Finding Radha

by Namita Gokhale

  A heartbroken Radha pleads piteously before her lord at his departure, ‘Stay, Shyama, my love Shyama, stay / Stay with me. I have no friend but you / no love, Madhava. No one but you’ (Poem 16, p. 61). Her earnest entreaties go in vain, and though her lover does not melt, the poetic persona Bhanu does and empathizes with Radha’s dejected self, ‘Weeping for Radha, I say that life is pain / If there were no love, there would be no grief’ (p. 63). She is also painfully aware of the fact that though Shyama is her lone object of desire, there are hundreds of Radhas who yearn for him.

  Once Krishna leaves, cloud and darkness, which had witnessed the consummation of their love earlier, become a metaphor for death. An utterly devastated Radha contemplates death as an alternative to love. In the poem titled ‘Maran’ (Death), a forlorn Radha vents her grief, ‘Maran re, tuhun mam Shyam saman’ (O Death, you resemble my Shyam; translation mine). The desire to achieve liberation through death is not a recurring trope in Vaishnava poetry. Yet this permeates not only Bhanusingher Padavali but also Gitanjali and some of Tagore’s later poems.19 In the English translation of Gitanjali (Song 91), Death has been personified as the lord and bridegroom. The poetic persona expresses the desire to meet her last hope, ‘O thou the last fulfilment of life, Death, my death, come and whisper to me! . . . After the wedding the bride shall leave her home and meet her lord alone in the solitude of night’ (Gitanjali, pp. 59–60).

  Tagore’s Radha, nonetheless, is a resilient devotee and lover, who ceases to pay attention to thoughts of suicide and her social disgrace. Radha puts everything at stake in love, including her family honour, friendship and, above all, her soul. She surrenders before God in all humility and expects infinite pleasure, ‘Radha is the Dark God’s mistress / May her pleasure be endless!’ (Poem 22, p. 85). She laments, however, that she does not know the art of seduction. Radha also emphasizes the class–caste difference in a self-deprecatory tone and addresses herself as belonging to ‘dukhani Ahir jati’, a distressed woman from the ‘Ahir jati’.20 Her ambivalent feeling towards Krishna continues as, on the one hand, she expects to remain happy even in separation, but, on the other, she reflects on her miserable existence.

  A LOVELORN AND FORLORN GOD: RADHA IN TAGORE, VIDYAPATI, JAYADEVA AND BHARATI

  Unlike Tagore, Vidyapati foregrounds Krishna’s vulnerability in love too. In the songs of the Maithili poet, a humanized God reciprocates Radha’s passion fervidly and conveys his pain through Radha’s friend, dooti (the messenger), who says, ‘Hey friend! The agony of Krishna’s heart is immeasurable / Forgetting the world, all that he utters is Radha, Radha’ (Vidyapati’s Padavali, ‘Krishna ki Dooti’, p. 85; translation mine). In his Padavali, Vidyapati seems to be mediating between the lovers, and here his sympathies overtly lie with the forlorn Krishna, ‘A half-dead Madhav cannot survive, says Vidyapati / Unless he drinks the nectar of your lips’ (87; translation mine). In describing Krishna’s longing for love through the trope of a messenger, Vidyapati seems to be inspired by Jayadeva.21 In a poem titled ‘Lotus-eyed Krishna Longing for Love’ in Gita Govinda, Krishna utters his total helplessness before Radha’s friend, ‘I will stay here, you go to Radha / Appease her with my words and bring her to me!’ And then, the news of her beloved’s pain is conveyed to Radha:

  Your neglect affects his heart,

  Inflicting pain night after night.

  Wildflower-garlanded Krishna

  Suffers in your desertion, friend.22

  But in Tagore, the dark lord does not seem to languish in love and neither does he express his intense longing, for Krishna mostly remains an absent presence in his songs. The endless agony of Radha is juxtaposed against the endless indifference of ‘heartless Krishna’ in the concluding section of Tagore’s songs, and the question of love and separation remains an open-ended one. It is perhaps this lack of a neat closure in various mystical–erotic narratives on Radha that induces the poets to revisit and retell the story of unrequited love. The eternal nature of their legendary love has been beautifully captured by the acclaimed Hindi poet Dharamvir Bharati in his work Kanupriya (1959), where a self-assured Radha addresses her lord Kanu/Krishna in absentia (p. 37; translation mine):

  Since eternity, in endless directions

  I have been your companion; I shall be your companion.

  I cannot recall the birth of this journey, neither can you

  And there is no end to this odyssey, my consort.

  Bharati’s Radha, unlike the young Tagore’s, is confident; she knows the significance of her place in history, and never undermines her individuality. Yet, like Tagore’s Radha, she, too, is willing to wait endlessly and unconditionally for her love (p. 79; translation mine):

  You had called for me!

  I stand steadfast

  at the most treacherous turn of the trail

  awaiting you, my Kanu.

  The image of a lovelorn Radha waiting endlessly and ungrudgingly will continue to fascinate poets, readers and lovers for years to come.

  17

  RADHA: THE UNFADING MYSTIC BLOSSOM IN OUR MIDST

  RENUKA NARAYANAN

  LIKE MANY OTHERS, I grew up knowing that Radha and Krishna were supposed to have conducted their love-play in the hospitable and sweet-scented shade of the kadamba tree. It was something our gods did—make passionate love—and it’s interesting how we just accepted it all so matter-of-factly as children and teenagers.

  As for Radha’s kadamba, its truly immortal moment surely came that golden day on the banks of the Yamuna when the gopis went to fill their clay water-pots at the river? Once they filled their water-pots, perhaps they looked meaningfully at each other and at the cool, laughing water. Perhaps there was time for a quick bath? Shedding their skirts and veils, the laughing band must have plunged into the Yamuna and enjoyed a pleasant frolic in her waters. When it was time to come out though, they found that a dark-skinned rogue in a yellow dhoti had hung their clothes out of reach on the kadamba tree that grew over the riverbank.

  How Krishna insisted that they shed their shame and come out naked to receive their garments is endlessly portrayed in song, story, painting and artefact. My favourite visual depiction of this scene is the Pahari miniature from Kangra, possibly by the artist Nainsukh. It is so vivid and charming that you feel you are in the scene yourself, perhaps as a curious songbird on a kadamba branch at Krishna’s own blue elbow, having quite forgotten how to chirp amidst all these strange goings-on.

  We were never taught to look at this scene pruriently or as a patriarchal fantasy of sexual harassment. Instead, we were told that we needed sanskar, or spiritual merit, to understand it as a dramatic metaphor or allegory for how the human soul must shed all baggage and approach God with total surrender and vulnerability. Is that the living magic of being Indian, do you think, that the old stories never go away but just pick up new tellings and we go with the flow?

  No wonder the dour Scots missionaries who traipsed about India during the British Raj in the 19th century grumbled in their journals and diaries that they were making very poor headway in their attempts to convert ‘the Hindoos’ because ‘we cannot match their myths with our own’.

  In case the matter teases, the kadamba’s botanical name is Anthocephalus cadamba and Nauclea cadamba of the Rubiaceae family. It’s a leafy tree with wide, spreading branches and yellow puffball flowers that scent up the air. You can propagate it from its seeds. It figures in medicinal listings because its bark is used for tonics and against fevers.

  Against these arguably prosaic material facts, you wonder why our ancients gave the kadamba so much spiritual significance as a divine favourite, for it is right up there in scripture, especially in the Srimad Bhagavatam or Bhagavata Purana, also familiarly called the Bhagavatam, Sri Krishna’s life story. This scripture celebrates the kadamba and details the creation of the Maha Raas, or Krishna’s mystic circular dance with the gopis or milkmaids of Vrindavana. It even takes the place of the idol in a number of temples in north-east India after t
he great reformer Sankara Dev of Assam popularized Krishna worship in the region.

  The kadamba also comes up in verses that praise the Devi, or Mother Goddess, where she is described as ‘Kadamba-vana nilaye’ and ‘Kadamba-vana vasini’ (Dweller of the Kadamba Forest).

  So both north India and south India venerate the kadamba with the interesting difference that the north associates it with Radha and Krishna, while in the south it is categorically known as the ‘Parvati Tree’, which is also its trade name in the timber business.

  Regarding this, I once saw a three-foot statue of Ganesha carved to order from Jaipur for the modest price of several lakh rupees.

  ‘It looks so like sandalwood,’ I said, knowing that it couldn’t be, since sandalwood is protected, but I was amazed at how sandalwood-like the polish made it seem.

  ‘Oh no, it’s kadamba—doubly lucky as the sacred tree of both Shaivas and Vaishnavas’, said an expert.

  In fact, this apparent difference expresses a deeper spiritual unity. Radha is said to be a manifestation of Lakshmi, the consort of Vishnu, whose eighth avatar was Krishna. Since Lakshmi and Parvati are both aspects of the Devi, or Parashakti, the supreme sacred force, the kadamba, by deduction, is essentially associated with the same persona.

  ‘Radha’, then, is the mystic blossom of Krishna lore. Her name means ‘auspicious’ and ‘wish-fulfilling’. It is said that the eastern poet Jayadeva is the man who made Radha really famous in the 12th century with his Sanskrit poem Gita Govinda, which celebrates Radha and Krishna’s love through intensely intimate verses set in the poetic form called ashtapadi. It ‘spread like wildfire across India’ and was translated into sixteen languages. Two poems from it are enshrined in the Guru Granth Sahib, the holy book of the Sikhs. The popularity of Jayadeva’s ashtapadis in Odisha, Bengal and north India is well-documented, as is the fact that the Gita Govinda is the official liturgical text of the great Jagannath Temple at Puri.

  The seventh ashtapadi, Mamiyam chalita, is possibly the first verse, or even the first instance, of a poem that has God pining for a human being’s love (Radha’s) and reproaching Himself for not understanding her anguish that He does not ‘belong’ exclusively to her. This is interpreted as the Para (Supersoul or God) longing as much for the love of devotees as devotees long for God’s love. It resonates with Advaita, the ancient Indian philosophical notion that the individual soul, Jivatma, is part of the Supersoul, the Paramatma.

  My mother, a classical dancer, never tired of pointing out the grandeur of spiritual humility in this fact, that an apparently simple, unlettered milkmaid like Radha was worshipped across India as the personification of divine mutual love. She explained Radha and Krishna’s love as an example of God’s saulabhyam, or accessibility, the gift of divine mercy, and taught me to sing and dance to Radha–Krishna songs in Tamil, Hindi and Sanskrit. Indeed, my earliest memory of being onstage is as Krishna at age five. There was always a cultural programme for Dussehra and Diwali in our neighbourhood, and I was installed as Krishna on a high stool, ankles crossed, with a peacock feather in my hair and a flute held to my lips while the big girls did a ‘gopi dance’ around me.

  In my growing-up years, Jayadeva’s ashtapadis were very much in the air in the Bhajana sampradaya, or devotional-song genre. Its beloved 20th-century exponent was the singing sanyasi Swami Haridhos Giri, born at the temple town of Tiruvannamalai in Tamil Nadu, which is famously associated with the sage Ramana Maharishi. Swami Haridhos Giri travelled widely across the Indian peninsula and to eastern countries like Malaysia, Singapore, and so on, drawing huge, ecstatic crowds with his emotionally charged renditions of ashtapadis and bhajans like ‘Brindavan Mein Kunj Bhavan Mein Naachat Giridharlal’. He made ‘Radharani’ come alive in madhurya bhakti, or ‘honeyed devotion’ to millions in south India until the day in 1994, aged about sixty, he reportedly took jalsamadhi, or voluntary death by drowning, in the holy waters of the Alaknanda, at Koteshwar Mahadev, near Rudraprayag, in the Himalayas.

  Nobody found it strange that a sanyasi sang of Radha’s love in Jayadeva’s sensuous ashtapadis, for he ‘became’ Radha in his fervour; and men and women of all ages were irresistibly drawn into his intense devotion and became Radha with him. It was a 20th-century mass Maha Raas. Other notable bhajan singers after him have kept the tradition literally rocking. Some, like Vittaldas Maharaj today, are capable of making a crowd of over ten thousand people at Tirupati get up and dance spontaneously to songs like ‘Radhe Radhe, Radhe Radhe’, ‘Radhe Govinda’ and ‘Hari Re Rangam Majhi’. Moreover, ‘Radha Kalyanam’, or Radha’s Wedding, is a regular cultural event across south India even today; blissful evenings of song and ceremony and showers of rose petals.

  In my view, a foundational reason for south India’s glad receptivity to Radha is the wistful figure of the girl saint Andal, who is believed to have lived in the Tamil region in the 8th or 9th century, well before Jayadeva in the 12th century and Meera Bai in the 16th century. Andal was found as a baby girl mysteriously left on the ground like Sita, by a priest who brought her up as his daughter. Andal saw Krishna as her husband and is believed to have ‘merged’ into the massive idol of Vishnu at Sri Rangam, the southern centre of Vaishnavism. Her songs remain hugely popular in 21st-century India. Andal, who sang of herself as a gopi, was a great influence on the luminous 10th-century founder of Srivaishnavism, Sri Ramanuja.

  The legend goes that Andal had composed a prayer at Azhagar Kovil, the temple to Vishnu at Madurai, which went, ‘O Lord Hari, if you accept me, I will offer you a hundred pots of sweet rice-pudding and a hundred pots of pure white butter.’ Shortly after making her promise there, Andal had gone back to her village, Srivilliputhur. She had been found out soon after, by her saintly father, in an act of vanity. She had taken to wearing the garland of flowers she wove every day for Vishnu before giving it to her father to offer in worship. One day, her father had spotted a long black hair caught in the flowers and had made Andal own up. But her father had then had a strange dream in which Vishnu had appeared to him and said that it was perfectly all right. It was only Andal’s pure and intense love that had made her wear ‘His’ garland.

  Events had moved swiftly after that for the young devotee, and one day when she had gone to Sri Rangam temple, she touched the feet of Vishnu’s idol there, swung herself up to sit on them . . . and disappeared. Everybody in the Bhakti community believed this then and believes it now. Andal’s yearning and her unkept promise to Krishna was fulfilled 200 years later by Sri Ramanuja to honour the spiritual debt he owed her.

  Here, it is fascinating to see how the cultural dotted lines run across India. Sri Ramanuja’s legacy went north with Sant Ramananda, the guru of Kabir, who in turn was cherished by Guru Nanak. Ramanuja’s influence on the Bhakti movement is profound and other legatees of note include no less than Tulsidas, whose Ramcharitmanas, ‘the people’s Ramayana’, changed the history of religion forever in north India.

  And it was at Sri Rangam that Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, the founder of Srivaishnavism in Bengal 500 years ago, made his longest stay during the four months of monsoon called chaturmaas. This was during his travels to holy places for six years after taking sanyas. He went every day to the Sri Rangam temple after bathing in the Kaveri River, and it seems entirely likely that his host, Venkatesh Bhat, told him all about Andal.

  Sri Chaitanya then set out to rediscover and map the long-lost physical locations of Vrindavana where Krishna was believed to have played and where the idylls and miracles of his childhood took place. This map is still followed by millions of pilgrims. Sri Chaitanya also conjured an inner landscape, of a life absorbed in the thoughts of Krishna, which he called the ‘hidden treasure of the Vrindavana within’. He urged that the path to the treasure lay in the practice of naam, in repeating Krishna’s names, particularly the refrain ‘Hare Rama, Hare Krishna’ and in singing kirtans in Krishna’s praise.

  It was Chaitanya who had famously added new lustre to the jatra, the old travelling folk theatre o
f the land. Chaitanya had preached the equality and brotherhood of all men, whatever their caste, and thrown himself into religious ecstasy as he sang and danced to Krishna with his followers on the streets of his home town, Nabadwip. One day, he had told his disciple Chandrashekhar that he wished to perform the play Rukmini Haran. This famous love story described how Krishna stole away Princess Rukmini of Chedi after he received her desperate love-letter asking him to rescue her from being married to someone else. Chaitanya had wanted the costumes, make-up and jewellery to be perfect. He had played the role of Princess Rukmini, transforming himself so completely that nobody could make out that it was their guru. The performance had gone on through the night at Chandrashekhar’s house and ended only in the morning. This pattern is similar to that of the other performing art forms like Kutiyattam, Kathakali, Kuchipudi, Manipuri and Sattriya, which are ‘musical dance-drama’, or balletic-operatic, in nature.

  So the depth and range of this great sweep of devotional, artistic, philosophical and lifestyle influence can actually be traced back to Andal-Radha. We could go so far as to say that it was the seed influence of Radha-Andal or Andal-Radha which kept religion alive in India through the tumult of history, putting out deep roots, wide-spreading branches and intoxicatingly perfumed flowers.

  Going by the ‘Radha logic’ we have attempted to trace here, the choice of the kadamba does make sense. It blooms in profusion not only across the land but in many minds, in poignant acknowledgement of Radha’s mystic idyll, and of how every pilgrim’s heart becomes Radha, too, in quest of Krishna.