Viraha-bhakti and stridharma: re-reading the story of Krsna and the gopis in the Harivamsa and the Bhagavata Purana.

• Author: Coleman, Tracy

Undeniably the most famous episode of Krsna's youthful life in Vraja, the moonlit tryst with the gopls 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 Krsna without knowing he is God, scholars have often viewed the gopls 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 samsara. According to this view, women are particularly privileged in their intimate relations with Krsna, 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, popular translation of the tenth skandha of the Bhagavata Purana, for example, Edwin Bryant (2003: liv-lv) claims in a discussion of the gopls that

while the conventional roles of women in everyday society are not challenged by the Bhagavata, the text allows them to discard these roles in the context of bhakti yoga and, having done so, is ground-breaking in the Puranic genre by its promotion of women as not just eligible devotees, but the highest of all yogis. Invoking the power of Krsna in order to "challenge aspects of the social and cultural milieu of the day," the Bhagavata, according to Bryant, thereby provides "significant resources for potentially revolutionary social change" (p. iviii). Bryant is not alone in his assessment of the Bhagavatays position on women, drawing on the gopis in particular. Eric Huberman (1998: 175) offers a similar interpretation, comparing the gopls to typically male renouncers:

By inverting the script, and having women leave their home instead of men, the Bhagavata glorifies 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 counterbalance to a confining social order. Such claims are not new, of course. In a much earlier study of Vaisnava bhakti in the Bhagavata Purana, Thomas Hopkins (1961: 12 n. 4) argued that the text challenges varnasramadharma 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 Vaisnava groups to adopt "the restrictions of the orthodox vamasrama-dharma [in order to find] 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 Glta and the Bhagavata Parana were conservative from their inceptions, as their brahmana authors were intent on preserving the dominant ideology of varnasramadharma, 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 specifically by means of its rasas, or moods of devotion, including dasya, santa, sakhya, vatsalya, and srngara. "Of these, dasya, 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 srngara [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 (gopls) 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 gopi narrative in the Bhagavata Purana that puranic bhakti is a remarkably conservative ideology, far from socially revolutionary, and that interpretations such as Bryant, Huberman, and Hopkins are misguided. Although the gopls are explicitly praised as the most blessed of devotees in the Bhagavata, their lofty spiritual attainments occur only within the larger context of conventional strldharma, from which the gopls are never liberated (except perhaps temporarily), even though they are supposedly liberated from samsara by means of passionate bhakti. A comparison of the narratives in the Harivamsa and the Bhagavata Purana, moreover, clearly reveals that bhakti in the Bhagavata is, in fact, about domination and subordination, and that the gopls are women disempowered, glorified precisely as Krsna's slaves, as their perfect viraha-bhakti effectively collaborates with patriarchy.

THE MOONLIT TRYST

Because the gopi story sometimes changes dramatically from one telling to another, and because specific changes can betray concerns particular to each text, this study compares two early Sanskrit versions of the core narrative: when the gopls meet their lover for rati in the forest. First appearing in the Harivamsa in only twenty-one verses, the story later comprises one hundred and seventy-three verses in the Bhagavata Purana. (1) The Bhagavata elaborates the gopi story well beyond the rasallla, moreover, adding over two hundred verses in several chapters that glorify the gopls and their passionate love for Krsna. (2) Without a doubt the Bhagavata's version has been the most influential throughout history, while the Harivamsa's remains relatively unknown. (3) This is perhaps surprising, given the outwardly subversive message embodied by the Bhagavata's gopis, married women who recklessly abandon their husbands and children and dharma, and rush desirously to the forest for an erotic, adulterous encounter with Krsna. At first glance, the Harivamsa's playful adolescent rendezvous seems innocuous by comparison. But I will argue to the contrary that the Harivamsa's telling is, in fact, the more threatening to the social order, and that changes later wrought to the narrative by puranic redactors represent masterful attempts to contain the threat and control the moral of the story.

More specifically, what I will demonstrate is that the extremely brief and ambiguous episode as depicted in Harivamsa 63 celebrates a youthful mutuality between Krsna and unmarried young women and thus legitimates the gratification of adolescent desires without any mention of dharma or its transgression and without any explicit soteriological subtext. The Bhagavata's lengthy narrative, by sharp contrast, excludes unmarried girls altogether and instead tells a tale of only married gopis, all of whom apparently attain salvation eventually, precisely through viraha-bhakti. The Bhagavata articulates an explicit soteriology of viraha, 'separation', in fact, so that Krsna's temporary disappearance and final departure effectively enable the gopis' salvation precisely by inflaming their passion and thus causing their continuous contemplation of a distant, physically unattainable Krsna. The Harivamsa's mutuality is thereby eliminated, as Krsna's being precisely unavailable inspires viraha-bhakti, exemplified in the Bhagavata by the gopis' intense longing and overwhelming suffering. Such viraha is necessitated not only by Krsna's inevitably going to Mathura--or by Krsna's being God and the gopis being human, thus rendering true union existentially impossible, as Fried-helm Hardy has argued in his influential Viraha-Bhakti. (4) Rather, viraha in the Bhagavata is above all necessitated by the gopis' being married to other men and explicitly obligated by strldharma to remain with their families in order to serve their husbands and children, despite their spoken desire to forsake everything for Krsna. Never mentioned in Harivamsa 63, dharma therefore becomes central to the Bhagavata's narrative, as even Krsna instructs the gopis on their duties as wives and mothers, just before he indulges their uncontrollable kama. Lest his motives for such Ilia be misunderstood, the Bhagavata emphatically states that Krsna is the supreme yogi, both aptakama and atmardma, desireless and delighting in himself, hence unmoved by the beautiful gopis, who otherwise attract and delight him in the Harivamsa. The Harivamsa s rather ambiguous tale celebrating mutual sensual pleasures has thus been superseded by a moralizing story about Krsna's divine mercy, gracefully showered 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 Harivamsa has therefore been carefully erased, as the Bhagavata transforms the Harivamsa's youthful unmarried girls into dutiful married sail and thereby unambiguously instructs the gopis, and the audience, about good girls' proper social and spiritual behavior.

HARIVAMSA 63

The brief narrative in Harivamsa 63 describing Krsna's amorous encounter with the gopis immediately follows the Govardhana episode (Hv 59-62), in which Indra recognizes Krsna's divinity and publicly consecrates him as Govinda, the lord of cows (62.37-44). Chapter 63 therefore opens with a short conversation between Krsna and the elder cowherds of...