Viraha Bhakti and Stridharma Re Reading

Viraha-Bhakti and Strīdharma: Re-Reading the Story of Kṛṣṇa
and the Gopīs in the Harivaṃśa and the Bhāgavata Purāṇa

Tracy Coleman
Colorado College
Undeniably the most famous episode of Kṛṣṇa’s youthful life in Vraja, the moonlit tryst with
the gopīs has been celebrated across India for millennia—variously recounted in Sanskrit and
vernacular languages, and sensuously represented in poetry, drama, music, and the visual
arts. Because the story depicts simple cowherd women enjoying intimate contact with Kṛṣṇa
without knowing he is God, scholars have often viewed the gopīs and their spontaneous
love as proof that bhakti is a democratizing force allowing all people, regardless of caste or
gender, unmediated access to divinity and deliverance from saṃsāra. According to this view,
women are particularly privileged in their intimate relations with Kṛṣṇa, praised in Sanskrit
texts even for their transgressions of dharma, thus demonstrating that bhakti is a socially
subversive force in an otherwise conservative culture. In the introduction to his recent, popu-
lar translation of the tenth skandha of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, for example, Edwin Bryant
(2003: liv–lv) claims in a discussion of the gopīs that
while the conventional roles of women in everyday society are not challenged by the Bhāgavata,
the text allows them to discard these roles in the context of bhakti yoga and, having done so, is
ground-breaking in the Purāṇic genre by its promotion of women as not just eligible devotees,
but the highest of all yogīs.
Invoking the power of Kṛṣṇa in order to “challenge aspects of the social and cultural milieu
of the day,” the Bhāgavata, according to Bryant, thereby provides “signiicant resources for
potentially revolutionary social change” (p. lviii). Bryant is not alone in his assessment of the
Bhāgavata’s position on women, drawing on the gopīs in particular. Eric Huberman (1998:
175) ofers a similar interpretation, comparing the gopīs to typically male renouncers:
By inverting the script, and having women leave their home instead of men, the Bhāgavata
gloriies the most extreme spurning of social convention and may even be tacitly admitting the
diseased, upside down nature of those conventions. The fact that cowherd women are seduced
and goaded on by God himself legitimizes all of this and—at the least—applies a strong coun-
terbalance to a conining social order.
Such claims are not new, of course. In a much earlier study of Vaiṣṇava bhakti in the
Bhāgavata Purāṇa, Thomas Hopkins (1961: 12 n. 4) argued that the text challenges
varṇāśramadharma and promotes “greater social and religious advantages for those who
are discriminated against by the orthodox regulations.” Thirty-seven years later, however,
Hopkins (1998: 14) revised his position somewhat, noting that tensions between devotional
movements and orthodox norms often led medieval Vaiṣṇava groups to adopt “the restric-
tions of the orthodox varṇāśrama-dharma [in order to ind] acceptance within the broader
Hindu social structure.” Bhakti was radical once upon a time, in other words, but was later
tamed in response to the demands of social and religious orthodoxies. Scholars such as
David Lorenzen (1995), on the other hand, contend that texts like the Bhagavad Gītā and the
Bhāgavata Purāṇa were conservative from their inceptions, as their brāhmaṇa authors were
Journal of the American Oriental Society 130.3 (2010) 385

386 Journal of the American Oriental Society 130.3 (2010)
intent on preserving the dominant ideology of varṇāśramadharma, with all its hierarchies
and inequalities, precisely in order to uphold the traditional social order. Subaltern historian
Ranajit Guha goes even further, describing bhakti as “an ideology of subordination par
excellence” (1989: 259). Guha argues that bhakti “promotes collaboration” with hegemonic
forces speciically by means of its rasas, or moods of devotion, including dāsya, śānta,
sakhya, vātsalya, and śṛṅgāra. “Of these, dāsya, literally the quality of being a servant, slave
or bondsman, is by far the most important” (p. 257) and is “the ruling principle of Bhakti”
(p. 258). In the devotional relationship thus structured, Guha continues, and
[e]ven in śrngāra [sic], the erotic mode, there is no notion of equality between devotee and deity.
The function of this rasa is primarily to spiritualize and aestheticize male dominance of gender
relations. In the numerous legends about Krishna’s sexual adventures among the milkmaids
(gopīs) of Vraj, the initiative is always his to seduce, dally with and desert his female partners. It
is a relationship of love that is an authentic instance of the primacy assumed by the male in the
sexual politics of a patriarchal society. (p. 258)
The present study endorses the latter position and demonstrates through a close reading of
the gopī narrative in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa that purāṇic bhakti is a remarkably conservative
ideology, far from socially revolutionary, and that interpretations such as Bryant, Huberman,
and Hopkins are misguided. Although the gopīs are explicitly praised as the most blessed
of devotees in the Bhāgavata, their lofty spiritual attainments occur only within the larger
context of conventional strīdharma, from which the gopīs are never liberated (except perhaps
temporarily), even though they are supposedly liberated from saṃsāra by means of passion-
ate bhakti. A comparison of the narratives in the Harivaṃśa and the Bhāgavata Purāṇa,
moreover, clearly reveals that bhakti in the Bhāgavata is, in fact, about domination and
subordination, and that the gopīs are women disempowered, gloriied precisely as Kṛṣṇa’s
slaves, as their perfect viraha-bhakti efectively collaborates with patriarchy.
the moonlit tryst

Because the gopī story sometimes changes dramatically from one telling to another, and
because speciic changes can betray concerns particular to each text, this study compares two
early Sanskrit versions of the core narrative: when the gopīs meet their lover for rati in the
forest. First appearing in the Harivaṃśa in only twenty-one verses, the story later comprises
one hundred and seventy-three verses in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. 1 The Bhāgavata elaborates
the gopī story well beyond the rāsalīlā, moreover, adding over two hundred verses in several
chapters that glorify the gopīs and their passionate love for Kṛṣṇa. 2 Without a doubt the
Bhāgavata’s version has been the most inluential throughout history, while the Harivaṃśa’s
remains relatively unknown. 3 This is perhaps surprising, given the outwardly subversive
message embodied by the Bhāgavata’s gopīs, married women who recklessly abandon their
1. The dates of the Hv and the BhP are uncertain. As a “supplement” to the epic Mahābhārata and the earli-
est textual source of sustained narratives about Kṛṣṇa’s childhood and youth, the Hv is generally placed between
the second and fourth centuries c.e. Speculation regarding the date of the BhP varies wildly, although sometime
between the six and eighth centuries c.e. now seems most reasonable (see Hazra, Rocher, Hardy, Bryant 2002, and
Hudson 1995 and 2008). Though the two accounts may thus be several centuries apart, both are relatively “early”
in relation to other Sanskrit and vernacular versions of the gopī narrative, which is retold in various ways even in
the present day. In my larger monograph in progress I examine the gopī narrative in Viṣṇu Purāṇa as well, situating
the ViP historically between the Hv and the BhP. All translations of these Sanskrit texts included here are my own.
2. See especially BhP 10.21, 10.22, 10.35, 10.39, 10.47, 10.65, 10.82, and 11.12.
3. Ingalls contends that the Hv is “the root” of the Kṛṣṇa tradition, though “its service has remained largely
hidden” (1968: 384–85).
Coleman: Viraha-Bhakti and Strīdharma 387
husbands and children and dharma, and rush desirously to the forest for an erotic, adulterous
encounter with Kṛṣṇa. At irst glance, the Harivaṃśa’s playful adolescent rendezvous seems
innocuous by comparison. But I will argue to the contrary that the Harivaṃśa’s telling is, in
fact, the more threatening to the social order, and that changes later wrought to the narrative
by purāṇic redactors represent masterful attempts to contain the threat and control the moral
of the story.
More speciically, what I will demonstrate is that the extremely brief and ambiguous epi-
sode as depicted in Harivaṃśa 63 celebrates a youthful mutuality between Kṛṣṇa and unmar-
ried young women and thus legitimates the gratiication of adolescent desires without any
mention of dharma or its transgression and without any explicit soteriological subtext. The
Bhāgavata’s lengthy narrative, by sharp contrast, excludes unmarried girls altogether and
instead tells a tale of only married gopīs, all of whom apparently attain salvation eventually,
precisely through viraha-bhakti. The Bhāgavata articulates an explicit soteriology of viraha,
‘separation’, in fact, so that Kṛṣṇa’s temporary disappearance and inal departure efectively
enable the gopīs’ salvation precisely by inlaming their passion and thus causing their contin-
uous contemplation of a distant, physically unattainable Kṛṣṇa. The Harivaṃśa’s mutuality
is thereby eliminated, as Kṛṣṇa’s being precisely unavailable inspires viraha-bhakti, exem-
pliied in the Bhāgavata by the gopīs’ intense longing and overwhelming sufering. Such
viraha is necessitated not only by Kṛṣṇa’s inevitably going to Mathurā—or by Kṛṣṇa’s being
God and the gopīs being human, thus rendering true union existentially impossible, as Fried-
helm Hardy has argued in his inluential Viraha-Bhakti. 4 Rather, viraha in the Bhāgavata
is above all necessitated by the gopīs’ being married to other men and explicitly obligated
by strīdharma to remain with their families in order to serve their husbands and children,
despite their spoken desire to forsake everything for Kṛṣṇa. Never mentioned in Harivaṃśa
63, dharma therefore becomes central to the Bhāgavata’s narrative, as even Kṛṣṇa instructs
the gopīs on their duties as wives and mothers, just before he indulges their uncontrollable
kāma. Lest his motives for such līlā be misunderstood, the Bhāgavata emphatically states
that Kṛṣṇa is the supreme yogī, both āptakāma and ātmārāma, desireless and delighting in
himself, hence unmoved by the beautiful gopīs, who otherwise attract and delight him in the
Harivaṃśa. The Harivaṃśa’s rather ambiguous tale celebrating mutual sensual pleasures has
thus been superseded by a moralizing story about Kṛṣṇa’s divine mercy, gracefully show-
ered upon even married women whose compulsory householder dharma would otherwise
exclude them from salvation in union with God. The potentially subversive, spontaneous fun
of adolescent rati as depicted in the Harivaṃśa has therefore been carefully erased, as the
Bhāgavata transforms the Harivaṃśa’s youthful unmarried girls into dutiful married satī and
thereby unambiguously instructs the gopīs, and the audience, about good girls’ proper social
and spiritual behavior.
harivaṂśa 63
The brief narrative in Harivaṃśa 63 describing Kṛṣṇa’s amorous encounter with the gopīs
immediately follows the Govardhana episode (Hv 59–62), in which Indra recognizes Kṛṣṇa’s
divinity and publicly consecrates him as Govinda, the lord of cows (62.37–44). Chapter 63
therefore opens with a short conversation between Kṛṣṇa and the elder cowherds of Vraja,
who praise Kṛṣṇa for saving their community from Indra’s torrents and who thus recog-
nize his divinity (63.1–4), but who likewise express confusion about his true identity and
4. Hardy makes this point repeatedly throughout Viraha-Bhakti, in his discussions of the Āḻvārs and the gopīs;
see pp. 443, 542–46, and 581–82, for example.
the purpose of his cowherd disguise (63.5–7). They then conclude that whatever sort of
being he may be, he was nonetheless born their kin and has become their refuge (63.8–9).
Kṛṣṇa smiles and responds ambiguously, without directly answering their questions, and
says instead that they should simply enjoy his favor without seeking unnecessary knowledge
(63.10–13). 5 The silenced cowherds then disperse (63.14),
kṛṣṇas tu yauvanaṃ dṛṣṭvā niśi candramaso navam |
śāradīnāṃ niśānāṃ ca manaś cakre ratiṃ prati || 63.15
but Kṛṣṇa, seeing the new youth due to the moon at night, he turned his mind toward the pleasure
of autumn nights.
He therefore engages the bulls and the cowherds in battles (63.16–17), and while the men are
suitably distracted, he enjoys himself with the gopīs:
yuvatyo gopakanyāś ca rātrau saṃkālya kālavit |
kaiśorakaṃ mānayānaḥ saha tābhir mumoda ha || 63.18
Gathering together the adolescent cowherd girls and honoring youth, the Knower of Time
rejoiced with them in the night.
The adoring gopīs lovingly behold Kṛṣṇa’s face resembling the moon (63.19), and they
eagerly ofer homage and embrace their beautiful Kṛṣṇa closely (63.20–23). The rough con-
tinuity of the short narrative is then broken by a verse lacking context:
tā vāryamāṇāḥ pitṛbhir bhrātṛbhir mātṛbhis tathā |
kṛṣṇaṃ gopāṅganā rātrau mṛgayanti ratipriyāḥ || 63.24
[Though] hindered by fathers, brothers, and mothers alike, those cowherd women fond of plea-
sure seek Kṛṣṇa in the night.
But the cowherd girls continue to delight Kṛṣṇa by singing and imitating his deeds (63.25–
29), and they rejoice in his presence, reveling even in the simple sounds he utters (63.33).
Their hair becomes disheveled and falls beautifully to their breasts (63.34), and then the
narrative suddenly ends:
Thus adorned with circles of gopīs, that joyful Kṛṣṇa rejoiced in the moonlit autumn nights.
(63.35)
Youth, Mutuality, and Ambiguity

What is most remarkable about this brief passage, especially when compared to the later
purāṇic versions, is that Kṛṣṇa gathers the “adolescent cowherd girls” speciically (yuvatyo
gopakanyāḥ, 63.18), and all together they experience mutual desire and pleasure. A virile
(vīryavān, 63.16, 17) young Kṛṣṇa initiates the moonlit tryst when he sees the youthful girls
(yauvanaṃ navam) and thinks of rati ‘(sexual) pleasure’ (63.15), just as the gopīs who are
ratipriyāḥ ‘fond of (sexual) pleasure’, seek Kṛṣṇa in the night (63.24). Kṛṣṇa’s face and
the cowherd women are mutually kānta, desired (63.19), though Kṛṣṇa is literally “more
desired” (kāntatara) because of his “splendid clothes, silken and shining” (63.20). Their
sensuous enjoyment is likewise mutual: the gopīs “delight the delighter” (ramayanti manora-
mam, 63.25), and in Kṛṣṇa’s presence they attain joy (sukham, 63.29), just as Kṛṣṇa is joyful
5. Kṛṣṇa’s ambiguous response to the gopas anticipates the BhP’s fuller doctrine of māyā, according to which
Kṛṣṇa deludes people in order to save them.
(sukhī, 63.35), when he rejoices (mumoda, 63.18, mumude, 63.35) with the rejoicing women
(muditāḥ, 63.28) in the nights.
Whether or not only adolescent girls partake of such joyful pleasures is uncertain, how-
ever, because the Harivaṃśa employs numerous terms to describe the gopīs. Among those
that more clearly indicate their age and marital status, gopakanyā (63.22) and gopakanyakā
(63.25, 32) denote unmarried girls and daughters (kanyā, kanyakā) of the cowherds (gopa), 6
while nava yauvana (63.15) and yuvatī gopakanyā (63.18) specify adolescence. Because
yauvana and yuvatī generally refer to youth and youthful girls who have crossed the thresh-
old of adolescence and experienced menarche, both terms can sometimes refer to young,
married women. But in this passage, the expression nava yauvana ‘new youth’ suggests that
the girls are newly adolescent and have only recently begun menstruating, 7 while yuvatī
gopakanyā implies that these youthful cowherd girls are both adolescent as opposed to pre-
pubescent, and unmarried. 8 Upon seeing precisely these youthful girls in the moonlight,
Kṛṣṇa feels inclined towards rati (63.15). He thus reacts spontaneously when he sees the
sexually attractive girls, and then gathers them together and rejoices (63.18). That Kṛṣṇa
sees and gathers only these young women is certainly clear, but because other terms in the
passage identify the gopīs only ambiguously, the age and marital status of all the gopīs are
indeterminate. Thrice they are called yoṣit, for example (vrajayoṣit, 63.27, 28; and gopayoṣit,
63.34), with yoṣit commonly referring to a girl, a maiden, a wife, a young woman, a woman
more generally, or even a female animal. The compound vrajayoṣit could therefore refer to
the girls or women, the maidens or wives of Vraja; and gopayoṣit to the cowherd girls or
maidens, or to the wives of the cowherds speciically. The compounds gopastrī (63.19) and
gopāṅganā (63.24) are similarly vague, referring either to cowherd women as opposed to
men, or to the wives of the cowherd men. The ambiguous compound varāṅganā (63.23, 29,
33) may describe especially shapely women, but these can also be shapely young women,
taruṇī varāṅganā (63.26), an expression perhaps referring to shapely adolescent girls. That
the gopīs are vanitā (63.31) is even more open-ended, according to Monier-Williams, who
6. Discussing the proper time of marriage, Kane (1997: 439–47) notes that several legal texts deine kanyā or
kanyakā as a ten year-old girl, but the narratives in question may not presuppose such a precise deinition.
7. kṛṣṇas tu yauvanaṃ dṛṣṭvā niśi candramaso navam (63.15ab) is somewhat obscure, but I read it as Kṛṣṇa
seeing the “new youth”—that is, girls who have just (nava) attained adolescence (yauvana) and who are therefore
sexually attractive because they are now young women of marriageable age. Kṛṣṇa kālavid ‘the knower of time’
(63.18) knows this when he sees the girls in the moonlight, and thus feels appropriately inclined towards rati. Hardy
and Couture (both incorrectly, I think) read yauvanaṃ navam with candramaso and respectively translate: “When
Kṛṣṇa then saw the fresh youth of the moon in the night . . .” (Hardy 1983: 72); and “Puis, Kṛṣṇa aperçut dans la
nuit la première beauté juvénile de la Lune . . .” (Couture 1991: 260). My claim that nava and yauvana should be
read together, despite being in separate pādas, and that the expression refers to attractive young women, inds sup-
port elsewhere. In BhP 10.90.2, for example, Kṛṣṇa’s city of Dvārakā is enjoyed “by women having the beauty of
new youth” (strībhir navayauvanakāntibhiḥ). In the Hv, Kṛṣṇa’s highly fortunate wife Satyabhāmā is described as
“ever youthful” (sthirayauvanā, 92.60), and in the ViP she is similarly “forever newly youthful” (susthiram nava-
yauvanam, 5.30.27).
8. If one reads yuvatyo gopakanyāś ca (63.18) as two separate nouns in the accusative, the verse could also
be translated: “Gathering together the young women and the daughters of the cowherds . . . ,” which might imply
a distinction between young women (or young wives, yuvatī) and girls (or daughters, kanyā), with Kṛṣṇa taking
them both. Like Hardy (p. 587) I read yuvatyaḥ as an accusative adjective (yuvatīḥ) following Vaidya (1969: 417),
resulting in Kṛṣṇa’s gathering only the “youthful cowherd girls.” This reading suggests that Kṛṣṇa is not enjoying
the cowherds’ wives, which also follows v. 24, where the cowherd women are not hindered by husbands speciically.
Couture likewise reads “jeunes bouvières” (1991: 260–61), but then seems to assume that (at least some of) the
gopīs are married (see p. 261 nn. 6–7).
says that the term can refer to women or females in general, to mistresses or wives, or to
women who are liked, loved, desired, acquired, or conquered.
One could therefore construct two distinct arguments about the identity of the gopīs in
Harivaṃśa 63. One could argue that all of the gopīs who enjoy rati with Kṛṣṇa are unmarried
adolescent girls, based on the speciic terms describing the young women whom he initially
gathers; all subsequent terms for women (yoṣit, strī, etc.) would then be taken in reference to
these initial “youthful cowherd girls.” Alternatively, one could legitimately argue that only
some of the gopīs are unmarried and that subsequent terms referring to women and wives
indicate the presence of married gopīs alongside the unmarried girls. Other verses in the pas-
sage might support the latter position, in fact. That the gopīs’ breasts are full, for example,
certainly indicates puberty, but if their breasts are literally payodhara, holding milk, they
may indeed be married women who have also given birth (63.23). 9 According to the Critical
Edition, on the other hand, the gopīs fond of rati are not hindered by husbands when they
seek Kṛṣṇa in the night, but only “by fathers, brothers, and mothers alike” (63.24), which
again suggests that they are unmarried but marriageable adolescent girls whose lowering
youth the youthful Kṛṣṇa happily enjoys. Hardy notes, however, that one northern and six
southern manuscripts substitute pati or bhartṛ ‘husband’ for father or brother (1983: 77; see
also Vaidya 1969: 417), making the gopīs explicitly married, as they are in the Viṣṇu and the
Bhāgavata Purāṇas. 10 Though such interpolations and later purāṇic changes may initially
seem subversive and, as Hardy notes, even more erotic (1983: 77–78), I contend that portray-
ing the gopīs as married women serves a fundamentally conservative purpose that supports a
social agenda related to brahmanical constructions of dharma. 11 In the Harivaṃśa, however,
unmarried young women are undeniably present in the moonlit tryst, and their presence
is signiicant: even if only some of the gopīs are youthful and unmarried, the Harivaṃśa
clearly celebrates youth by depicting Kṛṣṇa and the gopīs as playful teenagers whose aroused
romantic passions allow for shared desires and pleasures, and thus suggests a remarkable
mutuality between God and young women that is systematically eliminated in the later
purāṇic depictions.
Exactly what sorts of mutual pleasures Kṛṣṇa and the gopīs enjoy together is debatable.
Hardy reads rati as sexual pleasure speciically and says that in the Harivaṃśa “there is no
reluctance to depict the nocturnal scenes in frank erotic and sexual terms” (1983: 74–75).
Noel Sheth (1984: 14) interprets rati similarly:
9. Because both uras and payodhara can mean ‘breast’, translating payodharottānair urobhiḥ is tricky (63.23).
Though the gopīs might press Kṛṣṇa literally “with their breasts extended from bearing milk,” I suggest their breasts
are simply full and taut because I read the gopīs as youthful unmarried girls. That women who have not recently giv-
en birth sometimes spontaneously lactate (see BhP 10.85.53–54, for example) might indicate that women’s breasts
were thought always to be “holding milk,” or at least capable of producing it on short order. On this possibility
according to ancient Indian medical texts, see Das 2003, especially 309–11. Verse 63.34 presents similar diiculties:
tāsāṃ grathitasīmantā raticintākulīkṛtāḥ | cāru visraṃsire keśāḥ kucāgre gopayoṣitām ||. Hardy’s reading implies
that some of the gopīs may be pregnant: following MW he translates the uncertain compound grathitasīmantā as
“done with a parting,” describing the gopīs’ hair, parted in a manner that indicates pregnancy (1983: 73). But one
could also say that the ends, sīmanta, of the gopīs’ hair that had been tied or bound together (grathita) have become
disheveled due to rati and fall loosely to their breasts, a common image in Sanskrit poetry. Couture thus translates:
“Les cheveux de ces bouvières, [d’ordinaire] attachés en deux nattes, s’étaient défaits, préoccupées qu’elles étaient
de plaisir, et tombaient avec grâce sur leurs seins” (1991: 262).
10. The MSS in question are undated, and some are incomplete. See Vaidya 1969: x–xii.
11. I develop this argument even more fully in my larger work in progress, where I also include Rādhā (and
famous historical women) in my discussion of married bhaktās.
The [Harivaṃśa] speaks frankly of Krishna’s physical love with the women, which is quite
earthy in comparison with the later erotico-mystical love portrayed in the Viṣṇupurāṇa and the
Bhāgavatapurāṇa. Understanding Krishna as a human hero, the bard of the Harivaṃśa, unlike
the authors of the Viṣṇupurāṇa and the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, is embarrassed by Krishna’s making
love to several women and does not attempt any justiication of it.
Yet throughout his discussion of the Harivaṃśa Sheth notes repeatedly that the author
explicitly depicts Kṛṣṇa as Viṣṇu (1984: 3–42), and Kṛṣṇa publicly demonstrates his divine
nature by single-handedly supporting a mountain immediately preceding his encounter with
the gopīs. Clearly the “bard” in question understood Kṛṣṇa as more than a “human hero.”
Unlike Sheth, therefore, I propose that the author of the Harivaṃśa considered desire and
sensuality to be natural and thus acceptable in a god embodied in human form, which is
why the text ofers no theological “justiication” for Kṛṣṇa’s moonlit tryst. 12 The “bard” is
not “embarrassed,” as Sheth says, when Kṛṣṇa sees the sexually attractive young women
and then “turns his mind towards rati” (63.15). On the contrary, the youthful Kṛṣṇa is here
called kālavid ‘knower of time’, who recognizes adolescent passions in himself and in the
girls, and therefore legitimately honors youth (kaiśorakaṃ mānayānaḥ) by rejoicing with
the desirous gopīs in the nights (63.18). 13 The explicit illegitimacy of the adulterous tryst as
depicted in the later purāṇic accounts is altogether absent in the Harivaṃśa, where the gopīs
are “hindered by fathers, brothers and mothers” only after they have reached Kṛṣṇa physi-
cally and eagerly press him to their breasts (63.23–24). Clearly the girls’ families see some-
thing problematic in the sensuous encounter, but the Harivaṃśa nevertheless tells the brief
story as a tribute to youthful passions, despite inefective familial resistance in the midst of
the sensual encounter. 14 Such a positive presentation of sensuality notwithstanding, I would
argue, unlike Sheth and Hardy, that the language in the Harivaṃśa is ambiguous and that rati
and other derivatives of √ram do not necessarily refer to sexual intercourse speciically. 15
Such sexuality may be implied in the Bhāgavata, where Kṛṣṇa multiplies himself in order to
satisfy each gopī’s desire for exclusive intimacy, and where no family members intrude upon
12. In the Hv narrative depicting Kṛṣṇa’s premarital interactions with Rukmiṇī, moreover, Kṛṣṇa and Rukmiṇī
feel mutual kāma and wish to marry each other. Kṛṣṇa’s explicit kāma is even inlamed “like the lame of the ire
with the oblation” the irst time he sees Rukmiṇī, whom he therefore abducts due to lust (87.39–41). I discuss
Kṛṣṇa’s wives at length in my larger work in progress.
13. Hardy reads kaiśorakaṃ mānayānaḥ as Kṛṣṇa’s making the girls consent after driving them together, but
he notes “’appreciating youth’” as an “alternative” (1983: 72 n. 76). Couture reads the phrase as referring only to
Kṛṣṇa and translates, “s’estimant déjà un jeune homme” (1991: 261). MW says the term kaiśora refers to ‘youth,
boyhood (from the age of ten to that of ifteen)’ (p. 312). With respect to the later legitimation of such pleasures,
Hardy mentions the seventeenth-century Nīlakaṇṭha’s commentary on this verse, in which the commentator says
kāma “is allowed before the sacred thread ceremony.” Hardy notes in addition the Kāmasūtra’s sanction of kāma in
youth, yauvana (p. 75 n. 84).
14. Couture notes that the gopīs’ conduct seems to oppose dharma, but because Kṛṣṇa is not an earthly spouse
(époux terrestre), the gopīs’ relationship with him can coexist with their conventional marriages (1991: 261 n. 7).
Such a theological reading of the Hv seems inappropriate, however, as neither dharma nor marriage is explicitly
mentioned in the passage. My reading is far simpler: the gopīs are nubile girls seeking a lover in the night. Why
wouldn’t their parents and brothers try to stop them?
15. Hardy notes that “[w]ords derived from √ram occur many times” and thus demonstrate the “frank erotic
and sexual” nature of the encounter (1983: 75). Desai, on the other hand, inds the dalliance in the Hv to be “more
innocent” than in the BhP because the former “is merely a mixed dance of boys and girls unaccompanied by any
sort of physicality” (1990: 186 n. 66). Dutt likewise inds “beyond all doubt” that the “dance” is a “purely innocent
amusement freed from every shade of carnality” (1897: 318). Clearly, however, the terms used to describe the gopīs’
attraction to Kṛṣṇa convey an intense sensual passion beyond simple innocent dancing. Couture says the games have
an erotic connotation (1991: 260 n. 4); Matchett reads ambiguous “pleasures” (2001: 53).
the passionate tryst in the forest. But even in the Bhāgavata the titillating poetic language
remains ambiguous with respect to sex.
Despite the Harivaṃśa’s legitimation of mutual desire and pleasure, however, Kṛṣṇa is
also portrayed here as a relatively passive object of the gopīs’ exuberant adoration and their
intense and insatiable passions. Ofering homage, the shapely women excitedly press Kṛṣṇa
against their breasts and behold him with luttering eyelids (63.23). They delight him by
singing his deeds and enacting his līlā, walking with Kṛṣṇa’s gait, and “imitating his dance
and song, and playful smiles and glances” (63.25–28). They surround him and delight him
(63.30), altogether reveling in rati. Indeed, even when some gopīs “imbibe” Kṛṣṇa’s face
“with their eyes wide with emotion,” they remain insatiate (atṛptā, 63.31), just as other
thirsty (tṛṣitā) gopīs are simultaneously “immersed in rati” while “longing for rati” still
(63.32). Throughout the brief passage the emphasis thus consistently falls on the gopīs as the
active subjects who clearly adore Kṛṣṇa, while Kṛṣṇa simply seems to enjoy their afections,
without reciprocating their fervor. To be sure, though Kṛṣṇa himself initiates the tryst when
he gathers the gopīs and thereby intends to honor youth (63.18), he is subsequently the active
subject of only verses 21 and 35: in the former he beautiies Vraja, and in the latter, the inal
verse of the passage, he rejoices.
Kṛṣṇa is therefore an object of sensual worship and passionate devotion. “Homage to
Dāmodara!” the gopīs boldly exclaim after witnessing his extraordinary deeds in Vraja (63.22).
Then they embrace him and wander happily, “devoted to Dāmodara” (dāmodaraparāyaṇāḥ,
63.29). But is this religious adoration, perhaps an early version of passionate bhakti? Sheth
says no: while granting a “few glimmers of devotion in the Harivaṃśa,” he contends that
“the physical love of the herdswomen for Krishna is purely on the mundane level” (1984:
100–101). Hardy, on the other hand, argues that the passage implies a “religious interpreta-
tion” (1983: 74–75 n. 82), as the Harivaṃśa presents the gopīs’ intense desire for Kṛṣṇa’s
beauty and body as the key to “bliss” (sukha), not the cause of sufering (duḥkha) (75–
76). But while the gopīs certainly attain happiness in Kṛṣṇa’s bodily presence, what the
Harivaṃśa might further imply about sukha and duḥkha is not entirely clear in the passage.
Kṛṣṇa is no doubt divine, but the text attributes no explicit soteriological signiicance to their
amorous interactions, though the passage in question does seem to conlate romantic love and
religious devotion without further explanation. Unlike both Sheth and Hardy, then, I contend
once again that the Harivaṃśa is simply ambiguous regarding the theological import of the
gopīs’ attraction to Kṛṣṇa, and of Kṛṣṇa’s interest in them. To be sure, the gopīs adore the
youthful Kṛṣṇa, and Kṛṣṇa rejoices with the young women, but the speciically religious
sense of their tryst remains mysterious. That the soteriological value of the gopīs’ desire,
their precise marital status, and their painful, frustrated devotional relationship with Kṛṣṇa
are all explicitly elaborated in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa does demonstrate, however, that the
Harivaṃśa perhaps even unintentionally raised questions that had a profound impact on the
development of religion in Indian culture, for the answers later formulated in the purāṇic
process will efectively delineate the dharmic parameters of bhakti.
bhāgavata purāṆa 10.29–33

In book ten of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, the famous description of Kṛṣṇa’s sylvan tryst is
appreciably lengthened and preceded by two signiicant chapters in which the gopīs profess
their adoration: in 10.21 they sing a song of praise in Kṛṣṇa’s absence; in 10.22 they worship
the goddess Kātyāyanī and pray for Kṛṣṇa as their husband (pati) (10.22.1–5). During the
latter rite Kṛṣṇa unexpectedly appears and promises that the gopīs will later enjoy the nights
with him (10.22.27), a promise that seems to be fulilled in 10.29–33, the chapters detailing
the moonlit tryst. Here, as in the Harivaṃśa, Kṛṣṇa himself initiates the encounter when
he beholds the autumn nights redolent with blossoming jasmine and then resolves to enjoy,
but in the Bhāgavata he explicitly resorts to yogamāyā before seducing the gopīs (10.29.1).
He thus sings a soft song that captivates the women, who suddenly rush to him desirously,
abandoning strīdharma in the process, and this time hindered “by husbands, fathers, brothers
and kin” (10.30.3–8). Some of the gopīs are therefore trapped in their homes, yet liberated by
contemplating Kṛṣṇa (10.29.9–11), and the narrator Śuka elaborates on the Bhāgavata’s inno-
vative soteriology that describes emotional attachment to Kṛṣṇa as salviic (10.29.13–16).
When the other fortunate gopīs reach Kṛṣṇa in the forest, he welcomes them with an
unexpected dharma talk (10.29.17–27), unprecedented in the Harivaṃśa, and the wounded
gopīs immediately protest, proclaiming their undying devotion (10.29.28–41). Moved by
their sorrow, Kṛṣṇa relents (10.29.42), and as in the Harivaṃśa he enjoys himself with the
gopīs (10.29.45), exciting their passion and delighting them with various amorous gestures
(10.29.46). Being thus fulilled by Bhagavān, the gopīs develop an inlated opinion of them-
selves (10.29.47), so Kṛṣṇa suddenly disappears, his reason explicit:
tāsāṃ tatsaubhagamadaṃ vīkṣya mānaṃ ca keśavaḥ |
praśamāya prasādāya tatraivāntaradhīyata || 10.29.48
Seeing their reveling in good fortune and their pride, Keśava disappeared right there, for the
purpose of tranquility and grace.
All of chapter 30 then describes the gopīs’ lament in viraha, as they wander through the
forests like lunatics, seeking Kṛṣṇa and enacting his līlā (10.30.4–23), before spying his
divine footprints mingled with those of some lucky young woman who secretly enjoys his
lips, but who is eventually abandoned by Kṛṣṇa due to her pride (10.30.24–38). Chapter 30
then concludes by portraying the gopīs’ collective love as bhakti, and chapter 31 consists
of nineteen long, lyrical verses in which the gopīs sing about their sorrow and devotion in
viraha, addressing Kṛṣṇa directly. Though the gopīs sometimes seem to recognize Kṛṣṇa’s
divinity (10.31.4, 5, 7, 17), they clearly long for him as lovers, painfully separated from their
beloved. Simultaneously, therefore, they praise and criticize Kṛṣṇa for seducing and then
deserting them, for without him the gopīs are altogether miserable.
When in chapter 32 the beautiful Kṛṣṇa unexpectedly reappears in response to their
longing, then, the weeping gopīs all rush forth simultaneously and embrace him delight-
edly (10.32.1–9). Kṛṣṇa happily gathers the women and shines forth brilliantly among them
(10.32.10–12), and “slightly angry,” the lirtatious gopīs speak (10.32.15):
gopya ūcuḥ |
bhajato’nubhajanty eka eka etadviparyayam |
nobhayāṃś ca bhajanty eka etan no brūhi sādhu bhoḥ || 10.32.16
The gopīs said: “Some love back those loving; some do the contrary of this; and some love
neither. Oh please explain this to us truly.”
In a dialogue not found in earlier versions, the demanding gopīs seek an explanation for
Kṛṣṇa’s seemingly callous behavior, and a compliant Kṛṣṇa responds (10.32.17–32). He
tells them that mutual love is essentially about mutual gain, and is thus neither dharmic nor
genuinely friendly (10.32.17). But truly compassionate and even dharmic are those who love
without being loved in return (10.32.18). Instead of being displeased with their beloved,
Kṛṣṇa continues, they should know that he disappeared in order to encourage their devotion,
which is lawless as a result, and which Kṛṣṇa could never adequately repay (10.32.21–22).
The chapter thus concludes with Kṛṣṇa’s commending the gopīs’ ardent devotion, even as he
says that he cannot return their love, thereby making the lack of mutuality in their relation-
ship both inevitable and explicit, and elaborating the purpose of viraha.
Satisied by his response, and by his body, the gopīs escape the “pain born of separation”
(10.33.1) in praising and fondling Kṛṣṇa (10.33.7–16), and Kṛṣṇa enjoys himself likewise. In
order to dance with each gopī individually, moreover, Kṛṣṇa multiplies himself here, unlike
the Harivaṃśa:
kṛtvā tāvantam ātmānaṃ yāvatīr gopayoṣitaḥ |
reme sa bhagavāṃs tābhir ātmārāmo’pi līlayā || 10.33.20
Creating as many [forms of ] himself as there were cowherd women, the Blessed One delighted
with them in the līlā, even though delighting in himself.
Clearly distressed by such seemingly scandalous pleasures, and perhaps articulating ques-
tions raised by the Harivaṃśa’s ambiguous telling, King Parīkṣit soon interjects:
The blessed Lord of the universe partially descended for the establishment of dharma and the
suppression of the opposite. Why did that speaker, doer, and protector of the boundaries of
dharma do the contrary, O brāhmaṇa, touching the wives of others? (10.33.27–28)
Śuka likewise articulates deinitive answers when he responds that such transgressions of
dharma are not blameworthy among the gods (10.33.30), but others “should never behave
thus, even in their minds” (10.33.31). Kṛṣṇa, moreover, is not to be faulted for his dalliance
with married women because his deeds are not driven by karma, and thus not to be judged
according to conventional mores (10.33.33–35). His līlā is rather for the beneit of all:
He who dwells within the gopīs, their husbands, and all embodied beings is the Overseer enjoy-
ing a body here in play. Having resorted to a human body for the favor of living beings, he enjoys
such games, hearing about which one becomes devoted to him. (10.33.36–37)
In contrast to the Harivaṃśa’s portrayal, therefore, Kṛṣṇa’s play with the gopīs in the
Bhāgavata Purāṇa is intentionally orchestrated and explicitly purposeful. Nevertheless, their
games inevitably end when dawn approaches and the gopīs return to their domestic duties
(10.33.39), and the narrator concludes the story by proclaiming that such tales inspire bhakti
(10.33.40).
Unrequited Kāma and Divine Mercy

While Kṛṣṇa irst sees the young women and then thinks of rati in the Harivaṃśa, in the
Bhāgavata he beholds the autumnal nights and then decides to “enjoy” (rantum), resorting to
his power of divine illusion, yogamāyā. Though Kṛṣṇa’s entire līlā in the Bhāgavata likewise
relies on yogamāyā to disguise his cosmic supremacy and thus enable intimacy, explicitly
employing the concept in the irst verse of the rāsa serves to prevent misinterpretations of
this particular encounter, as do Parīkṣit’s later questions and Śuka’s meticulous responses.
Immediately invoking yogamāyā also serves to diferentiate Kṛṣṇa’s behavior from the ordi-
nary erotic play of impassioned teenagers: to be sure, the gopīs are not even mentioned in
the Bhāgavata in relation to Kṛṣṇa’s deliberate decision, in sharp contrast to his spontane-
ous reaction to seeing the adolescent girls in the Harivaṃśa. Nevertheless, the Bhāgavata’s
rāsalīlā is remarkably sensuous and erotic.
Although the precise meaning of rati remains unclear, the Bhāgavata, like the Harivaṃśa,
unmistakably celebrates the sensual, shared delights between Kṛṣṇa and the gopīs. Once
Kṛṣṇa decides to enjoy, he efortlessly attracts the gopīs fond of (sexual) pleasures (ratipriyāḥ,
10.33.9), and together they sing (10.29.44, 10.33.10), dance (10.33.2–3, 16), play in the
water (10.33.24), and generally enjoy (√ram) together (10.29.45, 10.33.20). Śuka calls both
Kṛṣṇa and the gopīs priya ‘beloved’ (10.30.3), and Kṛṣṇa once does the same, referring to
himself as the gopīs’ beloved as he afectionately addresses them in the vocative as priyāḥ
‘O beloveds’, and even tells them that he loves (√bhaj) them (10.32.21). 16 One might argue,
in fact, that Kṛṣṇa engages the gopīs more actively here than in the Harivaṃśa, for not
only does he sing and dance with the women as he wanders playfully through the forest,
but he explicitly excites their passion (ratipati) and delights them “by extending his arms
and embracing them, by touching their hands, hair, thighs, skirts, and breasts, by playfully
scratching with his ingernails, by play, and by glances and smiles” (10.29.46). In the midst of
the rāsakrīḍā likewise, “with unrestrained laughter and play, afectionate glances, hand hold-
ing, and embracing,” Kṛṣṇa enjoys himself (reme) with the beautiful gopīs (10.33.17), whose
beauty he obviously notices, for he calls them sumadhyamāḥ, “O beautiful-waisted women”
(10.29.19, 10.32.18). Although Kṛṣṇa sometimes seems, as in the Harivaṃśa, but a passive
object of the gopīs’ ardent desire, he also actively gathers them (10.32.11), ofers his body to
them (10.32.14), and even instructs them, telling them exactly why he disappeared from their
midst (10.32.17–22). He likewise speaks to them directly when they initially appear in the
forest (10.29.17–27), and the gopīs, too, address Kṛṣṇa boldly in the Bhāgavata, question-
ing him and honestly revealing their feelings in his presence (10.29.31–41, 10.32.16), quite
unlike their relatively voiceless behavior in Harivaṃśa.
Such active and seemingly mutual participation notwithstanding, however, the Bhāgavata
unambiguously constructs a radical lack of mutuality in their relationship, in part by strongly
emphasizing Kṛṣṇa’s divinity—or rather his divine supremacy, his true identity as God and
brahman. Numerous names and epithets not seen in the Harivaṃśa’s version thus appear
in the Bhāgavata, including the term bhagavān, repeatedly employed in 10.29–33, notably
in 10.29.1 and 10.33.40, the irst and last verses of the amorous interlude, where its inclu-
sion serves to frame the rāsa and accentuate its theological import. 17 Kṛṣṇa is similarly
parameśvara, the highest god (10.29.33), and yathādipuruṣa ‘like the irst person’ (10.29.31,
41), who mercifully responds to devotees and to people alicted by pain and sorrow. The
gopīs call Kṛṣṇa the “seer in the inner self of all embodied beings” (10.31.4), and surrounded
by the lovely women he appears “like puruṣa surrounded by śaktis” (10.32.10). Also called
brahman (10.29.12), paramātman (10.29.11, 10.30.24), ātman (10.29.32, 33), mahātman
(10.29.47, 10.30.25, 10.30.32), and the puruṣa within beings (10.30.4), he is the all-pervasive
ultimate reality, the true self within all people.
In the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, however, the fundamental lack of mutuality between Kṛṣṇa and
the gopīs follows not only from Kṛṣṇa’s metaphysical ultimacy and divine supremacy, but
also from his being radically desireless and self-suiciently delighted amidst the desirous,
adulterous gopīs. When the frustrated gopīs initially beg Kṛṣṇa not to send them home to
their husbands and children, for example, Kṛṣṇa yogeśvareśvara, the lord of lords of yoga,
compassionately delights the passionate gopīs, even though he is ātmārāma ‘delighting in
himself’ (10.29.42). When Kṛṣṇa later multiplies himself and delights with the gopīs in the
16. Two more verses in BhP 10.29-33 might refer to the gopīs as Kṛṣṇa’s beloveds: 10.29.13, where the com-
pound adhokṣajapriyāḥ can mean either ‘beloveds of Adhokṣaja’ or ‘those whose beloved is Adhokṣaja’; and
10.33.39, where bhagavatpriyāḥ can mean either ‘beloveds of the Lord’ or ‘those whose beloved is the Lord.’ Both
meanings make sense in each verse.
17. Kṛṣṇa is also called bhagavān in 10.29.14, 16, 17, 18, 47; 10.30.1, 14, 28, 40; 10.32.10, 14, 17; and 10.33.1,
16, 20, 27, 39.
līlā, he is similarly described as ātmārāma (10.33.20), and his total self-suiciency is also
emphasized in the midst of his secret dalliance with the special beloved:
reme tayā cātmarata ātmārāmo’py akhaṇḍitaḥ |
kāmināṃ darśayan dainyaṃ strīṇāṃ caiva durātmatām || 10.30.34
His enjoyment in himself, he enjoyed himself with her, even though complete and delighting in
himself, thus showing the wretchedness of male lovers and the evil nature of women.
Although this verse otherwise seems to lack context, its placement precisely here is impor-
tant since the gopīs envision Kṛṣṇa as a desirous lover taking pleasure with his secret
beloved in the immediately preceding verses (10.30.26–33). The narrator must therefore
correct the gopīs’ mistaken perspective: Kṛṣṇa does take pleasure with the woman, but he
remains ātmarata and ātmārāma, redundant terms that signify his delighting in himself (or
his delighting in the self, which of course is also Himself), and that therefore indicate his
independence in the afair. The term akhaṇḍita, literally ‘unbroken’, seems to function simi-
larly to stress Kṛṣṇa’s utter completeness even among impassioned women, as Śrīdhara’s
gloss of the term also suggests: “‘unbroken’ means ‘even though unattracted by the amo-
rous gestures of women’.” 18 Later playing in the water and being splashed by the laughing
gopīs, Kṛṣṇa enjoys himself once again (reme svayam), but his “pleasure is in himself”
(svaratiḥ, 10.33.24). Even King Parīkṣit, shocked by their dalliance, conidently proclaims
that Kṛṣṇa is āptakāma and thus not motivated by desire for the gopīs (10.33.29). According
to the Bhāgavata, in fact, Kṛṣṇa deludes even the deluding Kāma, the god of love and desire
(10.32.2), and thus controls the very kāma that deludes and controls the gopīs.
Kṛṣṇa’s being essentially desireless and radically independent is further nuanced by the
employment of such terms as acyuta and yogeśvara, not found in the earlier versions of the
gopī narrative. A common name for Kṛṣṇa, the Imperishable One, acyuta is simply a past
passive participle meaning ‘unmoved’ or ‘unfallen’. In the context of Kṛṣṇa’s afair with the
gopīs, the name thus connotes Kṛṣṇa’s being unfallen, both morally and ontologically, and
unmoved emotionally, despite his sensuous contact with married women. In 10.29.42–43,
for example, even as Kṛṣṇa delights the gopīs, he is not only ātmārāma, but also “unfallen
(acyutaḥ) with those assembled women whose faces blossomed upon seeing their beloved
. . . his behavior illustrious (udāraceṣṭitaḥ).” Kṛṣṇa is similarly acyuta in the midst of the
rāsakrīḍā when one gopī places his lotus-hand upon her breast (10.33.14), and when, hav-
ing been won by the desirous gopīs, he embraces their necks (10.33.15). Likewise after he
gathers the gopīs and enjoys the bank of the Yamunā, “surrounded by those whose grief had
been purged, the mighty unfallen (acyutaḥ) Bhagavān shone forth even more, like puruṣa
surrounded by śaktis” (10.32.10–12). 19 References to Kṛṣṇa as yogeśvara are fewer through-
out the gopī episode, but function similarly, for precisely in his role as the yogeśvareśvara
Kṛṣṇa compassionately delights the gopīs, though he is ātmārāma and acyuta (10.29.42–43).
His being Bhagavān yogeśvareśvara, says Śuka, also enables his devotees to attain liberation
through attachment to him (10.29.15–16), and precisely as yogeśvara he miraculously enters
in between each pair of women (10.33.3) in order to enable such attachment. As Bhagavān
yogeśvareśvara Kṛṣṇa also appears before the naked gopīs (10.22.8) and then steals their
clothes, making them bow down, cold and naked, in order to reclaim their garments. Matchett
(2001: 137) describes the “tone of [this] episode [as] not truly erotic,” but rather “as another
18. akhaṇḍitaḥ strīvibhramair anākṛṣṭo’pi, Śrīdhara’s commentary in BhP, ed. J. L. Shastri, ad loc.
19. Kṛṣṇa is also acyuta in 10.30.7, 11, 30; in 10.31.16, where the gopīs simultaneously call him kitava ‘a cheat’
for deluding and then abandoning them at night; and in 10.29.10 where the karma of those gopīs trapped in their
homes is destroyed when they meditate on acyuta.
display of Kṛṣṇa’s yogic power,” for he is simultaneously a “young boy laughing . . . and
the Lord who can command anything of his devotees.” To be sure, Kṛṣṇa’s yogic powers
enable extraordinary deeds, such as his multiplying himself and even his initially attracting
the women to the forest when he resorts to yogamāyā (10.29.1). But I suggest that as a master
of yoga, Kṛṣṇa is also a master of his emotions and thereby not entangled with the desirous
gopīs. Indeed, towards the end of the rāsa when Śuka explains to Parīkṣit why Kṛṣṇa, though
āptakāma, has transgressed the bounds of dharma and touched the wives of others, he clari-
ies in no uncertain terms that Kṛṣṇa is beyond the bondage of kāma and karma:
If even the sages satisied by worshipping the dust of his lotus-feet live spontaneously, not being
bound, their every bond of karma cast of by the power of yoga—then how can He who becomes
embodied intentionally ever be bound? (10.33.35)
If even sages can overcome the force of previous actions and subliminal desires by the
power of devotional yoga, then clearly Kṛṣṇa yogeśvareśvara—the lord of lords of yoga
who becomes embodied by his own merciful wishes—acts in the world without compulsion
by mundane desire. As the lord of yoga, moreover, Kṛṣṇa may also have total control over
his bodily functions as well, for though “adored by a group of women” and delighting them
all the while, his saurata remains contained within himself, says the Bhāgavata (10.33.26).
Śrīdhara glosses saurata as caramadhātu ‘semen’ and says that Kṛṣṇa’s is restrained within
himself, “na tu skhalito ‘but not dripping’.” 20 Following this interpretation, Kṛṣṇa yogeśvara
is also tantreśvara, the lord of tantra. Though the verse could be interpreted less sexually, 21
Śrīdhara’s gloss is, in fact, consistent with the Bhāgavata’s emphasis on Kṛṣṇa as the desire-
less yogin who delights in himself, even amidst desirous women who clearly delight in his
body. If Śrīdhara’s interpretation is correct, moreover, the meaning of rati may, in fact, be
perfectly clear in the Bhāgavata: Kṛṣṇa does enjoy sex with the gopīs, but without desiring or
ejaculating. Whether or not one agrees with Śrīdhara’s reading of saurata, 22 the Bhāgavata
unambiguously constructs Kṛṣṇa not as an adolescent lover who spontaneously enjoys with
the young beautiful gopīs, as in the Harivaṃśa, but rather as the supreme and self-suiciently
delighted God who responds mercifully but desirelessly to the gopīs’ passion, and who
enjoys such erotic play in an irresistibly attractive body explicitly for the purpose of grace
(10.33.36–37).
But the Bhāgavata’s portrayal of the Lord’s yogic supremacy and blissful independence
is all the more striking in relation to the gopīs’ unruly desire for his beautiful body and their
mad sufering in his absence. Indeed, if the Bhāgavata emphatically depicts Kṛṣṇa yogeśvara
as āptakāma and ātmārāma, then the impassioned gopīs are unambiguously inlamed with
kāma and burdened by sorrow in sharp contrast. Various terms for desire, including deriva-
tives of √kam (kāma, kānta, kāmin)—previously seen in the Harivaṃśa (63.19, 20)—there-
fore appear frequently, describing the gopīs’ condition and their attitude towards Kṛṣṇa.
When his song irst arouses their desire (anaṅga), for example, they rush to the desired one,
kānta, recklessly abandoning their dharma (10.29.4). Though some gopīs are trapped in their
20. evam apy ātmany evāvaruddhaḥ saurataś caramadhātur na tu skhalito yasyeti, Śrīdhara’s commentary in
BhP, ed. J. L. Shastri, ad loc.
21. The term saurata literally means ‘that which is related to surata’, with surata possibly, but not unambigu-
ously, referring to sexual pleasure speciically.
22. Sheth, for example, agrees and writes that the BhP “even resorts to tāntric yoga, by asserting that Krishna
restrains his seminal low... within himself” (1984: 55). Others seem to disagree. Bryant translates, “[Kṛṣṇa’s]
propensity for enjoyment is fulilled within himself” (2003: 142); Tagare, “but he controlled all his energy within
himself” (1978: 1462); and Schweig, “[Kṛṣṇa] was perfectly / fulilled in all desires / and pure within himself; / . . .
sexual enjoyment was of no issue” (2005: 73).
homes, they unite with their lover (jāra) in meditation (10.29.11), and though they know him
only as the supreme beloved (paraṃ kāntam) they attain liberation (10.29.12). With respect
to the gopīs who reach Kṛṣṇa in the forest, their every desire (sarvakāmāḥ) soon becomes
frustrated due to his resistance (10.29.30), and they beg him to relent, for they burn with
ardent desire (tīvrakāmatapta) (10.29.38), and want nothing less than his hands upon their
blazing breasts (10.29.41). Shamelessly, in fact, they later place his hands and feet upon
their bodies (10.32.5, 10.33.14), for his lotus-hands and feet fulill desires (kāmada) accord-
ing to the gopīs (10.31.5, 13). In his absence they long desperately for such sensual contact
(10.31.7, 13, 19), and for the nectar from his lips in addition (10.31.8, 14). When the gopīs
imagine Kṛṣṇa’s secret interactions with the special beloved, moreover, they envision their
mutual desire and afection, calling both Kṛṣṇa and the woman priya ‘beloved’ (10.30.31,
32), preyas ‘more beloved’ (10.30.31, 32), and kāmin ‘desirous’ (10.30.32, 33). The gopīs
likewise think that the special woman is kāntā ‘desired’ by Kṛṣṇa (10.30.33), and though the
narrator corrects this mistaken perspective for the reader by repeatedly emphasizing Kṛṣṇa’s
desireless detachment throughout the ive chapters, for the gopīs Kṛṣṇa remains suratanātha,
their ‘lord of erotic delight’ (10.31.2), ramaṇa, their ‘delighter’ (10.31.13), and kānta, their
‘beloved’ (10.31.5, 11). When Kṛṣṇa suddenly reappears, the gopīs therefore welcome him,
the inlamer of desire (anaṅgadīpana), with a medley of sensuous gestures (10.32.15), and
during the rāsakrīḍā “their senses [are] overwhelmed by the ecstasy of bodily contact with
him” (10.33.18). The gopīs are not alone, moreover, in their eager desire (spṛhā) for Kṛṣṇa
(10.31.17, 18), for when they win their desired (kānta) Acyuta (10.33.15), even the celes-
tial damsels observing the līlā from the sky are likewise ‘alicted by kāma’ (kāmārditāḥ,
10.33.19).
More than simply intensifying and eroticizing the gopīs’ attraction to Kṛṣṇa, however, the
Bhāgavata also stresses their pain in separation, for while Kṛṣṇa delights independently, the
gopīs’ delight is clearly dependent on Kṛṣṇa. The Bhāgavata therefore graphically elaborates
the gopīs’ distress, otherwise not found in the Harivaṃśa. When the women irst arrive in the
forest, for example, and Kṛṣṇa refuses to indulge them, the dejected gopīs “experience insu-
perable anxiety” (cintām āpur duratyayām, 10.29.28). Sighing with grief (śuc), their tears
washing the safron from their breasts, they stand silently before Kṛṣṇa, “bearing excessive
sorrow” (uruduḥkhabharāḥ, 10.29.29). With their eyes red from crying, they then stutter as
they beg Kṛṣṇa not to be so cruel (10.29.30–31), and when he actually disappears, the gopīs
sufer (atapyan, 10.30.1) as they wander through the forests, searching ‘like lunatics’ (unmat-
takavat) for Kṛṣṇa (10.30.4). Clearly driven by the pain of being forsaken, the gopīs talk
insanely (unmattavac) to various plants and animals in a series of verses not found in previ-
ous versions, but that here serve to portray the despair (kātara) that eventually drives them
to imitate Kṛṣṇa’s līlā (10.30.14). Unlike the Harivaṃśa, therefore, where the gopīs happily
imitate Kṛṣṇa in his presence (and the Viṣṇu Purāṇa, where they embody Kṛṣṇa’s deeds in
his absence, but without being motivated by sorrow), the Bhāgavata unambiguously states
that the gopīs sufer in their attachment to Kṛṣṇa, and that such pain and despair provoke
them to imitate his deeds after he disappears (10.30.1–3, 14). The gopīs are also explicitly
pained (ārta, 10.30.26) when they spy the evidence of Kṛṣṇa and his special beloved, whose
footprints cause them intense distress (naḥ kṣobhaṃ kurvanty uccaiḥ, 10.30.30). Separated
from Kṛṣṇa, the gopīs interpreting the footprints explicitly sufer, just as the special gopī suf-
fers (anvatapyata) when Kṛṣṇa abandons her (10.30.38) and when the roaming gopīs later
encounter her, their “aggrieved friend (duḥkhitāṃ sakhīm), bewildered by separation from
the beloved” (10.30.40).
Although Kṛṣṇa eventually returns and delights the desirous gopīs, such sensuous delight
is merely temporary, for Kṛṣṇa inally abandons the women permanently when he returns
to the city of Mathurā. Found in both the Viṣṇu and the Bhāgavata Purāṇas but not the
Harivaṃśa, the episode describing the gopīs’ reaction to Kṛṣṇa’s departure once again
underscores their passion, attachment, and sorrow. The Bhāgavata describes the gopīs as
“extremely disturbed” (vyathitā bhṛśam) to learn that Kṛṣṇa is leaving. Becoming pale and
faint, and feeling heartache (hṛttāpa), then “despairing of separation” (virahakātarāḥ), the
alarmed gopīs thus gather and tearfully remember their union with Kṛṣṇa, who now seems
merciless when allied with the cruel Akrūra (10.39.12–21). Though they have abandoned
everything and become his slaves, they say, Kṛṣṇa is oblivious to the sufering (ātura) that he
himself causes (10.39.22), for their hearts are now sad and shattered by fate following their
union with Kṛṣṇa, whom they ind extremely diicult to leave, even for an instant (10.39.28).
For those who once enjoyed the leeting rāsa, therefore, life without Kṛṣṇa will be unending
darkness (10.39.29). The gopīs attached to Kṛṣṇa (kṛṣṇaviśaktamānasa) thus weep loudly
and without shame, “violently sufering from separation” (virahāturā bhṛśaṃ, 10.39.31).
Hopelessly devoted (anurañjita), the gopīs then follow Kṛṣṇa until he notices them sufering
(tās tapyatīḥ) and consoles them with afectionate (saprema) messages (10.39.35). Finally
then, the gopīs watch motionlessly as Kṛṣṇa’s chariot departs, and without hope (nirāśā) in
his return, they spend their days and nights singing his deeds (10.39.37).
Although the Bhāgavata adds in the same verse that the gopīs are ‘free from sorrow’
(viśokā) as they sing about their departed beloved, the text nevertheless portrays their con-
tinual sufering when Kṛṣṇa’s messenger-friend Uddhava later comes to Vraja and attempts
to console the impassioned gopīs with philosophical messages from their lover. Immodestly
surrounding Uddhava, whose beauty resembles Kṛṣṇa’s (10.47.2–3), the gopīs cite com-
mon examples of purposeful unions followed by abandonment, referring to bees who aban-
don lowers, for example, and lovers who abandon women after enjoying sexual pleasures
(10.47.6–8). Resentful that Kṛṣṇa deserted them after enticing them to drink the “delusive
nectar” (sudhāṃ mohinīm) from his lips (10.47.13), one woman compares the gopīs to female
deer who perilously trust the hunter: the gopīs believed Kṛṣṇa’s deceitful promises, and now
only the pain of memory, sharp like his ingernails, remains (10.47.19). Though they aban-
doned everything for his sake, that ungrateful Kṛṣṇa still forsook them (10.47.16), and now
they wander like wretched beggars (10.47.18).
Uddhava sees things diferently, however, when he responds to the gopīs “ardently long-
ing for a glimpse of Kṛṣṇa” (kṛṣṇadarśanalālasāḥ, 10.47.22): by good fortune (diṣṭyā),
he says, the gopīs have abandoned everything and chosen Kṛṣṇa (10.47.26), and precisely
‘because of separation’ (viraheṇa) they devoted themselves completely (10.47.27). He then
conveys the message from Kṛṣṇa, who further explains the purpose of viraha (10.47.29–37).
Kṛṣṇa tells the gopīs that there can never be complete separation between them because he
is the all-pervasive ātman, the substratum underlying their very existence (10.47.29–30).
Though the mind fails to grasp this underlying unity because ātman is mistaken for māyā,
one should learn to restrain the senses and see beyond sense objects, which is precisely the
goal of various philosophical traditions and ascetic practices (10.47.31–33). According to
Kṛṣṇa, moreover, viraha efects the same purpose, hence his desertion of women:
yat tv ahaṃ bhavatīnāṃ vai dūre varte priyo dṛśām | manasaḥ saṃnikarṣārthaṃ
madanudhyānakāmyayā ||
yathā dūracare preṣṭhe mana āviśya vartate | strīṇāṃ ca na tathā cetaḥ saṃnikṛṣṭe’kṣagocare ||
10.47.34–35
That I, your beloved, remain far from sight is for the purpose of attracting your mind by means
of your desire for recollection of me, for absorbed in the distant beloved, the mind of women
dwells, but not so their mind when he is near, before the eyes.
Separation thus trains the gopīs to focus their minds completely and clearly on Kṛṣṇa. And
by remembering him always, he continues, they will attain him soon (mām upaiṣyatha,
10.47.36), just as the noble women who missed the rāsa with Kṛṣṇa in the forest also attained
him (māpuḥ) by contemplating his heroism (madvīryacintayā, 10.47.37). In this inal point
of consolation, Kṛṣṇa refers to those gopīs, earlier trapped in their homes by male relatives,
who attained Kṛṣṇa and thus liberation by means of meditation alone:
antargṛhagatāḥ kāścid gopyo ’labdhavinirgamāḥ |
kṛṣṇaṃ tadbhāvanāyuktā dadhyur mīlitalocanāḥ ||
duḥsahapreṣṭhavirahatīvratāpadhutāśubhāḥ |
dhyānaprāptācyutāśleṣanirvṛtyā kṣīṇamaṅgalāḥ ||
tam eva paramātmānaṃ jārabuddhyāpi saṃgatāḥ |
jahur guṇamayaṃ dehaṃ sadyaḥ prakṣīṇabandhanāḥ || 10.29–9-11
Having entered the inner chamber, their exits [thus] obstructed, some gopīs whose eyes were
closed meditated on Kṛṣṇa, absorbed in the thought of him. Their impurities shaken of by the
sharp pain of separation from the irresistible beloved, their auspicious works destroyed by the
delight of embracing Acyuta attained through meditation, united with that very Supreme Self
even by the cognition of a lover, their fetters immediately destroyed, they abandoned the body
consisting of guṇas. 23
Reading these verses with Kṛṣṇa’s later consolation delivered by Uddhava, it becomes clear
that viraha paradoxically facilitates the highest attainment—namely, union with Kṛṣṇa—
according to the Bhāgavata, wherein husbands’ resistance and Kṛṣṇa’s temporary disap-
pearance and inal departure therefore enable the gopīs’ salvation, albeit unbeknownst to
the sufering gopīs. When Kṛṣṇa suddenly disappears in the midst of delighting the gopīs,
therefore, he does so, says the Bhāgavata, “for the purpose of grace” (prasādāya, 10.29.48),
which Kṛṣṇa later explains to the gopīs after they question his seemingly callous behavior
(10.32.16):
evaṃ madarthojjhitalokavedasvānāṃ hi vo mayy anuvṛttaye ’balāḥ ||
mayā parokṣaṃ bhajatā tirohitaṃ māsūyituṃ mārhatha tatpriyaṃ priyāḥ || 10.32.21
Therefore, O delicate ladies, for my loving you invisibly you shouldn’t be displeased with me,
your beloved who disappeared so that you who had abandoned the world, the Veda, and your
everything for my sake would pursue me, O beloveds.
Clearly then, Kṛṣṇa temporarily disappears (and, eventually, never returns to Vraja) precisely
so that the gopīs will engage in viraha-bhakti. 24 According to the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, in fact,
such passionate pursuit constitutes both path and goal for the gopīs.
In a provocative soteriology of emotional attachment, kāma is explicitly identiied as the
gopīs’ path to deliverance in the Bhāgavata. When the gopīs trapped in their homes con-
template Kṛṣṇa as their ‘dearest beloved’ (preṣṭha) and thereby attain liberation as all their
fetters created by good and bad karma are destroyed, King Parīkṣit asks, how?
The king said: “They knew Kṛṣṇa as paraṃ kāntaṃ, but not as brahman, O sage. Since their
focus is on the guṇas, how is the perpetual low of guṇas stopped?” (10.29.12)
23. What exactly jahur guṇamayaṃ deham means, and whether the gopīs in question live or die, is unclear.
Sheth says these gopīs “actually die of their love for [Kṛṣṇa], whereas those in the Viṣṇu Purāṇa do not” (p. 122);
Hardy also infers death (see p. 529); and Huberman states this explicitly (see p. 162). But I am not so sure. In any
case, the BhP says nothing further, nor does Śrīdhara address this issue speciically. He says only that all of the
gopīs’ karma is destroyed, implying liberation from saṃsāra.
24. Within the larger story, of course, Kṛṣṇa goes to Mathurā in order to kill Kaṃsa and later fulill his divine
mission as the Yādava prince who defends dharma and protects the Pāṇḍavas in the Mahābhārata battle.
If the gopīs know Kṛṣṇa only as the “supremely desired one,” but not as the underlying eter-
nal essence of the cosmos, then how could their meditation without metaphysical knowledge
bring to an end the otherwise endless phenomenal entanglement engendered by desire and
thus liberate the gopīs from saṃsāra? As Śrīdhara notes in his commentary on the verse,
implying that knowledge is the path to salvation: if a woman’s loving her husband without
knowing he is brahman does not lead to mokṣa, then how does loving Kṛṣṇa in like igno-
rance do so? Śuka’s answer is simple, and was previously told: “just as Śiśupāla attained
fulillment (siddhim) even hating [Kṛṣṇa],” 25 how much more so the gopīs who love him
(kim utādhokṣajapriyāḥ, 10.29.13). According to this response, desire and other mundane
emotions are explicitly a path to the ultimate goal, deined as oneness with Kṛṣṇa, for as Śuka
continues, “always directing kāma, anger, fear, afection, unity, and even friendship towards
Hari, they become one with him indeed” (yānti tanmayatāṃ hi te) (10.29.15). 26
Elsewhere the gopīs’ very passion for Kṛṣṇa seems to be the ultimate goal, according to
the Bhāgavata. When Uddhava beholds the gopīs’ love for Kṛṣṇa and their pain in separation,
for example, he praises them efusively: their minds thus surrendered to Lord Vāsudeva, they
are honored in the world, and their goals are fulilled (pūrṇārthāḥ, 10.47.23), for their entire
being has attained Kṛṣṇa by means of separation (viraheṇa, 10.47.27). 27 Truly unsurpassed,
says Uddhava, is the gopīs’ devotion (anuttamā bhakti) to the Lord (10.47.25). Indeed, the
gopīs themselves lament that their minds are completely captured (hṛtadhī) by Kṛṣṇa’s man-
ner and appearance (10.47.51), and that every place he frequented and everything he touched
causes them to remember him (10.47.49–50). Though they might like to relinquish desire
(10.47.47), they are simply unable to forget (10.47.50), and fondly thus they recall again
and again the deeds of their beloved “in his boyhood and youth” (10.47.10). They wonder if
Kṛṣṇa remembers them, too (10.47.42–43), and if he will ever come again to enliven those
who are “alicted with grief” (taptāḥ śucā, 10.47.44). Completely absorbed in Kṛṣṇa, the
gopīs are therefore extraordinary, according to Uddhava, who is so delighted in their presence
that he honors them and sings (10.47.57):
etāḥ paraṃ tanubhṛto bhuvi gopavadhvo
govinda eva nikhilātmani rūḍhabhāvāḥ | 10.47.58ab
Embodied on earth—their beings ascended to Govinda, the cosmic self—the wives of the cow-
herds have reached the supreme.
Sages fearful of being reborn, and even Uddhava himself, strive for this end that the gopīs
have won through their matchless love (10.47.58), but the rustic women are unrivaled in their
achievement, says Uddhava, despite rumors about their conduct:
kvemāḥ striyo vanacarīr vyabhicāraduṣṭāḥ
kṛṣṇe kva caiṣa paramātmani rūḍhabhāvaḥ | 10.47.59ab
Where are these women, roaming in the forest, deiled by transgression? And where is he, whose
being has ascended to Kṛṣṇa, the self-supreme?
25. A reference to BhP 7.1.13–32, where Śiśupāla is absorbed into Kṛṣṇa’s body when Kṛṣṇa kills him.
26. The BhP’s explicit claim that the gopīs are liberated through kāma has proved problematic throughout
Indian religious history, precisely because kāma is often considered, in a variety of texts and traditions, a source of
bondage and an obstacle to salvation. Various claims about the transformation of selish kāma into selless prema,
‘pure love’, have thus been articulated by traditional commentators and contemporary scholars (see Schweig and
Huberman, for example). Śrīdhara, in the earliest extant full commentary on the BhP, does sometimes emphasize
prema, but in his long comment on 10.29.10–11 he clearly acknowledges the gopīs’ liberation by kāma.
27. sarvātmabhāvo’dhigato bhavatīnām adhokṣaje | viraheṇa mahābhāgā mahān me’nugrahaḥ kṛtaḥ || 10.47.27
Show me the man, challenges Uddhava boldly, who compares to these incomparable women,
whose vastly expanded love unites them lawlessly with Kṛṣṇa. 28 They uniquely enjoyed his
grace when he embraced them intimately in the rāsa (10.47.60), and now they unite with
him completely in viraha. Uddhava therefore honors the gopīs, worships the dust from their
feet (10.47.63), and even longs to be among the shrubs and creepers constantly devoted thus
(10.47.61).
Kṛṣṇa’s inal interaction with the gopīs likewise suggests that viraha-bhakti actually is the
ultimate goal, not merely the means to an end, because it actualizes immediate union with
Kṛṣṇa in the midst of everyday life. Clearly privileged with respect to their ability to win
their beloved Govinda, when the gopīs later see him at Kurukṣetra, long after his departure
from Vraja, they embrace him in their hearts and thereby gain his very being (tadbhāvam
āpuḥ), very diicult for others to achieve, even for those who are always joined with him
(api nityayujāṃ durāpam, 10.82.40). 29 Kṛṣṇa then embraces the gopīs and addresses them
briely (10.82.41). He tells them that people’s devotion to him efects immortality, and he
commends the gopīs for their afection, which is truly their attainment of him (10.82.45). 30
He describes himself as the imperishable essence of all beings—their beginning and end,
inside and out (10.82.46–47)—upon hearing which instruction on the higher self, the gopīs,
whose jīvakośas were destroyed due to remembering him, attained him (10.82.48). 31 The
gopīs then speak in the chapter’s concluding verse:
O lotus-naveled [Kṛṣṇa], may your lotus-foot—the rope raising the fallen from the well of
saṃsāra, pondered in the heart by the profoundly wise lords of yoga—always arise in the mind
of us, fond of domestic life (10.82.49).
Privileged as the gopīs are, then, to enjoy Kṛṣṇa’s beautiful body in the moonlit rāsa,
their true blessing, according to the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, is viraha. By means of viraha,
separation from the beloved, the gopīs’ desire intensiies and increases until it completely
overwhelms their consciousness, and precisely such overpowering love efects their union
with Bhagavān. By deserting the gopīs—briely, and then permanently following a sensu-
ous, ecstatic union—Kṛṣṇa thereby extends his divine grace to the women whose sufering
in his absence compels them irresistibly to pursue him. Though such pursuit is fraught with
pain, the gopīs’ desire and sorrow are not in vain, for the women attain immortality, oneness
with Kṛṣṇa, through their passionate viraha-bhakti that no man can match. The Bhāgavata
is therefore radical not only in its valuation of emotion as an eicacious path to salvation,
28. The bahuvrīhis rūḍhabhāvāḥ (10.47.58) and rūḍhabhāvaḥ (10.47.59), in the feminine plural and masculine
singular, respectively, which I have translated ‘whose being has ascended’ to Kṛṣṇa, could also mean ‘whose love
has increased’. In the latter sense, the gopīs’ love for Kṛṣṇa has increased or expanded, due to separation, so that
they rightly see him everywhere, even though they still fail to grasp intellectually his universal essence. Such a
reading would only enhance my point that viraha-bhakti is the ultimate goal here, since the expansive, endless love
itself would then be, even more literally, the gopīs’ attainment of the supreme.
29. It is unclear to whom api nityayujām refers. Śrīdhara glosses the compound as ārūḍhayoginām api “even for
accomplished yogis.” But the verse might refer to those who are “constantly joined” with Kṛṣṇa in more mundane
ways, such as his wives, in which case viraha again distinguishes the gopīs—who are forsaken and thus seem unfor-
tunate—from Kṛṣṇa’s wives, who enjoy Kṛṣṇa’s daily presence and thus seem extremely fortunate by comparison.
30. mayi bhaktir hi bhūtānām amṛtatvāya kalpate | diṣṭyā yad āsīn matsneho bhavatīnāṃ madāpanaḥ || 10.82.45.
31. adhyātmaśikṣayā gopya evaṃ kṛṣṇena śikṣitāḥ | tadanusmaraṇadhvastajīvakośās tam adhyagan || Śrīdhara
glosses jīvakośa as liṅga, loosely the ‘subtle body’ associated with karma and hence reborn in various physical
bodies until one is inally liberated from saṃsāra. The verse seems to indicate that because the gopīs have been con-
stantly recollecting Kṛṣṇa since his departure, they attained him immediately when they saw him and he instructed
them. Kṛṣṇa may refer to their present attainment, earlier in 10.47.36, where he says the gopīs will attain him soon,
due to remembering him, their clear minds completely absorbed in him.
but also in its exaltation of ordinary women who fall madly in love with Kṛṣṇa without
knowing he is God. In explicitly articulating a soteriology of separation and absence, the
Bhāgavata, unlike the Harivaṃśa (and the Viṣṇu Purāṇa), therefore gloriies the gopīs and
their spontaneous kāma; vindicates Kṛṣṇa for indulging and then deserting married women;
and advocates passionate viraha-bhakti as an exemplary means of salvation in oneness with
God. That ordinary emotions—albeit extremely focused and intense—have become a path
to salvation, moreover, demonstrates Kṛṣṇa’s ininite mercy and absolute power, according
to the Bhāgavata, for his accessible human form allows more people to experience his grace
precisely by loving him spontaneously (or hating or fearing him, etc., similarly in relative
ignorance). In the form of a playful and irresistible adolescent lover, then, Kṛṣṇa deliberately
delights and deserts the desirous gopīs, in an act of divine mercy, in order to arouse their
attraction, stimulate their constant devotion, and thereby enable their salvation by means of
unrequited love.
Strīdharma and Viraha-Bhakti

Simply to say that the Bhāgavata Purāṇa gloriies the gopīs and articulates an unambigu-
ous soteriology of viraha, however, is to disregard the signiicant social messages encoded in
the Bhāgavata’s construction of bhakti. As noted already, the relationship between Kṛṣṇa and
the gopīs entails a radical lack of mutuality not only because Kṛṣṇa is God and the gopīs are
human women who depend on him for deliverance, but also because the gopīs are explicitly
married, which eventually necessitates viraha. In the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, therefore, although
the gopīs recklessly abandon their husbands and homes when they hear Kṛṣṇa’s sweet soft
song, thereby demonstrating their single-minded devotion, their domestic obligations are
nevertheless clearly speciied, right from the start.
Hearing that song that heightens desire, their minds captured by Kṛṣṇa, the women of Vraja came
to where that beloved [was], their ardor mutually unnoticed, their earrings dangling quickly.
Some, milking [the cows but] abandoning the milk, led in great haste; others, putting the milk
on the ire, left without removing the cake. Some serving food, [but] abandoning that; some
nursing their children; some attending to their husbands; some eating, [then] discarding the
food. . . . Being hindered by husbands, fathers, brothers and kin, their hearts stolen by Govinda,
the bewildered women didn’t turn back. (10.29.4–6, 8)
In naming the actions and people that the gopīs neglect for a sylvan tryst with Kṛṣṇa,
the Bhāgavata also makes perfectly clear what the women must return to “unwillingly”
(anicchantyaḥ) when dawn approaches and the moonlit rāsa is over (10.33.39). Kṛṣṇa ulti-
mately conspires in their return home, though he delights them irst, in order to inlame their
impassioned devotion. Before he touches them, however, and allows them to touch him,
Bhagavān speaks, deluding the gopīs, as the text says (10.29.17), but nevertheless expressly
identifying the women’s duties in the world.
śrībhagavān uvāca ||
svāgataṃ vo mahābhāgāḥ priyaṃ kiṃ karavāṇi vaḥ |
vrajasyānāmayaṃ kaccid brūtāgamanakāraṇam ||
rajany eṣā ghorarūpā ghorasattvaniṣevitā |
pratiyāta vrajaṃ neha stheyaṃ strībhiḥ sumadhyamāḥ ||
mātaraḥ pitaraḥ putrā bhrātaraḥ patayaś ca vaḥ |
vicinvanti hy apaśyanto mā kṛdhvaṃ bandhusādhvasam ||
dṛṣṭaṃ vanaṃ kusumitaṃ rākeśakararañjitam |
yamunānilalīlaijattarupallavaśobhitam ||
tad yāta mā ciraṃ goṣṭhaṃ śuśrūṣadhvaṃ patīn satīḥ |
krandanti vatsā bālāś ca tān pāyayata duhyata ||

athavā madabhisnehād bhavatyo yantritāśayāḥ |
āgatā hy upapannaṃ vaḥ prīyante mayi jantavaḥ ||
bhartuḥ śuśrūṣaṇaṃ strīṇāṃ paro dharmo hy amāyayā |
tadbandhūnāṃ ca kalyāṇyaḥ prajānāṃ cānupoṣaṇam ||
duḥśīlo durbhago vṛddho jaḍo rogyadhano’pi vā |
patiḥ strībhir na hātavyo lokepsubhir apātakī ||
asvargyam ayaśasyaṃ ca phalgu kṛcchraṃ bhayāvaham |
jugupsitaṃ ca sarvatra aupapatyaṃ kulastriyāḥ ||
śravaṇād darśanād dhyānān mayi bhāvo’nukīrtanāt ||
na tathā saṃnikarṣeṇa pratiyāta tato gṛhān || 10.29–18–27
The Blessed Lord said: “Welcome to you, very fortunate ones. What favor shall I do for you?
Tell [me], is the poor health of Vraja the reason for your coming? This night of frightful appear-
ance is frequented by terrible creatures. Go back to Vraja. Women shouldn’t stay here, O beau-
tiful-waisted ones. Not seeing you, mothers, fathers, children, brothers, and husbands search for
you. Don’t alarm your family. You’ve seen the forest full of lowers, illuminated by the rays of
the full moon, [and] beautiied by blossoms on trees trembling playfully in the breeze from the
Yamunā. So go to the village without delay. Serve your husbands, O virtuous women! The calves
and children are crying—milk them, nurse them! Although (athavā) you have come properly,
your hearts bound by afection for me, for people delight in me, the highest dharma of women,
O illustrious ones, is nurturing children and obeying a husband and his kin without deceit. An
innocent husband is not to be deserted by women hoping to obtain the worlds, even if he’s
unruly, unlucky, old, foolish, diseased, or poor. The inidelity of a respectable woman is ruinous,
disgraceful, vain, painful, dangerous, and detested everywhere. From hearing [about me], seeing
[me], meditating [on me], [and] proclaiming [my glory], does one exist in me, [but] not so by
close contact. Therefore, return to [your] homes.”
Commenting on Kṛṣṇa’s unexpected speech, Sheth (1984: 55) writes, “that Krishna tells
them to return to their husbands is an indication that he is not sensually attached to them.”
But such an interpretation is naïve and neglects the larger context. That Kṛṣṇa is not sen-
sually attached to the gopīs, or to anyone, is made emphatically clear in a variety of more
explicit ways throughout the Bhāgavata, as I have already documented above. The point of
this speech is rather to extol strīdharma and thereby propagate dharmaśāstra through the
charming narrative. Although Kṛṣṇa then proceeds to indulge the gopīs’ desire after they
beg him to relent, his speech should not therefore be taken as a mockery of dharma, or as
an outright rejection of dharma, as Hardy’s cursory treatment of the category suggests; 32 or
even as a reinterpretation of conventional dharma in terms of bhakti, as Bryant argues 33—for
the gopīs are, in fact, required to return to such duties, permanently, even though they deeply
long to abandon their families in order to serve Kṛṣṇa exclusively. The gopīs thus respond:
yat patyapatyasuhṛdām anuvṛttir aṅga strīṇāṃ svadharma iti dharmavidā tvayoktam |
astv evam etad upadeśapade tvayīśe preṣṭho bhavāṃs tanubhṛtāṃ kila bandhur ātmā ||
10.29.32
What was said by you, the knower of dharma—namely, that the svadharma of women is serving
husbands, children, and friends—let it be so towards you, the lord, source of this instruction. You
are the dearest relative of those bearing bodies, verily the self. 34
32. Despite dharma’s ubiquity and signiicance in the BhP, Hardy treats the category only minimally in his
massive Viraha-Bhakti (see p. 537, for example).
33. See Bryant 2003: xlix–lviii, for example.
34. Śrīdhara notes that the third pāda can also mean the opposite: “Because you are the Lord, source of this
instruction, let it be so” (i.e., let our dharma be obeying husbands, etc.). Given the overall context, this seems
unlikely, but the ambiguity is certainly there.
But Kṛṣṇa allows the gopīs only temporary satisfaction in this request, for he delights them
only briely before they must return home, where they long for Kṛṣṇa until they later see him
at Kurukṣetra, and then ask only that his lotus-foot “always arise in the mind of us, even
enjoying the household” (10.82.49). Finally, then, the gopīs who have attained the highest
spiritual rewards simultaneously embody the “highest dharma of women,” explicitly identi-
ied by Kṛṣṇa as service to husbands and children. 35
Within this dharmic context, unique to the Bhāgavata’s narration, the names and epi-
thets for Kṛṣṇa and the gopīs have also changed dramatically. In addition to those already
noted, Kṛṣṇa has yet another signiicant title, uttered by the gopīs in the verse cited above:
dharmavid, the knower of dharma. Although Kṛṣṇa’s function as an embodiment of brah-
manical dharma is clearer in later narratives depicting Kṛṣṇa’s wives, his speech to the gopīs
nevertheless reveals what good women should do, and eventually must do, despite his own
playful and graceful transgressions of dharma that seem to subvert the conventional social
order. Kṛṣṇa’s extraordinary behavior notwithstanding, in fact, the Bhāgavata stresses that
one should never imitate his deeds (10.33.31), but rather embody his spoken position:
The word of the gods is good, likewise their behavior on occasion. The wise one should therefore
behave according to their decrees. (10.33.32)
Unlike the gopīs and others, however, Kṛṣṇa himself is not bound by his own dharmic
instructions, as Śuka explains to Parīkṣit when the latter questions Kṛṣṇa’s behavior with the
gopīs on the basis of dharma:
For these beings without ego, O King [Parīkṣit], there’s no personal advantage in proper
conduct, or disadvantage in the opposite. For the Master, moreover, of all beings-to-be-mas-
tered—animals, people, and deities—how much less concern for what’s proper and improper!
(10.33.33–34)
Propriety is, of course, crucial for the gopīs, whose husbands do not even suspect adultery
in this version of the narrative, for “deluded by [Kṛṣṇa’s] māyā, each imagining that his own
wife remained by his side, the husbands in Vraja didn’t resent Kṛṣṇa at all” (10.33.38). The
gopīs therefore emerge as virtuous women despite their adulterous tryst with Kṛṣṇa and their
continual longing for their lover in his absence. Indeed, Kṛṣṇa refers to them as such in his
dharma speech, where he employs a signiicant term for women not seen in the Harivaṃśa’s
narrative: satī, literally ‘good woman’, but a loaded term that connotes a woman devoted to
her husband, sometimes in the extreme.
So go to the village without delay. Serve your husbands, O satīs! The calves and children are
crying—milk them, nurse them! 36 (10.29.22)
Eventually, of course, the gopīs do return to the village and live up to their good name,
at least in terms of karma and dharma, though their hearts are forever ofered to Kṛṣṇa in
bhakti. Kṛṣṇa therefore appropriately addresses the gopīs as satī, and likewise with the voca-
tive kalyāṇyaḥ ‘illustrious women’, also translatable as noble, virtuous, good, fortunate, etc.
(10.29.24), which suits the gopīs both spiritually and socially.
35. In a recent reading of the BhP that likewise stresses householder dharma, Donald Davis suggests that
the text ofers devotees a “substitutional means” (2007: 250) of fulilling dharma through bhakti, because Kṛṣṇa
“completely embodies dharma. Devotion to Kṛṣṇa then becomes a devotion to dharma itself and . . . [p]articipating
in Kṛṣṇa’s līlās serves as a legally legitimated substitute for the actual performance of dharma in the household”
(p. 253; see especially pp. 249–54). But the BhP, in fact, ofers no such substitutional means to the gopīs, who must
return home to their husbands and children. Though correctly reading the BhP as dharmaśāstra, Davis still fails to
see that the gopīs remain bound by conventional pativratādharma despite their exemplary bhakti.
36. Śrīdhara glosses satīḥ as the vocative, he satyaḥ, which is also how I read the term.
Not insigniicantly—despite the term’s ubiquity in Sanskrit literature and Indian culture—
Kṛṣṇa also employs the term strī, woman or wife, in his dharma speech to the gopīs (10.29.19,
24, 25, 26), where strī clearly refers to women as wives. Though the term appears repeatedly
in the Bhāgavata’s gopī narrative, it appears only once in the Harivaṃśa’s: in the compound
gopastriyaḥ, the cowherd women (63.19). Its frequent usage in the Bhāgavata indicates not
only that the gopīs are women, as opposed to girls, but also emphasizes throughout 10.29–
33 that they are wives, not unmarried youth. Indeed, the term strī (including vrajastrī and
kulastrī) appears fourteen times in the gopī narrative, 37 whereas terms signifying daughters,
unmarried girls, and youthful unmarried women—prominent in the brief Harivaṃśa ver-
sion—have almost completely disappeared. Not once are the gopīs called kanyā or kanyakā
‘girl’; and in only one verse in the considerably lengthened narrative are they called yuvati-,
young women:
Beheld with afection, being suiciently splashed on all sides by the young women (yuvatibhiḥ)
laughing in the water, [and] being praised with showers of lowers by those in celestial cars, he
whose pleasure is his own (svaratiḥ) enjoyed himself here, playing like the king of elephants.
(10.33.24)
Though youthful unmarried women certainly delight with Kṛṣṇa in the Harivaṃśa, I would
argue that no gopīs are unmarried in the Bhāgavata, for while the verse above refers to them
as young or youthful, yuvati can refer to both married and unmarried young women, as I have
noted above. But the Bhāgavata’s narrative otherwise implies that all of the gopīs are mar-
ried; and if young, unmarried women do partake in the rāsa, the Bhāgavata shows no con-
cern for them whatsoever. Kṛṣṇa’s speech, for example, is addressed speciically to married
women, and though one might argue that those women whose mothers and fathers search
for them are possibly unmarried (10.29.20), Kṛṣṇa himself never distinguishes wives from
unmarried girls, but rather tells them all to go home and serve their husbands and children
(10.29.22). Likewise when the gopīs beg Kṛṣṇa to relent, they boldly proclaim, “Enough of
husbands, sons, etc., givers of pain!” (10.29.33). Indeed, the Bhāgavata’s narrative clearly
emphasizes the gopīs’ brief abandonment of husbands and children speciically, as well as
their desire to forsake conventional strīdharma forever. Unambiguously, however, the gopīs
are the “wives of others” (paradāra) whom Kṛṣṇa has touched (10.33.28), and explicitly the
wives (dāra) of the cowherds in Vraja, the men who imagine their women by their sides all
along (10.33.38).
In addition to the term strī—and again in sharp contrast to the Harivaṃśa’s kanyā—the
term vadhū ‘young woman’ or speciically ‘bride’, also appears in the Bhāgavata’s narrative
ive times. The gopīs refer to the special beloved, who enjoys Kṛṣṇa’s attention in private, as
vadhū (10.30.26, 32), Kṛṣṇa’s bride, and someone—either the gopīs or the narrator, the voice
is uncertain—refers to her similarly in 10.30.38, when she sufers after Kṛṣṇa abandons her.
I read the term speciically as ‘bride’ because I think the gopīs, clearly envisioning Kṛṣṇa as
a desirous lover (kāmin) with his favorite beloved, interpret their secret afair as a gāndharva
marriage, a union based on mutual kāma often consummated in the forest. In this context,
it is useful to recall Bhāgavata 10.22, in which the gopīs perform a ritual to Kātyāyanī in
order to secure Kṛṣṇa as their pati ‘husband’, so their later imagining the special beloved as
a bride would logically follow. This earlier pre-marital ritual to Kātyāyanī would also help to
legitimate the gopīs’ behavior in the rāsa, for Kṛṣṇa promises in 10.22 that they will enjoy
the nights with him, their vow to the goddess fulilled (10.22.27). He thus sends them back
to Vraja, addressing them signiicantly as satī, possibly suggesting that they are his faith-
37. 10.29.4, 19, 24, 25, 26, 32, 40, 47; 10.30.34, 35, 42; 10.33.2, 3, 18.
ful wives, based on their desire to marry him and their devotion more generally. Within the
context of 10.22, moreover, the gopīs could potentially become Kṛṣṇa’s legitimate wives, for
they are still daughters (dārikā, 10.22.17) and unmarried virginal girls (kumārikā, 10.22.1,
4, 28; kumārī, 10.22.5). In fact, with the single exception of satī noted above, 10.22 never
refers to the gopīs with the terms signifying ‘woman’ and ‘wife’ that we ind repeatedly in
10.29–33. To be sure, in 10.22 they are gopīs (10.22.12) with beautiful waists (10.22.11)
who are virtuous and good (satī and sadhvī, 10.22.27 and 10.22.25, respectively), but they
are unambiguously unmarried girls seeking Kṛṣṇa as their pati.
I suggest, therefore, that the ritual to Kātyāyanī and the gopīs’ encounter with Kṛṣṇa in
10.22 together efect a kind of spiritual marriage that justiies their later adulterous tryst
depicted in the rāsakrīḍā—a tryst never similarly justiied in the Harivaṃśa—for though
the gopīs are kumārī in 10.22, they are deinitively strī who are paradāra in 10.29–33.
Their changed status is important, for while Kṛṣṇa approaches the kumārī in Bhāgavata
10.22—naked kumārī, moreover!—he never touches them here, nor do the girls touch him.
Indeed, though he steals their clothes and they bow down naked before him, no physical
contact occurs. Instead, Kṛṣṇa promises that they will enjoy the nights with him (mayemā
raṃsyatha kṣapāḥ, 10.22.27), and the narrator says their desires are fulilled (labdhakāma),
though they leave Kṛṣṇa only with diiculty and return to Vraja (10.22.28). By compari-
son to the Harivaṃśa’s brief gopī narrative, such elaborate changes in the overall story are
interesting indeed. Whereas Harivaṃśa 63 depicts an amorous encounter based on youthful,
mutual, and spontaneous desire, Bhāgavata 10.22 describes an entirely diferent occasion
on which Kṛṣṇa clearly demonstrates his power over the young girls who adore him, and
who are helpless, naked, cold, and embarrassed before him. The spontaneity and mutuality
central to Harivaṃśa 63 have thus disappeared in the Bhāgavata, even before the celebrated
moonlit tryst, for Bhagavān Kṛṣṇa yogeśvareśvara appears purposefully in Bhāgavata 10.22,
expressly for the fulillment of the girls’ pre-marital rites (10.22.8). But the actual physical
fulillment comes later, only after the gopīs are already married—socially married, that is,
to cowherd men. Only then does Kṛṣṇa touch them, and allow them to touch him, intimately
and passionately, though they reveled in such sensuous touch as unmarried youth in the
Harivaṃśa. In Bhāgavata Purāṇa 10.29–33, by sharp contrast, only married gopīs enjoy
Kṛṣṇa’s body. Such touch is here legitimated by the spiritual marriage efected earlier in
10.22—and by the fact of the adulterous tryst’s being a manifestation of Kṛṣṇa’s compas-
sion and grace—so the gopīs are also called the “brides of Kṛṣṇa” in the midst of the rāsa
(kṛṣṇavadhvaḥ, 10.33.8).
That the gopīs are ambiguously called the “brides of Vraja” (vrajavadhū, 10.33.40) in the
inal verse of the rāsa should not be misunderstood therefore: they are both Kṛṣṇa’s spiritual
brides and the social wives of others. This marital dichotomy (also implied in the Viṣṇu
Purāṇa) is fully efected only in the Bhāgavata with the inclusion of the Kātyāyanī rite,
and with the descriptions of the gopīs as married women explicitly obligated by strīdharma
to their human husbands, but simultaneously gloriied for their passionate viraha-bhakti to
Kṛṣṇa, their spiritual pati. Beyond providing ritual, theological, and metaphysical justiica-
tions for the gopīs’ adultery, moreover, the Bhāgavata otherwise fully sanctions conventional
marriage in an even racier narrative where the gopīs are more impassioned, and Kṛṣṇa more
physically active, and no husbands, fathers, or brothers intrude upon their sylvan romance.
Indeed, whereas the gopīs are hindered by relatives in the Harivaṃśa in the very midst
of their dalliance with Kṛṣṇa, in the Bhāgavata they are all hindered right from the start.
At the beginning of the narrative, when the gopīs hear Kṛṣṇa’s song, abandon strīdharma,
and would rush to him for a sylvan tryst in the moonlight, right then they are hindered
“by husbands, fathers, brothers, and kin” (10.29.8). Because the women are unambiguously
married, their desire is socially transgressive and their transgression of dharma is therefore
emphasized immediately, both by their male relatives’ hindrance and by Kṛṣṇa’s unexpected
dharma talk when they irst approach him in the forest. But because the gopīs are also spiri-
tually Kṛṣṇa’s brides, the union entails a special legitimacy and is thus fulilled in the rāsa
without any later intrusion by family members. The gopīs thus enjoy the nights with Kṛṣṇa,
as he promised they would in 10.22, and their deepest desires are fulilled, for they are noth-
ing less than Lord Kṛṣṇa’s brides. Their physical union is necessarily temporary, however,
for they are already socially married to others and must thus return home to the very people
and duties that Kṛṣṇa speciied in his dharma talk. The gopīs therefore obey Kṛṣṇa, the
knower of dharma and their spiritual pati, and behave like the good wives, satī, that they
are—both serving their husbands and engaging in viraha-bhakti.
Within this context in which the gopīs deinitively lack social power (and power over
Kṛṣṇa) and must therefore return again unwillingly to Vraja, the Bhāgavata employs yet
another term for women not seen in previous versions of the narrative: abalāḥ, literally
‘women without power’. Monier-Williams notes that the feminine noun a-balā simply means
‘woman’, but this is because one without bala—strength, power, military force, etc.—is
generally a woman in the culture that deines the term thus. Simply to translate abalāḥ as
‘women’, however, is to overlook important connotations in both 10.22 and 10.29–33, where
abalāḥ is used repeatedly in reference to the gopīs. In 10.22 the unmarried girls are called
abalāḥ four times, twice in Kṛṣṇa’s address to them (10.22.10, 27) and twice in the narrator’s
voice (10.22.20, 24). That the naked girls are without power in relation to Kṛṣṇa here is clear,
despite Kṛṣṇa’s likewise being young and playful and surrounded by his youthful friends. He
steals their clothes, after all, and though the girls are positively thrilled to be in his presence
(10.22.22), they have no choice but to obey him when he tells them to emerge naked from
the water and bow down, their hands on their heads, in order to reclaim their clothing. They
have committed an ofence in bathing naked, he says (10.22.19), and the girls, wishing to
complete their rites successfully, have no choice now, for they have already tried to appeal
to Kṛṣṇa’s sense of dharma—and thus call him dharmajña, the knower of dharma—and
his fear of possible punishment by the king, but to no avail (10.22.15). The use of abalāḥ
is especially interesting in verses 20 and 27: in the latter verse Kṛṣṇa tells the girls in the
imperative to “return to Vraja” (yāta) and addresses them in the vocative as both satīḥ and
abalāḥ—literally, if you will, ‘O good girls’ and ‘O girls without power’; in the former verse
the “girls without power” understand their own “falling from the vow” (vratacyuti), precisely
as it was “explained by the unfallen one” (acyutenābhihita). The naked girls are thus fallen
and powerless, while Kṛṣṇa remains unfallen and powerful as Bhagavān yogeśvareśvara
(10.22.8).
In 10.29–33 the term abalāḥ is again used repeatedly to describe the gopīs, both in Kṛṣṇa’s
absence, when they imitate his deeds (10.30.3) and seek him in the forest (10.30.26); and in
his presence, when they see him (10.32.3), learn why he disappeared (10.32.21), and enjoy
his beautiful body in the rāsa (10.33.26). Though these speciic examples lack the sharp con-
trast between power and powerlessness that we see in 10.22, the gopīs are, in fact, powerless
when Kṛṣṇa unexpectedly disappears, but when he suddenly returns, “the women without
power all sprang forth simultaneously, as if life had returned to their bodies” (10.32.3). Kṛṣṇa
most literally empowers the gopīs, and the Bhāgavata stresses this fact frequently and vari-
ously, in terms of both bhakti and the metaphysics of existence, for Kṛṣṇa indwells the gopīs
and all embodied beings (10.33.36), and is clearly the beginning and end of life. 38 By means
38. Men are sometimes similarly enlivened by Kṛṣṇa. In 10.82.33, for example, the rejoicing Vṛṣṇis all rise up,
as bodies coming to life, when they inally see Kṛṣṇa after a long separation.
of bhakti the gopīs attain Kṛṣṇa, says the Bhāgavata, and thereby enjoy a cosmic power that
no man with earthly bala can match, according to Uddhava in 10.47.
Yet the gopīs are nevertheless abalāḥ in a very signiicant sense: though they beg to be
Kṛṣṇa’s servants and call themselves his slaves, they remain obligated to their human hus-
bands and families whom they otherwise long to abandon. That the Bhāgavata emphasizes
the gopīs’ servitude represents another important change in the narrative, for where desir-
ous youth join in mutual pleasure in Harivaṃśa 63, in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa precisely the
gopīs’ enslavement now “empowers” them most efectively. When the gopīs hear Kṛṣṇa’s
dharma talk and experience “insuperable anxiety” (10.29.28), they beg him to love them, not
to desert them (10.29.31), and they ask that their svadharma of service be directed towards
him instead of their husbands and children (10.29.32). They have had enough of husbands,
they say, and call themselves Kṛṣṇa’s servants (bhṛtā, 10.29.33), longing like Tulasī, Śrī, and
other servants (bhṛtya) for the dust of Kṛṣṇa’s lotus-feet (10.29.37). They beg him for mercy,
for they wish only to serve him (tvadupāsanāśā): “O jewel of men, grant servitude (dehi
dāsyam) to us whose selves are inlamed with ardent desire due to the sight of your beautiful
smile!” (10.29.38). Their request is repeated: “Let us be your slaves (dāsyaḥ)!” (10.29.39).
Likewise in 10.31, when Kṛṣṇa has disappeared, the gopīs call themselves his “gratuitous
slaves” (aśulkadāsīkā, 10.31.2). They beg him to love his servants (kiṅkarī, 10.31.6), and
to enliven them, “these servants (vidhikarīḥ) bewildered by [his] sweet song with ine lyr-
ics” (10.31.8). What is most interesting about the gopīs’ tenacious desire for servitude is
precisely its eiciency, so that in 10.29.42 Kṛṣṇa relents: “Hearing their despondent speech
[and] smiling with compassion, the lord of lords of yoga delighted the gopīs, even though
delighting in himself.” Similarly in 10.32, not only does Kṛṣṇa return after the gopīs again
ofer themselves in servitude, but he tells them he disappeared for precisely this purpose:
so that the women without power, his beloveds, would pursue him and be totally devoted
(10.32.20–21).
The special beloved whom Kṛṣṇa deserts in the forest, moreover, provides an instructive
example to the contrary. Blessed though she is to enjoy Kṛṣṇa’s afection all alone, she soon
becomes proud after Kṛṣṇa pampers her in various amorous ways, such as carrying her to
protect her feet and adorning her with lowers. Most unfortunately for her, however, “she
then thought herself the best among all women: ‘Having deserted the desiring gopīs, that
beloved loves me!’” (10.30.36). Now “haughty” (dṛptā), she expects Kṛṣṇa to carry her,
but Kṛṣṇa suddenly disappears, and inevitably, “that bride (vadhūḥ) sufered” (10.30.38).
“O lord! [My] darling, most beloved! Where are you? Where are you, O great-armed one?
Reveal your presence, O friend, to pitiful me, your slave (dāsyās te)!” (10.30.39). All the
gopīs in the forest then encounter this pitiful woman struck by viraha, and hearing about her
“attainment of honor (māna) from Mādhava, and [her] dishonor (avamāna) due to selish-
ness, they became supremely astonished” (10.30.40–41).
Astonishing indeed is the moral of the story, for together the servile gopīs and the haughty
special beloved unambiguously demonstrate once again what is proper and improper in love
and bhakti, according to the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. Whereas the gopīs ofer themselves as gra-
tuitous slaves and beg Kṛṣṇa repeatedly to enslave them, the special beloved, by contrast,
expects Kṛṣṇa to serve her. Carry me, she says, feeling proud, conident, and empowered
in the presence of her adoring lover. Clearly she speaks improperly, for Kṛṣṇa immediately
disappears, and his bride sufers and repents, inally calling herself his “slave.” But her desire
to serve comes too late, alas, and she is promptly deserted, efectively punished. The gopīs
who surrender themselves unconditionally to Kṛṣṇa’s service in bhakti, on the other hand, are
doubly rewarded: sensually, when Kṛṣṇa returns and delights them in the rāsa, and spiritu-
ally when he leaves again and they engage in viraha-bhakti in the midst of their compulsory
strīdharma. Quite unlike the Harivaṃśa’s gopīs, then, the Bhāgavata’s gopīs are celebrated
for their shameless adoration, their constant anxious longing, their intense sufering, and
their self-efacing servitude. The proud special beloved is thus taught an important lesson
when she acts inappropriately empowered: the good woman, the satī, the most fortunate of
devotees, is precisely abalā, dependent and disempowered.
conclusion
Although the Harivaṃśa and the Bhāgavata Purāṇa similarly celebrate the shared enjoy-
ment of sensual pleasures in their accounts of Kṛṣṇa’s sylvan tryst with the gopīs, the story
changes dramatically from its brief and ambiguous epic telling to its lengthy purāṇic legend.
Whereas the Harivaṃśa depicts a young Kṛṣṇa spontaneously attracted to unmarried girls
and then delighting with them in the moonlight but ascribes no religious signiicance to such
playful adolescent rati, the Bhāgavata Purāṇa explicitly emphasizes Kṛṣṇa’s divinity and
situates the passionate encounter within a theological context. If the mutually pleasurable
consummation of adolescent desires thus forms the core of the earliest narrative, then the
later and more inluential narrative eliminates such youthful freedom and instead tells a tale
of God and married women that provides both social and spiritual instruction.
Unequivocally divine in the larger Harivaṃśa but obviously spontaneous and desir-
ous in his interactions with women, Kṛṣṇa becomes the supreme yogī in the Bhāgavata,
both āptakāma and ātmārāma as he deliberately orchestrates his encounter with the gopīs
when he resorts to yogamāyā and lures the women to the forest. While he still enjoys sen-
sual pleasures, his purpose in playing is fundamentally merciful, and he remains radically
detached and independent amidst their erotic, adulterous afair. The Bhāgavata’s gopīs, by
contrast, have become positively wild with passionate desire, longing sometimes insanely
for their beloved as they sufer in his absence, essentially embodying a state of emotion-
al attachment and bondage in obvious opposition to Kṛṣṇa’s yogic freedom. Although the
Harivaṃśa describes a happy tryst without any references to sorrowful longing in separation,
the Bhāgavata elaborately exploits the soteriological value of viraha. The Bhāgavata, in
fact, systematically advocates viraha-bhakti as the gopīs’ sole path to salvation, thus simul-
taneously transforming the women into faithful bhaktas and devoted lovers whose ultimate
fulillment lies in unrequited love. By encouraging the gopīs to pursue Kṛṣṇa despite his
physical absence, and despite his yogic indiference that renders him incapable of recipro-
cating their afection, the Bhāgavata efectively gloriies the women’s passionate longing
and sufering in separation. Kṛṣṇa’s disappearance, therefore, is but another manifestation
of his grace, for he deliberately makes the gopīs sufer in order to destroy their pride and
inlame their passion, so that as proper bhaktas they anxiously ofer themselves in servitude
and beg for mercy. Only such extremely humble devotion elicits Kṛṣṇa’s compassion, after
all, unlike the arrogance of the special gopī in the Bhāgavata, who is promptly rejected and
punished for her pride and her conident independence. Just as this episode involving the
impudent gopī consequently teaches all the others an important lesson about proper atti-
tudes in love and bhakti, so the Bhāgavata’s new dharma talks unambiguously identify the
women’s proper duties in the world, and the explicit questions posed by Parīkṣit preclude
improper interpretations of the narrative overall. Indeed, no longer the Harivaṃśa’s youthful
kanyā, the gopīs are married women in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, but their adulterous liaison
with Kṛṣṇa must not be misunderstood, and their svadharma as women—as good wives and
mothers—must not be neglected. Inevitably separated from Kṛṣṇa because of strīdharma,
then, the gopīs are both powerless to resist the forces of social convention for more than a
brief moonlit tryst, and yet radically dependent on a beloved but distant Kṛṣṇa for true fulill-
ment and salvation. Bold and empowered though they may seem in speaking and demanding
Kṛṣṇa’s attention, therefore, the gopīs inally have no choice but to return home and engage
in viraha-bhakti, thereby becoming exemplary satī in relation to both human and divine pati.
According to the Bhāgavata, moreover, such behavior represents the very highest attainment,
so spiritually potent, in fact, that even those who merely hear and recite the tales of Kṛṣṇa
with the “brides of Vraja” likewise attain the “highest devotion to the Lord” (10.33.40). In
thus presenting the tales themselves as salviic, the Bhāgavata not only distances God further
from his adoring devotees, but also universalizes a love that in the Harivaṃśa is distinctly
particular. Though the Bhāgavata’s universalization of bhakti generously opens the path of
salvation to all—for anyone (at least theoretically and ideally) can contemplate Kṛṣṇa con-
tinuously in the midst of householder life—the Harivaṃśa’s account of a spontaneous and
joyful adolescent attraction that arises mutually between a playful young Kṛṣṇa and nubile
cowherd girls has now completely disappeared, superseded instead by a calculated construc-
tion of bhakti that celebrates sufering married women who fulill strīdharma and attain
salvation in viraha simultaneously.
abbreviations
BhP Bhāgavata Purāṇa
Hv Harivaṃśa
MW Monier-Williams
ViP Viṣṇu Purāṇa
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Viraha Bhakti and Stridharma Re Reading

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Viraha-Bhakti and Strīdharma: Re-Reading the Story of Kṛṣṇa

and the Gopīs in the Harivaṃśa and the Bhāgavata Purāṇa

Journal of the American Oriental Society 130.3 (2010) 385

the moonlit tryst

Youth, Mutuality, and Ambiguity

bhāgavata purāṆa 10.29–33

Unrequited Kāma and Divine Mercy

Strīdharma and Viraha-Bhakti

krandanti vatsā bālāś ca tān pāyayata duhyata ||

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