Radha

The oldest surviving line about her is small enough to walk past. A herd is coming home down a road in the Deccan, hooves lifting a fine brown haze that hangs at knee height, and in the middle of it a cowherd boy leans in and blows the dust out of a girl’s eye. Seven hundred verses sit in King Hala’s Prakrit anthology and that is the one that outlived the rest: one puff of breath, one girl singled out of a crowd of milkmaids, and every other woman in the village quietly demoted. The verse is roughly nineteen centuries old. The girl is called Radhika.

Then she nearly disappears. For a thousand years she surfaces only in glimpses, a stray reference in Bhatta Narayana’s drama around 800, an illustrative quotation in Anandavardhana’s treatise on poetic suggestion, another in Abhinavagupta’s commentary on it, a line in Kshemendra, a line in Hemachandra. In every one of them she is already grieving and already understood, as though the audience needed no introduction. And the great text that carried the Krishna cult across India, the Bhagavata Purana, never names her once. It has an unnamed favourite gopi whom Krishna slips away with, and it leaves her unnamed. Seventeenth-century commentators would insist that this was Radha and that the silence was deliberate, a secret too intimate to print. Sceptical scholars read the same silence as evidence that she was a regional figure who had not yet arrived.

She arrived in the twelfth century, in Sanskrit, in the wet heat of a Bengal spring. Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda is a sequence of songs about two lovers in the forest along the Yamuna, and it does something no earlier text had risked: it makes the woman the equal subject. She sulks, she accuses, she refuses to be soothed, and Krishna spends most of the poem in various postures of apology. In its most famous position she is above him. Around the same time, and possibly through friendship with Jayadeva, the philosopher Nimbarka built a theology with her at its centre, the first acharya to do so, teaching that the left side of the supreme lord simply is Radha and that she is served eternally by thousands of companions. After that the vernacular poets took her. Vidyapati in Maithili, Chandidas in Bengali, Surdas and Swami Haridas in Braj Bhasha. Chandidas has her burn her own reputation without apparent regret: casting away all the ethics of caste, my heart dotes on Krishna day and night.

Her origins were supplied later and generously. She is the daughter of Vrishabhanu, a Yadava chief, and his wife Kirtida, born at Rawal near Gokul and raised at Barsana in the low hills west of the Yamuna. One well-loved account has Vrishabhanu find her instead, an infant on a thousand-petalled lotus turning slowly in the river, and the child keeps her eyes shut for months, refusing the world, until a dark toddler from the next village is carried in and she opens them. She is nine months older than him. That detail matters more than it looks: in Braj she is the senior, and the local grammar of the relationship follows from it.

Her ordinary days are the best-documented part of her. She and her eight companions, Lalita and Vishakha at the front of them, run the daylight economy of a cowherd settlement, and the stories are full of the small friction of that world. Krishna blocks the path to the river and demands a toll of curd. He steals clothes, hides in trees, dresses as a woman to get through a door that is closed to him, dresses as a peacock and dances to break her temper. She has a temper. An entire recognised category of devotional feeling, maan, is named for the state of loving someone enough to be furious with them and to make them work for it. At Barsana every spring the women still drive the men of Nandgaon out of the village with long sticks while the air goes pink with thrown powder, and everyone involved understands they are re-enacting an argument.

The other scene is the one the whole tradition is built on. On an autumn night Krishna plays the flute on the riverbank and the women of Braj get up from their husbands and their cooking fires and go out to him, and he multiplies himself so that each of them dances with him alone. Radha is not one of many there. She is the reason it happens. The forest floor is cool, the Yamuna is running low, and the dance goes on for what the texts describe as a night of the gods, which is to say longer than a night.

Then Krishna leaves for Mathura on political business and never comes back to live in Braj. That is the fact the entire later tradition organises itself around, and it is not softened. He sends his companion Uddhava with a message of philosophical consolation, and the women of Braj listen to it and are unimpressed. The Garga Samhita and the Brahma Vaivarta Purana give her a strange, bleak exit: she leaves Barsana for a forest of plantains and leaves behind a shadow of herself, Chaya Radha, so that the village does not notice she has gone. A curse of a hundred years’ separation has to run its course. Only when it does does he come back, and a chariot takes the whole of Braj up to Goloka, the cow-world above every other heaven, where the two of them are said to relate as a body relates to its soul.

Whether they married is the oldest quarrel about her, and both answers are load-bearing. The Brahma Vaivarta Purana and the Garga Samhita have Brahma himself officiate a secret wedding in the Bhandirvan forest, which makes her a wife and their union svakiya, lawful. The Bengali tradition prefers parakiya, love that has no social permission and therefore no safety net, on the grounds that a love with nothing to lose is worth less. One much-repeated exchange splits the difference. She asks why he will not marry her, and he answers that marriage joins two souls, and that they are one soul already, so whom would he be marrying.

What she can do follows from what she is. In the theology that grew up after Chaitanya, Krishna’s own capacity for joy takes shape as a person, and that person is Radha, so his delight is not something he generates but something he receives from her. The Radha Vallabha and Haridasi lineages went further and worship her alone, with Krishna attending. The Radhatantram makes him her student. Sage Durvasa gave her a boon that anything she cooked would surpass nectar, which is the kind of power granted to someone who is expected to stay in a kitchen and did not. Sculptors in Maharashtra carved the two of them as a single split figure, half her, half him, the same device used for Shiva and Parvati.

Her limits are the same thing seen from the other side. She has no scriptural charter, no hymn in the Vedas, no line in the text that made Krishna famous, and her defenders have had to argue her into the canon for eight hundred years. She cannot keep him. Everything she is capable of, the anger, the boon, the dance, the thousand names, operates inside a story whose ending is that he goes to Mathura and she does not. Chandidas gave her the only description of the cost that the tradition has never improved on. Longing for him, she says, she has blackened her golden skin.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Radha in Hindu mythology?

Radha is a Hindu goddess of love and devotion and the chief consort of Krishna. In her human form she is a cowherd woman of Braj, the leader of the gopis and the daughter of Vrishabhanu and Kirtida of Barsana. In Vaishnava theology she is Krishna’s hladini shakti, the personified power of bliss, and traditions such as Radha Vallabha worship her as the supreme deity in her own right.

Why is Radha not mentioned in the Bhagavata Purana?

Radha is never named in the Bhagavata Purana, the text that carried the Krishna cult across India, and this absence has been argued over for centuries. Devotional commentators such as Visvanatha Chakravarti identify the unnamed favourite gopi of the Bhagavata as Radha and treat the silence as deliberate concealment of something too intimate to state. Other readings take the absence at face value and place her rise later, with Jayadeva’s twelfth-century Gita Govinda and the philosopher Nimbarka.

Were Radha and Krishna married?

The traditions disagree, and both answers carry theological weight. The Brahma Vaivarta Purana and the Garga Samhita describe a secret wedding conducted by Brahma in the Bhandirvan forest, making the union svakiya, or lawful marriage, and the Nimbarka Sampradaya worships Radha as Krishna’s wedded wife. Gaudiya Vaishnavism prefers parakiya, love outside social sanction, holding that a love with no protection is the purer form.

What is Radha’s earliest appearance in literature?

The earliest surviving reference is a single verse in the Gatha Saptasati, a Prakrit anthology attributed to King Hala and dated to roughly the first or second century CE, in which Krishna blows dust from Radhika’s eye and so humbles all the other milkmaids. She then appears only in scattered literary allusions for around a thousand years before Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda made her a central figure in the twelfth century.

Where is Radha worshipped and when is her festival?

Radha is worshipped across northern and eastern India and in Nepal, most intensely in the Braj region around Barsana, Vrindavan and Mathura, and in Maharashtra under the regional name Rahi alongside Vithoba. Her birthday, Radhashtami, falls on the eighth day of the bright half of the lunar month of Bhadrapada, fifteen days after Krishna Janmashtami, and is celebrated most elaborately at Barsana.

Related Entries

Krishna, Vishnu, Lakshmi, Jagannath, Kama, Rati, Chakora, Sita, Rama, Parvati, Ardhanarishvara, Devi, Durga, Sarasvati, Apsaras