Appearance
4.6 — Radha, the Gopis, and the Misconception That Will Not Die
The misconception, stated plainly so it can be answered: that Krishna was a womaniser, that he had a girlfriend called Radha and a harem of village women, and that a religion was built around a man's love life.
Almost every part of that is wrong, and the corrections are interesting.
Radha is not in the early sources
She does not appear by name in the Mahabharata. She does not appear in the Harivamsa. She does not appear in the Bhagavata Purana — the great tenth-century work that contains the fullest account of the Vrindavan childhood, the gopis and the raas dance. The most important devotional text about Krishna's youth does not name her.
She emerges in fragments in earlier poetry, and becomes a central figure through the Gita Govinda, a Sanskrit poem written by Jayadeva in Bengal around 1178 CE, which treats the love of Radha and Krishna, its separation and its reunion, at length and in explicitly erotic terms.
From there she becomes central, especially through the devotional movements of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries — Chaitanya in Bengal, and the poets of Braj — until in most of India today her name is said before his.
So: the most famous love story in Indian religion is roughly two thousand years younger than the man it is about.
What she was invented for
And "invented" is the right word, used without disrespect, because what she was invented for is theologically serious.
The problem the devotional traditions were trying to solve is this. How do you describe the relationship between a human being and the divine in a way that is not about obedience, fear, or transaction?
The available models were all inadequate. Servant and master is obedience. Subject and king is transaction. Child and parent is closer, and the tradition uses it heavily with Yashoda. But none of them capture the specific thing the devotees were trying to name: a longing that is total, that has no purpose beyond itself, and that is willing to lose everything.
So they used the one human relationship that has those properties: love that has nothing to gain.
And they made it deliberately illicit, which is the part that is always misread. Radha is, in the developed tradition, married to someone else. This is not a moral failure in the story; it is the structural point. A love that costs you your reputation, your position and your safety, and that you pursue anyway, is the strongest available image of a devotion that is not transactional. She has nothing to gain and everything to lose, which is exactly the state the poets were trying to describe.
The tradition is entirely explicit about this, and the commentators say so directly. It is a metaphor with the intensity dial turned to maximum on purpose.
The gopis and the raas
The raas leela is the great scene: Krishna plays the flute at night, the women of the settlement leave their homes and come to the forest, and he dances with all of them at once — the text says he multiplied himself so that each one had him entirely to herself, and none knew the others were also with him.
Read as biography this is absurd. Read as what it is, it is precise.
The multiplication is the whole meaning. The claim being made is that the divine is entirely available to each person, undivided, at the same time. Not shared out. Not queued. Each one has all of it. That is a statement about the nature of the infinite, dressed as a dance, and there is no more economical way to say it.
And the leaving is the other half. The gopis leave their houses, their husbands, their cooking, their reputations, at night, to go into a forest. The image is of a call that overrides every social obligation, which is exactly what the devotional traditions were claiming about the encounter with God, and which is also precisely why the orthodox found them alarming.
The Bhagavata Purana itself puts a warning in the text, effectively saying that nobody should imitate this behaviour and that describing an act of God is not prescribing a rule for people. The tradition knew it was writing something that could be misread, and said so.
The thing that settles it
Here is the fact that answers the misconception most completely, and almost nobody knows it.
Krishna leaves Vrindavan at around sixteen and never comes back.
He goes to Mathura (4.2), and afterwards to Dwarka, and he lives another seventy-odd years, and he does not return. The tradition is emphatic about this, and treats it as the central sorrow of the entire Braj story. The gopis wait. Radha waits. He does not come.
He sends a messenger once — his friend Uddhava, with a philosophical letter about the omnipresence of the divine — and the gopis' response, which is one of the great passages in the tradition, is essentially: keep your philosophy, we want him. Uddhava goes back changed, having learned more from them than he brought.
A man whose youth is used to prove he was a womaniser left at sixteen and never returned. Whatever the Vrindavan material is about, it is not about a love life, and 4.7 is about the leaving.
What the material is actually teaching
Three things, and all three are usable.
Longing is a legitimate spiritual state, and possibly a higher one than satisfaction. The tradition's technical term is viraha, love in separation, and it holds — deliberately, against the obvious objection — that the gopis' state after he leaves is greater than their state while he was there. The reason given: presence lets you get comfortable, and absence keeps the attention absolutely fixed. You may or may not accept that. It is an interesting claim and it is not a sentimental one.
A relationship that gains you nothing is the purest kind. Strip out the transaction — the status, the security, the return — and what is left is the actual attachment. This is a real test and it applies far outside religion. Ask of any relationship you value: what would remain if it stopped being useful to me?
And the divine is undivided. The multiplication in the raas is the whole of it: you do not get a share.
Why the misconception persists
Worth naming, because it is instructive.
Because the imagery is erotic and the framework is not. A reader who has the imagery and not the framework will reach the obvious conclusion, and the tradition made that easy by choosing the most charged possible metaphor. That was a deliberate risk, taken because the weaker metaphors did not work.
Because the layers get flattened (4.1). The cowherd of the twelfth-century poets and the strategist of the fourth-century-BCE epic are read as one continuous biography, so a metaphor from one becomes a character trait in the other.
And because it is a convenient thing to believe if you want to dismiss the tradition without reading it.
What to carry from this page
Check the date on the most famous part of any tradition. It is frequently the newest, and it is frequently a metaphor that hardened into a fact.
Ask what a strange story was built to solve. Radha exists because master and servant and king and subject did not describe what the devotees were experiencing. That is a real intellectual problem and she is a real solution to it.
Test your relationships for the transaction. What would be left if this person could do nothing for me? The answer is the actual relationship, and the rest is arrangement.
And take longing seriously rather than treating it as a failure state. The tradition's claim is that wanting something completely, and not having it, is a condition that produces attention of a quality that having it never does. Whether or not you accept that about God, it is observably true about most things people are good at.
Next: 4.7 — the leaving. He goes to Mathura at sixteen for what everybody assumes is a short trip, and he never comes back, and the tradition has never got over it.