or woman. This is made amply clear in the Krishnology that exalts Radha to such a high status. It is only because Radha is attached to Krishna that she is saved and transformed. To desire an ordinary mortal in a similar way might not result in similar gains. Yet, the temptation, if not the possibility, is always there to emulate the Radha–Krishna love in our daily lives, to exalt love, in other words, to such a level that it becomes a transforming experience. Radha–Krishna, like Lakshmi–Narayan, thus becomes the prototype of the ideal couple, which even flawed humans may aspire to copy if not replicate.
Similarly, the Radha–Krishna love gives pride of place to a distinctive world of emotional variety, richness and depth. Even though most of the situations that the lovers go through are severely conventionalized, they still distil the essence of passion—its tremulous longings, its multitudinous fears, its endless hopes and heart-wrenching sorrows and mind-blowing ecstasies. The whole package so resembles the gamut of our own human emotions that even though it is idealized, the family resemblance between the human and the divine is unmistakable. Hence, just as sensual and sexual pleasure are an aid to self-realization, so is the whole range of human emotions, which need not be shunned but directed by love to the highest object, that of obtaining a lasting and transforming union with the beloved. Indeed, some might argue that this variety of Krishnology degenerated into excessive, even maudlin, emotionalism and sentiment, in cloying and stereotypical gestures and modes of expression, which the social and religious reformers in the 19th century regarded as effeminate and emasculating. Whether in the songs of travelling Vaishnava bards, a staple feature in the new literature, but representing a now marginalized and residual tradition, or even in the Odissi style of dancing, what we see is a stylized enactment of standardized emotions of submission. Such cloying sentimentality found disfavour in the ethos of renascent India, especially in Bengal, where a new cult of masculinity began to be fostered as a precondition to nationalism. An ideology which regarded God as the sole male and every other creature as female, soul-wise, could easily be dubbed as conducive to subordination and slavery in a feudal age, as Ranajit Guha tacitly argues (50):
Bhakti . . . is an ideology of subordination par excellence. All the inferior terms in any relationship of power, structured as Dominance or Subordination within the Indian tradition, can be derived from it.
Perhaps, this is why the Mughals found this va
riety of Hinduism non-threatening enough to permit its practitioners to set up a whole temple-city in the middle of their power base. Unarmed but effective in their politics of embrace, the followers of the Radha–Krishna cult managed to give beleaguered and conquered Hinduism a new locus standi in north India.
While it is standard practice to regard Radha as allegorizing the human soul and Krishna as God, what makes Radha so special is that she is not an ordinary soul, but a Krishna-catching device par excellence. There is no one superior to her in this respect. That is why, from the generalized attraction of the gopis for Krishna, and Krishna’s own dalliance with numerous cow-girls, Radha emerges as supreme in her capacity to claim Krishna for herself as hers exclusively. When she wins him over all her other competitors, though, there is no jealousy or loss of status for the latter, they concede, even celebrate, Radha’s triumph. That is because Radha is everything that the gopis are, taken to its logical conclusion; her victory over Krishna, therefore, gives hope to all other souls thirsting for God. Radha as Krishna’s chosen paramour is exemplary, even as she is unique and exalted over all the others. What is so special about her that it is she who ‘gets’ the Lord? In a word, it is the quality and intensity of her self-offering. Krishna as the supreme Godhead belongs to everyone; all have claims over him. But it is Radha alone who can become his bride and then subdue him so that he serves her. Thus, the Lord bends low to worship and honours his own creation, this world of light and colour and ecstasy that is the reflection of his own glory. This world that is transient and relative is thus no ‘less’ or no different from the sheer majesty of the absolute, alone, self-shining and independent of all else though ‘He’ may be. Radha is Krishna; the world is God. There is no duality.
What, after all, is Krishna without Radha? Though, as the Purushottama, or the Supreme Being, he is already perfect, needing no other support or embellishment, Radha augments his power and divinity just as the halo of the sun makes visible and radiant the otherwise intolerable heat of the core of the sun.9 Radha, thus, makes Krishna accessible to the rest of us. She shows us how to obtain our heart’s desire, how to unite with the Lord, how to make him our very own. The Lord is perfect but he needs Radha to make that perfection visible and manifest. Radha delights Krishna as the world; when the world functions according to his wishes, she delights the Lord. Radha, in completely surrendering to Krishna, also becomes indistinguishable from him. Where she ends and Krishna begins no one knows.
I have sometimes wondered what Radha would tell Gandhi if she were suddenly to encounter him, as he tries to purify himself and rid himself of all carnal desires. Perhaps, she would say:
Bapu, to love Krishna the way I do, to long for the notes of his flute, to wait for days just to catch a glimpse of him, to desire above all to touch him, feel him, dance with him, dissolving in his embrace, to feel him inside one’s body, quickening the very rhythm of one’s heart, to be one with him, to experience the joy of union with him, to transcend one’s sense of separation from him, to think, touch, taste and hear of him, to speak only of him, to praise him, worship him, and to be teased, touched, abandoned and reunited with him, to be his and to make him one’s own, to conquer him, win his favour, subdue his fiercely independent nature—all this is also brahmacharya—the way of the vast. To love is also to grow vast, to love not only in the celibate, impersonal way, but to love in a deeply sensual, sexual and whole-being way, to love personally, even ‘romantically,’ is also to lose one’s moorings and grow infinite, the circumference of one’s being expanding till it embraces the whole cosmos. This, Bapu, is also a way of loving, a way of being, a way to reach God, not only through self-denial, chastity and renunciation, but through the fullest participation in the ananda-yajna that is life.
This way of loving does not bind one in the chains of causality or trap one in the endless eddies of samsara. Instead it is a special kind of maya, which in traditional Krishnology goes by the name of Yogamaya. As Edwin F. Bryant explains in ‘Krishna in the Tenth Book of the Bhagavata Purana’ (Bryant 131):
Yogamaya covers the pure liberated souls in the leela with her power of illusion, such that they are unaware of Krishna’s real nature and thus relate to him not as God but rather as their friend, lover, or child, and so on. Were Yogamaya not to extend her influence in this way, the souls would realize Krishna’s true nature and be incapable of interacting with him in leela in these intimate ways (10.7.32; 10.11.2 and following; 10.16.14; 10.19.14; 10.20.1; 10.42.22; 10.61.2). To put it differently, how could God truly play spontaneously and unceremoniously with anyone in the role of a son or friend, if everyone knew he was really God? Unlike that of her samsaric counterpart, Yogamaya’s power of illusion, then, is a highly desirable and positive one obtained only by the highest yogis.
That is why of all modes of bhakti, or devotion, madhurya—the way of regarding the Lord as lover, partner, spouse and husband—is the best.
CONCLUSION
The rise of Radha coincides with the period when Vaishnavism, especially the post-Chaitanya ecstatic mode of Krishna bhakti, enjoyed the widest popularity in northern India. Its after-effects, albeit in a diluted and distorted form, are still evident in popular culture and imagination. Vaishnavism, before Radha, suffered from a particular goddess-deficit. The first three avatars—Matsya, Kurma, Varaha—are subhuman; Vaman is single and celibate; Narasimha, half man, half lion, though later paired with Lakshmi, had no relationship with her. With Rama we see the beginning of a real love story. The romance of Sita–Rama is, indeed, charming, especially their first meeting, the svayamvara, when Sita chooses Rama after he breaks Shiva’s bow, then, despite Rama’s banishment, it is Sita’s accompanying him that changes the first years of that terrible forest exile from something akin to a death sentence to a real honeymoon. The image of Rama and Sita in Chitrakoota is etched in the cultural memory of India as an idyll of conjugal bliss. But then Sita is abducted and the focus shifts to the great battle between Rama and Ravana. Though the latter is vanquished and beheaded, Sita’s subsequent humiliations, her trial by fire and, finally, her banishment when pregnant with Luv and Kush, turns the love story into a tragedy. It takes the peculiar double ‘DNA test’ of his sons first reciting incognito his own story to him, then vanquishing Rama to prove that they are indeed his sons. But the love story by this time is dead, as is Sita. Vaishnavism needed the special kind of love-goddess, whom Radha would make the most attractive and irresistible of the avatars. Krishna is God because he can satisfy all his devotees, not only his fabled 16,000 plus wives who come to him later, but right in his adolescence, Radha, the most demanding and devoted of all lovers. We all wish to enjoy and own God; only Radha knows and teaches us how to. It is only with Radha that Vaishnavism’s goddess-deficit is met. There are other female worshippers of Krishna both before and after, Andal and Meera, for example, to name two historico-mythic heroines. But Radha supersedes the former and anticipates all those that follow her, showing how loved and adored she is. That is why Radha bhava is so significant, whether in Chaitanya or Ramakrishna—we have to become Radha really to know and enjoy God.
Related to the goddess deficit is the problem of the male-dominated theology of the Vaishnavas. Vishnu, the Supreme Person, is conceived of and depicted as a male. In Vaishnava iconography, there is the famous depiction of the Lord reclining on the sea of milk, shaded by the hooded snake, sesha, with Lakshmi, his consort, at his feet. Such a portrayal invites, indeed, a feminist critique.10 Here, the goddess serves her Lord, pressing his feet, offering service, while he rests. It would appear that men have it easy in such a scheme, while women must serve them. But on closer scrutiny we see that a lotus emerges from the navel of the Lord, which contains the three-headed creator, Brahma. The implication is that the Lord is tired because he has just completed one cycle of creation, but even as he rests before his next act of bringing into being another universe, the process of creation has already been initiated. The goddess, his own power, pleased with his abilit
y to generate another world into motion, ensures that he enjoys a moment of rest between his labour. Such iconography acknowledges the exertions of the male in the act of reproduction; he must exert himself to satisfy his female partner before conception can take place. After losing his seed, the male rests to recover his strength, while his spouse looks on, pleased, helping to put him to sleep. Despite such a favourable interpretation, Vaishnavism remains mostly male-dominant. But it is possible that the rise of Radha occurred because of the intersection of Shaktism with Vaishnavism. The Supreme Goddess, the divine Mother, thus infiltrates and re-engineers the male-dominant creed of the Vaishnavas as Radha. But she flowers not as Mother but paramour, lover, spouse. In that sense, Radha adds to the repertoire not only of Vaishnavism but of tantricism as well. But one might argue, to the contrary, that the gopis are only the older yoginis of tantricism, pastoralized and tamed. Instead of flying, powerful beings, they are now docile cow-girls pining for Krishna. The fierce, matriarchal harridans and witchlike spirits have now been domesticated in the new agriculturalist patriarchy in which women’s generative and sexual powers are no longer feared or worshipped. The wild orgy in the forest and the ritual of the chakra puja becomes the more sedate and serene rasa mandala, with one Supreme male cavorting with all his adoring nymphs.
Finding Radha Page 10