Radha and Krishna: divine love in poetry, mysticism and painting

In medieval India human love became the highest language for speaking of the love between the soul and God. At the centre of this tradition stand Krishna, the dark-skinned cowherd god who plays the flute, and Radha, the young cowherd girl who loves him above all things. Their story, sung by poets, mystics and painters, is one of the most famous love stories in the religious literature of the world.

The cowherd girls of Vrindavan

Krishna's youth among the herdsmen of Vraja, the region around Mathura and Vrindavan, is told above all in the tenth book of the Bhagavata Purana, a Sanskrit text that according to many scholars reached its present form between the ninth and tenth centuries. Here the young god enchants with the sound of his flute the gopis, the cowherd girls of the village, who leave their homes to join him in the forest on autumn nights.

The most famous moment is the rasa lila, the circle dance in which Krishna multiplies himself to dance beside each of the gopis. In the Bhagavata Purana one cowherd girl is described as the favourite, with whom the god goes off for a while, but her name is not spoken. Later tradition would identify her with Radha, who was to become the undisputed heroine of devotional poetry.

Jayadeva's Gita Govinda

The text that made Radha immortal is the Gita Govinda, the Song of the Cowherd, composed in Sanskrit in the twelfth century by the poet Jayadeva, linked by tradition to the court of King Lakshmana Sena of Bengal. The poem, divided into twelve cantos, tells of the lovers' separation, Radha's jealousy, the messages carried by a confidante and finally the reconciliation in the forest.

The work combines narrative passages and songs meant to be performed to melodies and rhythms indicated in the manuscripts. From the Middle Ages the Gita Govinda was sung in the temple of Jagannath at Puri, in Orissa, and became part of the repertoire of the classical Odissi dance. Its explicit sensuality was not felt as a contradiction: the union of the lovers was read as an image of the union of the soul with the divine.

Mystics, painters and festivals

In the sixteenth century the Bengali mystic Chaitanya, who lived from 1486 to 1534, made Radha's love for Krishna the model of perfect devotion. For his followers Radha is not merely a lover but the very power of the god, his energy of bliss. From the movement he inspired arose the school known as Gaudiya, which had in Vrindavan one of its main centres.

Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries the painters of the courts of Rajasthan and of the Himalayan foothills, in the so-called Pahari schools such as those of Basohli and Kangra, illustrated the Gita Govinda and the stories of Krishna in series of miniatures of extraordinary refinement. Even today at Barsana, the village tradition regards as Radha's birthplace, a lively Holi festival is celebrated in memory of the two lovers' games.

The story of Radha and Krishna shows how a culture can use the language of human love, with its waiting, its jealousy and its joy, to express the highest religious experience. This is why, in Indian devotion, their names are almost always spoken together, as if they formed a single word.