Roberto Calasso - Ka

The gopīs were good-looking cow girls with thin, nervous legs, gypsylike, as violent in play as in their feelings. While they were tending their cows, the oranges, violets, blues, yellows, others, greens, and reds of the clothes they wrapped so carefully around their bodies would stand out against grass and sky. Walking along the road, balancing jars of butter on their heads, they were as conspicuous as colored ribbons fluttering in the breeze. Sometimes, if they had been playing with Kṛṣṇa and the other herdboys, rolling around on the muddy ground, they would be grimy with dust, bristling, tousled. But for long periods they wandered around alone. Then they would get together in a circle, whisper, conspire. There was one thing their minds came endlessly back to: how to explain Kṛṣṇa’s managing to steal some gopīs ’ sugared butter every single night without ever getting caught? They told each other how they would tie him up with a long scarf of red silk. They thought of all the insults they would make up to heap on him. They knew no school but the meadows, woods, and canebrakes. They knew no music but that which issued from Muralī, Kṛṣṇa’s flute. They were jealous of it, because Muralï is a feminine creature, and she would abandon herself to Kṛṣṇa’s mouth before their eyes. They never yearned for another life. When they walked in single file toward Mathurā, there was only one excitement they were hoping for: the game of the butter tax. Kṛṣṇa and the other boys might sneak out of the bushes. Wearing crude masks, they would claim to be the king’s guards and demand that butter duty be paid. The gopī s would resist. But already Kṛṣṇa and the other boys would be grabbing the pitchers and mussing up their clothes. Then they ran off with the loot, brash and cocky as bandits.

Closer to Fénelon than to the Vedas, untempted by any articulated form of knowledge, the gopīs would only ever know an alternation of the presence that melts, the privation that paralyzes. All possibilities between, the things that make up ordinary life, were of no interest to them. Precisely, painstakingly, but like so many sleepwalkers, they got on with their daily duties, milked the cows, looked after the children, drew water, fed the fire. Agreeable, obliging, but absent. Across their bright, empty eyes slid a shadow, the only time you might have suspected the inklings of a thought was when they sat down to put on their makeup. Then they conversed with the mirror as though the two images of their face were two flimsy fabrics that clung to the air between, flittingly haunted by Kṛṣṇa’s phantom.

Rasa , “juice,” “sap,” also means “emotion,” “taste,” “flavor.” Kṛṣṇa is the determined thief of a barely curdled liquid because he himself is liquid. Kṛṣṇa is forever stealing from himself. It is the emotion that steals the heart. Kṛṣṇa is he who opens the liquid path toward the bazaar of love. Going there is as dangerous as diving into waters from which one may never emerge.

When the first full moon of autumn approaches and the jasmine is in bloom, the shrill, soft sound of the flute penetrates the rooms. It is Kṛṣṇa calling. Whatever they are doing, the gopīs are roused. One gets up from the half-empty pail where she was milking a cow. One gets up from the flickering twigs where she was lighting the fire. One gets up from the bed where her husband was about to embrace her. One gets up from the toys she was playing with on the floor. One knocks over the bottles she was using to perfume herself. They are little girls, adolescents, wives who suddenly and furtively set off toward the forest. All you would hear then was a tinkling of bangles and ankle bracelets through the dark. Slipping out from the trees, each believing she was alone, they found Kṛṣṇa in a moonlit clearing. He looked at them, as they stood still, painting from haste, smiled and said: “Women of good fortune, what can I do for you? The night is full of frightening creatures. Sons, husbands, and parents are waiting for you in the village. I know you have come here for me. This is happiness. But you mustn’t let people stay up worrying on your account. Celebrate my name in silence, from afar.” Then one of the gopīs spoke up on behalf of all the others: “Nothing we have left behind is as urgent and important to us as adoring the soles of your feet. No one is closer to us than you are. Why is it that learned men can find refuge in you, and we cannot? We grovel in the dust of your footsteps. Place your hand on our breasts and our heads.” Kṛṣṇa smiled again and began to walk, playing Muralī, the flute. From behind a curtain of leaves came the sound of the Yamunā flowing by. One by one, in order, the gopīs came up to Kṛṣṇa and, shaking breasts damp with sweat and sandalwood oil, brushed against his blue chest. Whenever Kṛṣṇa laid his mouth on a new hole of his musical rod, his lips wet a different part of the gopīs ’ bodies. In the milky light you could just see the pink marks his nails left. Dancing ever so slowly, the circle of the gopīs closed around Kṛṣṇa as he went on playing Muralī. Each felt seized, abandoned, seized again, as if by a wave. Then all at once each noticed that her eyes had met those of the gopīs on the opposite side of the circle, while the center was suddenly empty. Yet again, Kṛṣṇa had disappeared. Then they scattered. Some mimed Kṛṣṇa’s deeds, like actresses. One was Pūtanā, the evil wet nurse who tried to poison Kṛṣṇa with her milk; another gripped her breast, sucking it violently as Kṛṣṇa once had. Another copied the slight sway of Kṛṣṇa’s gait. Another put her foot on a companion’s head and said: “I am here to punish the wicked.” But others were quiet and stared at the ground. They were trying to find footprints. Not just Kṛṣṇa’s but the light step of another gopī , Rādhā, the favorite. Doubtless Kṛṣṇa had left them to hide away alone with her. There were those who to their dismay could remember seeing Kṛṣṇa lie down like a riverbed between the columns of Rādhā’s legs and speak words that made them blush: “Adorn my head with the sublime bud of your feet.” The gopīs ’ eyes glittered with anger as they hunted. Another clearing opened up, and in the middle, arms clutched around her knees, hair loose, shut up in herself like a bundle of colored rags, they found Rādhā. When she raised her face, it was furrowed with tears. Kṛṣṇa had just left her.

The rāsalīlā , “the dance game,” the circular dance that is echoed in every other dance, couldn’t get started. Each of the gopīs wanted to be nearest to Kṛṣṇa. They were all trying to get close enough to color his skin with the saffron paste smeared on their breasts. That way they would have managed, even if only for a few seconds, to have left a trace of themselves on him. A cluster of shawls, bodices, and slender, glistening chests closed him in on every side. Then in order to get the dance going, Kṛṣṇa decided to multiply himself. He resorted to his knowledge of mirrors and reflection. In the circle, between each gopī and the next, another Kṛṣṇa appeared, holding them by the hand and looking alternately at one, then the other, as though following the steps of the dance, though each gopī was convinced that he was there for her alone. The yellow cloth wrapped around his loins was always the same, but the color of the skin varied, from dark blue to hyacinth. These were the many Kṛṣṇa, while the one Kṛṣṇa remained in the center of the circle, where the gopīs could see nothing at all.

Is the love of Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā, or of Kṛṣṇa and the gopīs for that matter, svakīyā (legitimate, conjugal) or parakīyā (illegitimate, adulterous)? It’s a theological question which cleaves the centuries like a flaming sword and over which scholars have argued vehemently and rancorously. In 1717 they hastened in their scores to the court of Nawāb Ja‘far Khān to confute the positions of their enemies. They came from all over Bengal and Orissa, but likewise from Vārāṇasī and Vikrampur. They debated the matter for six months, to the point of total exhaustion. Pale and haggard, they argued over the greater or lesser intensity of Kṛṣṇa’s erotic games with Rādhā, and their celestial consequences: if the līlā that briefly occurs at Vṛndāvana is no more than a feeble replica of the one perennially performed in the celestial Vṛndāvana, does that then mean that adulterous love is sovereign in the sky as on earth and offers itself as a model even to the gods? And must what is a model for the gods by that very token be one for men too?