Finding Radha Read online

  A second kind of legacy lies in secular study circles, to seek Radha’s place in Indic traditions. As queried by Meghnad Desai, ‘Why was it necessary to invent or create Radha as Krishna’s consort? My conjecture is that powerful as he was in battle and diplomacy, not to mention as the person who recites the Geeta to Arjuna, Krishna was lacking something. Rama had Sita. Vishnu had Lakshmi. Shiva had Parvati. But who did Krishna have? 16,108 women would hardly qualify as significant in his life. Krishna needed one woman, one he cared about over all others.’ Furthermore, is there a sacred geography attached to Radha–Krishna? Renuka Narayanan opens up the less-researched subject of Radha in the literature of south India: ‘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.’ Narayanan also speaks of the modern saints, Swami Haridhos Giri of Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu, and Vittaldas Maharaj in Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh.

  A third legacy resides in the evolution of spiritual interpretations. Among those who have written on this subject, Shubha Vilas, mentioning the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition says, ‘The beloved consorts of Lord Krishna are of three kinds: the goddesses of fortune, the queens and, foremost of all, the milkmaids of Vraja. These consorts all proceed from Radhika. Just as the fountainhead, Lord Krishna, is the cause of all incarnations, Shri Radha is the cause of all these consorts. The goddesses of fortune are partial manifestations of Shrimati Radhika, and the queens are reflections of her image.’ In many ways, the exposition on Radha comes full circle in the belief that she and her Lord are One. In the section ‘Songs of Radha’, Jayadeva’s lines resonate timelessly:

  Krishna, without you Radha,

  Is scorched by love, a flame that burns

  As, with every sighing breath, she yearns.

  —From Gita Govinda: Love Songs of Radha and Krishna, by Jayadeva, translated by Lee Siegel

  Transiting through the ages, gathering tributes from Surdas, Chaitanya, Vidyapati, Balarama Das and innumerable others, Radha keeps appearing in the cycle of mythology, articulating an infinite, cosmic, inseparable togetherness with Krishna. In Ramakanta Rath’s words:

  You are the fragrance of rocks,

  the lamentation of each flower [. . .]

  the fantastic time that’s half-day and half-night,

  the eternity of the sea’s brief silence . . .

  OTHER BOOKS ON RADHA AND OUR EMPHASIS

  We deeply appreciate the works of scholarship on Radha that have preceded our book Finding Radha: The Quest for Love. While gaining immensely from these publications, we have tried to present largely fresh material, making the elusive goddess Radha accessible in her many manifestations. Our work will naturally invite a correlation with Heidi Pauwels’s excellent work The Goddess as Role Model: Sita and Radha in Scripture and on Screen (2008). Indeed, these mythical women are a study in contrast: Sita the loyal wife, Radha the eternal paramour. Pauwels’s scholarly introduction explores historical narratives on ‘love’; among the chapters are included her superb expositions on TV and film. To avoid an overlap, we have emphasized the power of storytelling and invited scholars to delve into Indic traditions and creative writers to imagine their Radha. Another book of high value is by John Stratton Hawley and Donna Marie Wulff (editors), The Divine Consort: Radha and the Goddesses of India (1987), in which the symbols and rituals that are inherent to ‘devi’ give rise to insightful essays on ancient figures as well as new icons such as Santoshi Maa. The sections on Radha have helped us in formulating our thoughts, specifically in relation to secular and religious debates, and we have extracted some sections from Acharya Shrivatsa Goswami’s article. Harsha V. Dehejia (editor), with Radha: From Gopi to Goddess (2014), comes nearest to our endeavour, and we are grateful for the permission to reprint two essays from this admirable collection discussing Radha as ‘both kamini and ramani, desirable and beautiful [. . .] both a gopi and a nayika’. Here, too, our corpus is somewhat different. We include creative interpretations, translations and a few essays that enter the religious, mythic, historical, social and cultural dimensions around the figures of Radha and Krishna.

  We are grateful to all our contributors for sharing this journey of discovery and self-discovery, because in Finding Radha we find ourselves. Raised in a rustic village yet consort to the Lord of the Universe, Radha touches the heart of every Indian who recognizes the integrity of unquestioning love and the power of worship—across regions, across languages, across time. The Raas Leela continues.

  1

  A MILKMAID CALLED RADHA

  DEVDUTT PATTANAIK

  IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to think of Krishna without thinking of Radha. Theirs is an eternal love story. The stuff of romantic songs. And, yet, some of the biggest Krishna temples in India do not enshrine the image of Radha. In Puri, Odisha, Krishna is enshrined with his sister, Subhadra, and his brother, Balarama. In Udupi, Karnataka, and Guruvayoor, Kerala, and Nathdwara, Rajasthan, Krishna stands alone as a cowherd boy. In Pandharpur, Maharashtra, and Dwarka, Gujarat, he stands alone with the temple of his wife, Rukmini, nearby. Even the most sacred book of Krishna, the Bhagavata Purana, does not mention Radha. To understand this, we have to look at the historical development of Krishna worship in India.

  It is difficult for many people to accept that religious ideas have a history of their own. The earliest tales of Krishna, found in the Mahabharata, compiled between 300 BC and 300 AD, only refer to, but do not describe, his early life in the village of cowherds. Later, around 400 AD, the Harivamsa was added as an appendix to the Mahabharata. This described in detail Krishna’s life in Gokul, including his dalliances with milkmaids. But there was no mention of Radha or any particular milkmaid. The women were a collective with whom Krishna danced and sported. The mood was joyful and carnival-like. In the Bhagavata Purana, compiled around the 10th century in south India, where the idea of devotion to God visualized as Krishna was elaborated, Krishna disappears when the milkmaids become possessive and seek exclusive attention. The idea that God (Krishna) loves all with equal intensity was visually expressed by making the women dance in a circle, each one equidistant from Krishna, who stood playing the flute in the centre.

  Around this time Prakrit literature began referring to one Radha who was portrayed as Krishna’s favourite. In Hala’s Gatha Saptasati, Krishna removes a dust particle, kicked up by cows, from Radha’s eye, thus declaring her exalted position in his heart and humbling the other women. In these songs Krishna is not divine; he is a simple cowherd, a hero of the village folk. The songs lack sensual passion and religious ecstasy. Radha is never wife, and the dominant emotion is one of longing, following separation, an emotion that eventually characterizes the Radha–Krishna relationship.

  In the 5th century, the Tamil epic Silappadikaram refers to one Nal-Pinnai who was the beloved of Mal (the local name for Krishna). Scholars believe that she represents an early form of Radha. This idea of a favourite milkmaid gradually spread to the north and reached its climax with the composition of the Gita Govinda, a Sanskrit song written by Jayadeva in the 12th century AD, in which the passion of the cowherd god and his beloved milkmaid was celebrated in a language and style that took all of India by storm.

  Jayadeva was born in a village near Puri, Odisha, which is renowned for the grand temple complex of Jagannath, lord of the world, a local form of Krishna. Research has shown that he was involved with Padmavati, a temple dancer, or devadasi, and perhaps even married her. Hi
s work was inspired by both his personal experience and his religious beliefs. Each of Jayadeva’s songs is composed of eight couplets, known as ashtapadis. Twenty-four ashtapadis make a chapter and twelve chapters make up the entire work. In it Krishna is identified as the supreme divine being—a radical shift from the earlier scriptures where Krishna is one of the many incarnations of Vishnu. The book uses extremely ornamented language to describe in intimate detail Radha’s passion. As one moves from verse to verse, one is transported from the physical realm into the spiritual realm. The erotic longing becomes the cry of the soul for union with the divine. Such an approach was revolutionary; it fired the imagination of the priests and dancers who made it a part of the temple ritual. Being a major Vaishnava religious centre, hundreds of pilgrims from all over India poured into Puri. Day and night, they heard the priests sing Jayadeva’s song of Radha’s love for Krishna, with the devadasis depicting her yearning for her beloved in graceful dance steps. Before long the visitors were mouthing the lyrics and taking it back to their villages. In less than a century, the Gita Govinda transformed from a temporal parochial literary work into a sacred pan-Indian scripture. It completely revitalized Vaishnavism in the subcontinent and catalysed the rise of the Bhakti (devotional) movement in India.

  Before Jayadeva, love and eroticism revolved around Kama, the god of lust, and his consort, Rati, goddess of erotics, who were eulogized by poets such as Kalidasa and scholars such as Vatsyayana. With the rise of the monastic orders of Buddhism and Jainism, Kama was demonized into Mara, who had to be conquered by those seeking enlightenment. In the Puranas, stories were told of how Kama was burnt alive when Shiva, the supreme ascetic, opened his third eye. All things sensual came to be seen as fetters that blocked one’s spiritual growth. But Jayadeva changed all that. Through his song he made sensuality and romantic emotion the vehicle of the highest level of spirituality. His Krishna was a reformed Kama. His Radha was a reformed Rati. He turned kama (lust) into prema (romance). Krishna’s love for Radha and Radha’s love for Krishna were expressed in physical terms but they communicated a profound mystical experience.

  The centuries before the Gita Govinda had seen the collapse of Buddhist orders and an increased stranglehold of Brahminism based on caste hierarchy and ritualism. God was visualized either as an ascetic (Shiva) or a king (Vishnu). With the arrival of Islam from the 8th century AD onwards, the exalted status given to ascetics and kings took a beating. Cities were razed to the ground. Poets and artists took shelter in the rural hinterland and there discovered the simple ideologies of the village folk based on love and devotion. It is in this environment that poets such as Jayadeva were inspired to shape God as a simple cowherd, accessible through the simplest of emotions, stripped of complex scholarly erudition.

  Inspired by Jayadeva, in the 14th and 15th centuries, poets such as Vidyapati and Chandidas further elaborated the relationship of Radha and Krishna. It was always described as a turbulent shift between separation and union, jealousy and surrender. In a rather bold move, these poets saw Radha as a married woman who broke all social norms to be with Krishna. Some folk narratives of this period suggested that she was Krishna’s aunt, married to his maternal uncle. Some said she was older, a mature woman, while he was a boy. Even in the Gita Govinda, Radha’s union with Krishna always takes place in secret. There is constant reference to the threat of social disgrace. By making the relationship illicit and clandestine, the poets heightened the emotional quotient of the relationship. It was seen as true love that transcended custom and law. Devotees came to realize that Radha was the symbol of all those who were ‘married’ to social responsibilities, seeking liberation and union with their true love—God—who is Krishna.

  Many found the use of these extramarital and incestuous metaphors rather scandalous. They moved towards a different theology in which Radha and Krishna were two halves of the whole. She was the material world, he was the spiritual soul. She was the supreme woman, he was the supreme man. They were Goddess and God whose union gave birth to the universe. The world was seen as Radha, born of Krishna’s delight. She was Krishna’s shakti, or power, one who could never be separated from him. This was the svakiya (belonging to Krishna) tradition, which distinguished itself from the parakiya (belonging to another) tradition. These were expressed in scriptures such as the Brahma Vaivarta Purana.

  Despite this, across India, Radha is always Krishna’s beloved, never his wife. His wives are Rukmini and Satyabhama. Radha’s relationship is different in nature in comparison to Sita’s relationship with Ram. While Ram is the model husband and Sita is the model wife, Krishna and Radha represent the great lovers who were destined never to unite. Perhaps that is why, except in religious orders of the Gangetic plains that follow the svakiya tradition, Radha is never enshrined in a temple.

  Scriptures say that worldly responsibilities force Krishna to leave the village of cowherds and go to Mathura and thence to Dwarka and Kurukshetra. He has to sacrifice the land of pleasure, vilasa bhumi, for the land of duty, karma bhumi. He has to rescue a world that was descending into anarchy—where women such as Draupadi are being gambled away by their husbands. Radha has to be given up. After leaving her, Krishna never plays the flute, for Radha was his inspiration. The later Krishna never danced or made music. He is no more the cowherd; he was the charioteer riding into battle.

  In time, Radha became a goddess in her own right. Without her, Krishna was incomplete. She was the medium through which Krishna could be realized. Metaphysically, Radha came to represent the truth of our soul, the unexpressed, unrequited longings of our heart, suppressed by social realities, which cry out to Krishna. Krishna acknowledges this truth of our being that society denies, each time he dances with Radha at night, outside the village, in secret.

  2

  IN SEARCH OF THE HISTORICAL RADHA

  JAWHAR SIRCAR

  WE CANNOT EVER imagine Krishna without Radha, but not many, perhaps, know that she actually entered the life and legend of Krishna rather late. An even-lesser-known fact is that Krishna himself took his own time to blossom into a dominant figure in Indian mythology. Contrary to what most people are told, Krishna was certainly not visible in the Vedic period—when all that was or is ‘holy, good and great in India’ is claimed to have appeared. His first mention—just a wisp of it—appears well after the Rig Veda had been completed. It is in the Chhandogya Upanishad of the 8th or 7th century BC that we get one ‘Krishna, son of Devaki’: Krisnaya-devakiputraya. However sparse, this single mention of Krishna indicates that some legends about him were possibly in circulation somewhere in the post-Vedic period.

  This is about the time when the speakers of an Indo-Aryan language were coming to terms with the indigenous people of India—whom they had earlier reviled, rather intensely. Over the next few centuries we get to hear of him, in bits and pieces, in other texts such as the Taittiriya Aranyaka, the Jain sacred tales, Panini’s Ashtadhyayi, and so on. Vasudeva—as a divine character who is distinct from yet allied to Krishna—makes his first physical appearance a century or so before the Christian Era or the Current Era commenced. On one side of a silver coin of Agotheles the Greek we get an image of Vasudeva–Krishna. We must remember that, during this period, Vasudeva was an independent, established deity, while Krishna was a rather amorphous, upcoming deity on whom there was neither any literature nor any icon, till then. Pierre Amiet and his fellow scholars declare, rather decisively: ‘There is no evidence of Krishna (or Radha) in sculpture or coinage or inscription before the Current Era began.’1

  The first clear image of Krishna appears in the Ekanamsa Group of sculptures of 2nd century AD in Gaya, Bihar,2 where he appears to have broken free from Vasudeva. But he is still yoked with Balarama, whose images, incidentally, are quite visible in the preceding three centuries. This Kushan-period sculpture of Ekanamsa positions Krishna next to Balarama, with a female who is identified as ‘Subhadra’, their sister. The first sacred text that mentions Krishna is the Harivamsa of the 3rd
or 4th century, which collated the hitherto-nebulous or patchy tales about Krishna into one authoritative omnibus. It is around this time that the Mahabharata and the Ramayana had reached the final stage of composition after almost five centuries ‘in the making’—busy absorbing and sewing together different, colourful tales from all over the Indo-Gangetic plains and beyond. Yet, though both the Harivamsa and the Mahabharata extol the ‘mature and godly Krishna’, we do not come across any corroborative sculpture or other arts. These are all on Bala-Krishna, as are the large number of sculptural or terracotta representations of Krishna that appear in the next 600 years. Gupta and post-Gupta art depict Krishna as a baby or a child, not as a youth or adult—which thus precludes Radha’s arrival altogether.

  To reach Radha, we need to cross another six long centuries, to reach the 9th-century sacred text, the Bhagavata Purana. But before we come to the first Radha-like young woman in Brahmanical literature, we must mention a secular text that mentions Radha. The Gatha Saptasati is a collection of 700 verses composed in Prakrit by a king named Hala. We know that he belonged to the upper Deccan but we do not know the time frame for the same. This could have been in the 2nd century AD, which means this book preceded the final version of the Mahabharata and the Harivamsa. Or it could have been composed some three or four centuries later—no one knows. We are taken aback at the explicit reference—pada 225 of the first chapter, that says, ‘O Krishna, by the puff of breath from your mouth, as you blow the dust from Radha’s face, you take away the glories of other milkmaids.’3 Not only this, we come across a verse in another work, Banabhat.t.a’s Harshacharita, which describes how ‘the breasts of Radha made Krishna dance in the courtyard, and people were amazed’. It is clear that the myth of Radha and Krishna—including his loves, or leelas—was surely known to a section of the masses of India, by the middle of the first millennium of the Current Era. The moot point here is, however, that Radha was still not ‘recognized’ by Brahmanical religion, even though we find Radha in Jain commentaries. In the 7th century, we see a mention in Bhatta Narayana’s Venisamhara. Another Jain scholar Anandavardhana also mentions her in his famous Dhvanyaloka, which preceded the first Hindu sacred text to refer to her, that too, rather indirectly—the Bhagavata Purana.