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iii
Acknowledgments
This project began unexpectedly several years ago when I first laid eyes on a
Brajbhasha poem of eight lines (Appendix A). There is no other way to say it: the
poem captured my heart. And an idea was born. Much like the subject of this
dissertation, this idea evolved over time in a new direction when I learned about
husband, introduced me first to Bill Croft’s theory. I do not yet know whether Croft
will recognize his theory of language change in my adaptation, but I hope he will
still appreciate a good story. Krishna’s story is captivating, but my efforts to tell it
anew would not have succeeded without the help of the following individuals and
Brakke, Gerald Larson, and Richard Nance, for their unfailing support,
benefitted from the advice of Shandip Saha, Rupert Snell, Pratapaditya Pal, Jan
grateful to Mr. and Mrs. Kapoor, Dr. and Mrs. Seitz, Dr. and Mrs. Sidhu, and the
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA, for kindly permitting me to include a few
iv
I also wish to thank Indiana University’s College of Arts and Sciences and
the University Graduate School for granting me the Greenberg Albee Fellowship
and COAS Dissertation Year Research Fellowship for fall 2005 and spring 2006.
Grant in the summer of 2000. This was the cherry on top of the cake that was the
years of teaching assistantships, travel grants, and the limitless help at Indiana
faith in my ability to finish this project. I have no words to express the depth of my
v
Richa Pauranik Clements
and scholarly authorities, by Christian missionaries, and by the Hindu intelligentsia of the
day are given unique significance. In order to test the validity of the notion that the
of one god, Krishna, in religious, poetic, and visual texts of ancient and medieval India.
Borrowing a new theoretical framework from the philosophy of science and linguistics, it
analyzes the conceptual evolution of Krishna captured in these texts. It presents strong
evidence suggesting that religious change in Hinduism has consistently been driven by
the activities of bilingual practitioners, that the contours of change conform to dominant
conceptual categories prevailing at any given time across different communities, that the
others due to cognitive and social factors, and, finally, that these processes of change
and ‘reform’ unfold along similar paths regardless of the time period.
_______________________________
_______________________________
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vi
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements iv
Abstract vi
Explanatory notes x
1. Introduction 1
1.3.1 Replicator 37
1.3.3 Selection 48
vii
2. The evolution of Krishna of the Mahābhārata and the Bhagavad Gītā 72
2.4.3 Society and religion in eastern India in the late Vedic period 105
3.2 Society and religion in the first millennium CE North and South India 152
3.2.2 Language & literature, court & temple, politics & devotion 159
3.3 Krishna / Vishnu and Māyōṉ / Tirumāl before theBhāgavata Purāṇa 188
viii
4. Enduring images of Krishna in love and war 230
Appendix A 270
Appendix B 271
Appendix C 272
Abbreviations 273
References 274
ix
Explanatory notes
modified in the Linguistic Society of America style (thus, no space after the colon
2. Unless stated otherwise, italicized words within direct quotations have original
3. Titles of classical texts are italicized by some authors and not by others. The
variation of the practice within direct quotation reflects the original author’s
4. When citing an author’s single work over many paragraphs, I give the work’s
date at the beginning of each paragraph followed by only page numbers within
that paragraph.
6. I use the standard diacritics for Sanskrit words, and follow the practice of
7. All translations from Sanskrit, Brajbhasha, and Hindi are mine, unless
otherwise stated.
x
The religious concepts we observe are relatively successful ones selected
among many other variants. Anthropologists explain the origins of many
cultural phenomena, including religion, not by going from the One to the
Many but by going from the Very Many to the Many Fewer, the many
variants that our minds constantly produce and the many fewer variants
that can be actually transmitted to other people and become stable in a
human group. To explain religion we must explain how human minds,
constantly faced with lots of potential “religious stuff,” constantly reduce it
to much less stuff.
1
1. Introduction
Indian Hindu identity — to be a British construction and others who argue that it
“grow’d” over centuries of rivalry with Islam prior to the coming of the British
(Lorenzen 1999), and further evolved during the colonial period with the active
I build upon but depart from the above studies, and situate the contact-induced
2
practitioners of a religion belong to multiple communities within society. My
internal and external mechanisms for change, there is also continuity and
the representation of Hinduism by the Hindus) to the Other. I also argue for
1 Cf. Pennington (2005:170), who finds merit in the constructionist proposition that “colonial
modernity decisively altered the character and evolutionary course of Hindu religion,” even
though elsewhere he points out that “the historical question of continuity vs. rupture in the
evolution of Hindu thought is quite complex” (11).
2 Rescher (1977:133) contrasts ‘natural’ selection process in biological evolution and ‘rational’
choices allow their (re)presenters to make claims about the worth of their own
beliefs and practices; these choices have certain prestige value. When a
operates as a function of the cognitive optimum effect so that straightforward associations may
take the place of more unintelligible or unidentifiable religious forms.” Thus, selectivity functions
at both ends of a communication process. As Boyer (2001:42) points out, people’s minds are
disposed to arrange conceptual material a certain ways rather than others.
4 The cognitive structure in a practitioner’s mind, which contains his belief system, shapes his
production and understanding of religious forms. Exposure to the concepts more frequently
repeated over others in discourse would impact the formation of individual’s belief system or
cognitive structure. The more frequent a concept appears in discourse, the more recognizable it
is and the easier it is to process cognitively. Clements (2009:3-4) notes the crucial role of
frequency in the formation of structure with an acknowledgment that
frequency would not be as important as it is if the human mind did not function as it does.
Among myriad other complex things, the human mind functions as a highly sophisticated
pattern recognizer. Assuming that, in dealing with linguistic and other input, our minds
work to create processing short cuts, these can be regarded in language learning as
pattern generalizations over linguistic elements, extracted out of the input received by
speakers in discourse. If the nature of input changes, so too may the frequency of use of
a given item and, in turn, the corresponding patterns.
4
For instance, when representing Hinduism to the Other, the choice
would make communication possible. The choice may also depend upon the
aspect of Hinduism. The more frequent such discursive situations occur and the
more frequent this choice is made, the more likely it would be for Hinduism to be
discursive contexts.
5
1. Religion is fundamentally a social interactional phenomenon: a religion’s
discourse situations. 5
religious change.
ideas of god, devotion, goals of life, the human condition, ethical principles of
right and wrong, and so on. These concepts are articulated in communicative
of selection.
7
Krishna is expressed in the form of stories, painted images, and dramatic
poetic, and pictorial texts of north-west India, and explain the changes in his story
language change and David Hull’s (1988) general theory of selection which
subsumes both biological and conceptual evolution. 7 The issues I explore are of
discourse environment.
two modalities of religious practice and relating to the world have coexisted in
Hinduism since Vedic times, though discursive emphasis on one over the other
from a heroic warrior god to a brahmanical god (c. 300 BCE–300 CE) to a
paradigmatic lover (c. 800-1000 CE), to a loving god (c. 1500-1700 CE), to a
6 Cf. Dawkins (1989 [1976]:192-193): “Consider the idea of God. . . . How does it replicate itself?
By the spoken and written word, aided by great music and great art.”
7 Croft is a professor of linguistics, and Hull a historian and philosopher of science, especially
1995) — in order to account for certain continuities and changes in the history of
mores were reflected not only in his own religious traditions but also in the
Scholars of Hinduism have long framed their queries into its history in
theism vs. atheism, eroticism vs. asceticism, which are all abstract categories.
removed from its historical contexts, and not as a dynamic phenomenon evolving
8 ‘Krishna is ‘secondary’ only in relation to the primacy of the other Vaishnava god, Rama, in
certain contexts. Cf. the Brockingtons’ (2006:xi, 363-364) view of the changing conception of
Rama in different times and different milieux with different values such that Rama went from
being a martial hero to a moral hero, then a regal but still human figure, then an avatāra
(‘descent’, earthly manifestation) of the god Vishnu, and finally a God in his own right.
9 See, for instance, Doniger O’Flaherty’s (1973), Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of
Śiva. Though she continues to organize some of her scholarship in terms of dualities, like
sexuality and renunciation, violence and tolerance, etc., (2009:9, 11), she now situates these
tensions in their historical circumstances and not simply mythology.
Structuralist binaries came into religious studies from structuralist linguistics via
anthropology. Croft (2000:26) views the structuralist notion of language as a system of
contrasting signs as “the embodiment of essentialist thinking.” Instead of seeing language or
religion as constituted of abstract entities, they should be seen as made up of real, empirical
entities — linguistic utterances, or religious forms, such as scriptures, stories of gods, painted
images — actually produced by speakers or practitioners in discourse.
9
Modern, post-colonial scholars of Hindu traditions perceive, describe, and
often project the prominence of one trait over another, as did earlier colonial and
Orientalist scholars — say, their valuing of reason over emotion and knowledge
over devotion as reflected in the Orientalist criticism of Krishna bhakti sects and
their practices — but fail to articulate their own historical impulse behind their
many British Orientalist scholars to value the former of the two sets of categories,
Haberman maintains that the distinguishing feature of Hindu religious life is that it always
seems to operate between two irreconcilable opposites only to arrive at a third possibility, which
seems an inconceivable paradox. This negotiation between any pair of opposites imparts a
dynamic quality to Hinduism. For example, Haberman (1994b:26-29) describes how the “dualistic
distinctions” between worldly happiness and unhappiness are resolved in “pointless ‘enjoyment’”
(ānanda) which transcends them both; and how the tension between asceticism and sexual
desire is mediated in the desirous yearning for god who forever remains elusive.
10 See, for instance, Halbfass (1988) for an exposition of the relationship between Indology and
the historical currents in Europe in the Age of Enlightenment and, following that, of Romanticism.
Haberman (1999, 1994a, 1993) provides three such hard-hitting critiques of Orientalists and their
impact on Hindus, especially those engaging in bhakti (loving devotion) toward Krishna.
11 King (1999:95) considers a certain inevitability of Orientalism and reminds us of Gadamer’s
argument that “understanding something implicitly involves the prejudices of one’s own ‘historical
situatedness’; one simply cannot avoid having an agenda or a perspective upon things by virtue
of one’s cultural and historical particularity.”
Cf. the views of Edwards (2000), a historian of Islamic art and the curator of the exhibition
‘Noble Dreams Wicked Pleasures: Orientalism in America, 1870-1930’. (All references in this
paragraph are from Edwards 2000.) The history of American Orientalism pertaining to the
Mediterranean region and this period as detailed by Edwards has resonances for American
representations of India and its cultures, peoples, and religions. According to her (12), American
10
the earlier Orientalist scholarship, the current scholarship often replicates it — in
monochromatic. 12 It is worth taking note of the point made by Bose and Jalal
Orientalism at the beginning of this period was “resonant with but quite different from” that of its
imperialist counterparts in Europe, such as French, because of America’s own status as a former
colony, its “sober” Protestant legacy, and its recently fought civil war over institutionalized slavery.
However, she (viii) writes, “What was true in 1870 had evolved somewhat by 1890 and changed
radically by 1925. Furthermore, I became convinced that Orientalism is best considered a
symptom, a representation, or a therapeutic response to changing circumstances rather than a
static intellectual stance or a monolithic phenomenon.” Within these six decades, American
Orientalism evolved through three stages, “subject to domestic needs and social pressures” (16).
In 1870s and 80s Americans viewed paintings of picturesque Orient, which served a retrospective
purpose, as a wistful look back at simpler life before the rapid industrialization and urbanization of
the late Victorian period. American Orientalism at this time served as “a foil for ‘progress’” (27-
28). Then came the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the Orient was brought home at the
Midway Plaisance in the form of belly dancers, Bedouins, camels, and donkeys. “This was the
point where the erotic and the exotic merged” (37). The belly dance or the ‘hoochy-coochy’, for
instance, “opened up certain areas of the public arena for American women and literalized the
fantasies of American men…. Thus the Orient was irrevocably and explicitly sexualized in the
public eye” (39-40). Thereafter, in the early decades of the twentieth century, American society
went from being “agrarian, republican, and religious” to “secular and market-driven,” in which
Victorian standards of propriety gave way to focus on the body, and “the quest for pleasure,
security, and material well-being” (40). The Orient was “reimagined around sex” and offered to
the public through mass-produced goods, lithograph prints, and movies (17). The counter-
cultural movement in the 1960s, though ostensibly anti-materialistic and attracted to eastern
religions, took another step in the same direction. American scholars of Hinduism influenced by
their historical moment, just as their British predecessors were during the colonial times, were
either attracted to or repelled by certain aspects of Hinduism which spoke to their psychological-
cognitive drives.
12 Cf. Fox in ‘East of Said’ (1992:144-45), who criticizes Inden for attacking all South Asian
scholarship as Orientalist and for exhibiting in his anti-Orientalism the very same Orientalist
stereotyping. Fox’s positing of ‘affirmative Orientalism’ by certain western apologists is in turn
critiqued by King (1999:231, n.51), who points out that “this may reflect a lack of appreciation on
Fox’s part of the extent to which even ‘affirmative Orientalism’ contributes to European hegemony
over the East.”
11
orient as the realm of the irrational, the unscientific and the inferior, these
historical anthropologists and anthropological historians ended up
committing two grave fallacies. First, they failed to notice the dissonance
and polyvalence within colonial discourse as it developed over time, and
they imbued it with an ahistorical, monolithic quality. Second, they drew a
sharp dichotomy based on a championing of otherness that posed the
innocence of local culture against the cunning of universal reason. This
also led to a privileging of particular kinds of textualized and oral sources
of indigenous knowledge and the abandonment towards them of a critical
stance which seemed reserved only for the colonial archives, even as the
latter continued to be used as the main repository of the former.
traditions.
bhakti, writes:
nineteenth-century Britain, while the celebration of all that was censored earlier
12
70s, whose effects live on in contemporary scholarship on Hinduism. 13 By virtue
I am a part of one such lineage, and to that extent the subject matter of
of conceptual change, and by extending the range of inquiry from scriptural texts
to art forms like poems and paintings. In so doing, I show the emergence of
moment in history, and thus in search for ways to explain religious change
internal changes in the absence of a non-Hindu Other are similar to those that
13See, for example, Kripal’s analysis in Roads of excess, palaces of wisdom: Eroticism and
reflexivity in the study of mysticism (2001) of the antinomian roots of Agehanand Bharti’s writings
on Indo-Tibetan Tantric traditions. Kripal sees a similar countercultural impulse and a focus on
sexuality in scholarship on mainstream Hinduism as well (personal communication March 2006).
14 Haberman (personal communication March 2006) uses the word ‘paramparā’ to describe the
transmission of knowledge and interest in specific areas of Hindu Studies (for example, Gaudiya
Vaishnavism, Pushti Marga, Shrivaishnavism, etc.) from one generation of scholars to the next.
Cf. Hull’s (1988:410) view that genes or concepts form lineages as do organisms. Both biological
and conceptual lineages are historical entities.
13
cause changes during interactions with Others is a step toward a new theoretical
historical environment, and that colonialism may be seen as simply one new
The following is a brief look at two representative volumes which explicitly deal
with the topic of religious change in order to illustrate how change is theorized (or
not) in the field of religious studies, and how its understanding can be improved
The most recent work on the subject of religious change in south Asia is
Asia. It has thirteen contributions which variously investigate the point at which
14
innovations occur in different traditions, the agents involved in transmission and
change, and the audiences and patrons of these processes (Pauwels 2009a:1).
that
The volume is impressive in its scope in terms of the range of texts, practices,
framework that might explain the broader significance of the various cases of
change or their relationship to each other when they may be viewed as different
volume exemplify this point: the first is by Monika Horstmann, in whose honor it is
Indian of Al-Ghazālī’s Persian Sufi text Kimiyā-i Sa‘ādat (The Elixir of Happiness)
(15) in which, for instance, the original Sufi text’s contention that “the process of
15
realization of the essential properties of the heart represents a holy war (jihād)”
was rendered as “the firm and systematic pursuit of the puruṣārthas [goals of
life]” (18). Also, in Horstmann’s (17) words, “God’s beauty, which figures so
translator].”
audience with an Indic cultural background in such a way as “to avoid confusing
16
concludes that “it is obvious that Nāgarīdās, the Hindu Braj poet, outdoes the
(32) and brings his concept of love closer to Perso-Arab view than does Raskhān
(35). In contrast with their respective existential situations, Nāgarīdās, who was
neophyte, who needs to assert the orthodoxy of his faith,” which for Raskhān was
the “faith of love” toward Krishna (35). She suggests (36) that Raskhān’s
views of love that he must have been familiar with before his conversion. She
also notes that Nāgarīdās remained a Hindu though belonging to two worlds by
virtue of being a vassal of the Mughals, but she goes no further with the possible
implications of his familiarity with two different religious and political communities.
may have been inspired by the poetry popular in the court circles at the time (23-
24, 36), but who constituted his own target audience? Was his poetry ever
performed at the Mughal court, “which he frequently attended” (36)? Was the
purpose of his other Urdu poetry in praise of Krishna in order to bring Krishna to
17
his Muslim audiences, or in order to bring Urdu’s Perso-Arabic register to his
fellow Hindu devotees of Krishna? Pauwels does not raise this question. She
classical Urdu poetry. More interesting question would be, given his dual
citizenship in a Hindu kingdom and the Mughal court, whether he saw any
Perso-Arab concept of love? Did the transmission of the Urdu register and
Perso-Arab concept of love into Braj traditions by Nāgarīdās have any immediate
Pauwels (2009a:2) believes that her close comparison of the two texts
significance must be assessed relative to its propagation, and Pauwels does not
account for the motivations behind Nāgarīdās’s selection of Urdu register or the
consequences of his choice for the Braj religious traditions and Urdu poetry. Her
15Pauwels (2009b:34) admits that “it has not yet been studied how the new Rekhtā [i.e. classical
Urdu] poetry made its influence felt in the Krishna devotional Braj poetry of the time.” Her present
contribution does not shed any light on the matter either.
18
thus do not contribute toward building a general analytical framework that would
religious change (Williams, Cox, and Jaffee 1992), also an edited volume,
Addressing the issue of innovation’s motivations, they critique the overuse of its
argument that it is only one among three major factors, which are “social
environment, the influence of the prior history of development within the history of
16 Williams et al (1992) say that for them ‘change’ is too broad a term that includes “an infinite
host of minute alterations or fluctuations in religious perceptions that are inevitable not only from
generation to generation, but from individual to individual, or even from instant to instant within
the same individual” (1). They do not make a distinction between a process of inherent change
and an evolutionary process involving replication of an entity with its attendant consequences of
altered replication and differential replication, that is, of innovation and propagation. My
theoretical model, following Croft (2000), offers this perspective.
19
balance, the explanation they most favor for religious innovation is that it is
religious tradition:
nature of religious forms, the agency of innovators, and the role of social
20
(2000:5) evolutionary theory of language change, my theoretical model
Another question raised by Williams, Cox, and Jaffee (1992:353), which they
‘tradition’ such that some event or other constitutes an ‘innovation’ within it?” I
propose that these questions can be empirically answered with the help of a
customs of thought and action handed down orally or in texts (i.e. entextualized
linguistic ‘convention’. 17 Both religion and language are dynamic systems, whose
17Cf. OED ‘Tradition’ (definition 5b): “A long established and generally accepted custom or
method of procedure, having almost the force of a law.” Just as, collectively, linguistic
conventions constitute the common ground of knowledge of a speech community, religious
customs/norms form the common ground of knowledge — a religious tradition — of a religious
community.
21
Regardless of how a convention originated, in language a convention is “a
Of course, common ground is found in the minds of speakers, albeit shared with
variable, but in a different way: conventions vary in the degree to which they are
The variants have differing social values associated with them which make
their use, depending on one’s communicative goals, either more or less desirable
to the speaker. The more frequently a variant is selected for its social value in
language use, the more entrenched it becomes in speakers’ minds, the higher
22
violated, a variant religious form is born, which may or may not be selected with
among community members. That is, a tradition aids better and quicker
meaning, and a convention thus emerges. For example, the Hindu religious
religious meaning is arbitrary. The world would not end if people went counter
clock-wise; and yet every practitioner follows the custom, because it is the
expected behavior.
There are other practices, though, whose meaning and form were
the Hindu tradition of Pushti Marga, the ritual worship of Krishna is referred to as
23
‘sevā’(service), while the non-Pushti Marga devotees of Krishna continue to
perform ‘pūjā’ (worship). The members of the Pushti Marga have assigned a
convention, which then forms part of the tradition or common ground or common
knowledge of the community members. It sets them apart from other Krishna
unselfish love for and service of the divine being, while pūjā is worship
done for the doer’s benefit. There are some physical differences between
organized pūjā and organized sevā — for example, worshippers doing
pūjā usually offer their offering and perform their worship as isolated
individuals while, on the other hand, sevakas perform sevā as a group, as
a satsaṅg, and do not offer their gifts directly before the divine svarūpa —
but the real difference is in the attitude within the heart of the
worshipper. 18
Hindu society, the Pushtimargis created a variant. This is innovation, and it can
language change.
theorized in the two volumes directly related to the subject, leave certain
18 For descriptions of what constitutes pūjā for Hindus in general, see Michaels (2004:241-245)
and Eck (1996:47-50). Both authors’ accounts of formal pūjā offer some textual evidence
supporting the Pushtimargi interpretation; however, in terms of actual practice, having witnessed
for years pūjā performed by family members and others in India and abroad, I can say that many
Hindus perform sevā in the Pushtimargi sense even while referring to it as pūjā.
24
more comprehensive framework for addressing them is evolutionary theory of
below a brief overview of the earlier uses of evolutionary biology and linguistic
Linguists have long studied language change and have developed theoretical
models that are applicable to the investigation of religious change. The use of
linguistic models in the study of religion is not new. The influence of structural
linguistic and cultural creolization and language acquisition have also been used
However, as Leopold and Jensen (2005:4) point out, “innovations are not
necessarily the result of inter-cultural contact, but they may arise independently
cultural backgrounds.”
19 For instance, in The white Buddhist, Prothero (1996) uses the theory of creolization in
linguistics to examine Henry Steel Olcott’s hybrid Buddhism and also Olcott’s religious/cultural
interactions with Sri Lankan Buddhists in 1800s.
25
Leaving aside the problematic category of syncretism, theories of
change as laid out by Croft (2000) offers such a model. The evolutionary model
explaining the origins or function of religion in human history. The most notable
(2002), who put forward a case for viewing religion as a force that enables
people to form a moral community and function as an adaptive unit. The moral
for religion (a search for the so-called ‘God gene’; Cf. Wright 2009:460), or
evolutionary origins of religious thought (Boyer 2001), or the evolution of the idea
26
of God (Wright 2009), or the adaptation and survival of religious communities
(Wilson 2002). 20 In other words, this dissertation does not deal with the origin of
religion, its existence, or its persistence. Instead, its focus is the evolution of a
specific religious concept in the history of a one religion and the mechanisms
pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate
themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which,
20 Wright’s (2009:4, 448) book is, in his own words, a “materialist” account of the evolution of the
idea of God in the history of religion in general, which began with the biological evolution of
human brain, to technological evolution, to expanding social organization, to the expansion of
moral imagination. He cites the Canadian newspaper National Post’s (April 14, 2003) headline
“Search continues for ‘God gene’” to dispute the very notion of religion as a singular genetic
adaptation. In this context, Wright (540 n.2) also critiques the group-selectionist explanation of
religious evolution in Wilson’s (2002) Darwin’s cathedral.
21 Cf. Hull (1988:282), who argues that instead of seeing cultural evolution (or meme-based
in the broad sense, is how memes can replicate. But just as not all genes that
his descriptions above. 22 It is only much later (1982) he concedes that evolution
‘vehicle’, like an organism) is not the same as the one that replicates (a gene).
carried over from his earlier ambiguity regarding genes. On Dawkins’ denial that
he had ever mistaken a replicator for a vehicle, his critics disagree. “As they see
things, Dawkins was confused on all issues from start to finish. His switching
sums up (414).
22 See Croft (2000:3-5). The replication process results in change at two levels: In the first, the
structure of the replicate is different from the structure of the original. This is altered replication,
and it produces variants of a structure. In the second, there is shift in the frequency of variants
relative to others. This is differential replication. In the context of language, Croft refers to the two
processes of change also as (1) innovation or actuation – the creation of new forms in the
language, and (2) propagation or diffusion (or, loss) of those forms. He argues that both are
distinct but jointly necessary components of the processes of language change.
28
There are other problematic points in Dawkins’ theory of cultural evolution.
Keep in mind that differential selection between variants is at the heart of the
no alleles or variants like genes do which compete with their opposite for a place
Dawkins makes no connection between the above point — that any meme that
grabs the attention of human brain and gains traction in it wins in competition
cognitive optimum effect (see § 1.1 fn.3 above). Any meme that can be
29
cognitively processed quickest (with least effort) will win the competition, that is,
between two variants of a single meme. For him, either two memes are different,
or, if linked in any way, they are one (1989:196); for example,
But what is convenient need not necessarily be correct. I disagree with Dawkins’
makes the argument that in socio-cultural evolution, ideas sometimes have one,
sometimes two, sometimes more sources; secondly, “ideas do not always exist in
just two forms, just two conceptual ‘alleles’. Numerous alternatives exist.” Hull
(444) explicates:
30
‘alleles’ can be said to coexist in the same conceptual pool. Quite
obviously, more than two conceptual variants can be said to coexist in the
same conceptual pool, but nothing about biological evolution implies
otherwise. 23
Just as genes are organized into genomes, ideas or concepts are organized into
‘theories’; different versions of the same theory are ‘different’ because at one or
competition (Hull 445). Thus, Hull both builds on Dawkins’ ideas and corrects
a conceptual variable.
the other(s); 24 and that the mechanisms that lead to the selection of these
23 Croft (2000:28-29) calls the linguistic equivalents to the genes and memes ‘linguemes’ and
their alleles ‘variants’, that is, “alternative structures used for a particular structural element, such
as alternative phonetic realizations of a phoneme,” etc. The locus for a set of variants is the
‘variable’, and only one variant can occur in its (the variable’s) structural position in an utterance.
“The total set of linguemes in a population of utterances (the language), and hence in the
grammars of the speakers taken as a whole, is the ‘lingueme pool’.”
I propose the equivalents for religion to be: religious concepts (= gene, meme, lingueme),
conceptual variants (= alleles), conceptual variable (= the locus for the conceptual variants), and
conceptual pool (= gene pool, lingueme pool), which contains the total set of religious concepts in
a population of religious forms.
24 Context is important in deciding whether variants are in competition with each other for the
same conceptual locus or whether they are occupying different spots at different conceptual loci.
31
or religion-external contact-induced pressure. Consider the conceptual variants
Chart 1: Conceptual variants of ‘Ultimate Reality’ in the conceptual pool of Vaishnava traditions 25
Theory of Reality
Becoming Being
atheism theism
monotheism polytheism
Rama Krishna
Baby Warrior Moral Ideal avatāra God God avatāra Ideal Amoral Warrior Baby
Rama hero hero king of Vishnu of Vishnu lover hero hero Krishna
the material world of becoming or as an unchanging eternal being, then the two
concepts ‘Becoming’ and ‘Being’ are in competition for the one definitional spot
‘Becoming’ and ‘Being’ as two components that together make up the Reality, the
25This is a simplified outline for purposes of exposition; there are other variants not included.
26The dualistic nature of reality is comprehensively explored by the Sāṃkhya school, and its
practical implications by the Yoga school of classical Indian philosophy. For a thorough account
32
unchanging eternal being, if ‘Being’ is defined either in theistic terms or in
atheistic material terms, then the concepts ‘God’ and ‘Matter’ are in competition
Reality can only be monotheistic. The view in Hinduism is more complex: Hindus
most often represent their religion in terms of both ‘monotheism’ and ‘polytheism’
in that they express the idea that all their gods are but manifestations of one
Also, when Hindus represent Rama as ‘an ideal king’ and Krishna as ‘an
ideal lover’, these conceptualizations of Rama and Krishna are not in competition
because they emphasize two different characteristics of the two gods. But if
Hindus are representing an ideal Hindu warrior god, they have two competing
may choose to emphasize his warrior aspect over his lover aspect. In such
of the principal texts of both schools and their history, see Larson (1998 [1969]), and Larson and
Bhattacharya (1987, 2008). Though the two schools are fundamentally non-theistic in the
absence of a god who orders and participates in his creation, their dualist thought impacted the
development of theistic Hinduism, as seen, for instance, in the traditions of goddess worship.
27 See Larson (1995:112, 158) for more on Indic traditions’ “polymorphic” spirituality and theology.
33
discourse situations the conceptual variants ‘warrior Krishna’ and ‘lover Krishna’
change (Croft 2000); together they provide the basic framework for my analysis
of religious change. I first describe Hull’s generalized theory below and then
Hull explains the evolution of concepts and organisms by first offering a general
parts (1988:408-409):
replications.”
34
2. “Interactor – an entity that interacts as a cohesive whole with its environment in
4. “Lineage – an entity that persists indefinitely through time either in the same or
412; also Croft 2000:22-24): First, a replicator (for example, a gene) must have
identical i.e. normal, (2) altered, or (3) differential. The mechanism of identical
replications result in new replicators with a different structure from the original.
interact with their environment in a way that causes replication of some variants
(and their structures) to become more frequent relative to others. That is,
35
replicators), and the extinction of others. Successive replications create entities
interaction occur at all levels of the organizational hierarchy, “from genes and
and species.” However, genes are paradigm replicators and organisms are
paradigm interactors.
“all the entities that function in selection processes as well as those that result
conceptual change in the history of science. The relevant theses for our
The scientists’ brains are vehicles of transmission, and the scientists are
consists of the part of the natural world they study, their fellow scientists, and the
rest of the society. “Their interaction with their environment causes the replication
specific disciplines of science, linguistics, and, important for us, religious studies.
1.3.1 Replicator
30Hull (1988:437): “The similarity between genetic and memetic replication is enhanced by the
apparent appropriateness of talking about the transmission of ‘information’ in both.” And “Just as
a series of analogies presupposes literal usage, information must be information about
something. . . . The messages incorporated in the genetic material are about something — the
phenotypes of the various structures that they help produce” (439).
37
In conceptual evolution, it is the concept that replicates. In the field of science,
the goals of science, proper ways to go about realizing these goals, problems
on” (Hull 1988:434). For Hull (443), the “size” of the conceptual replicator is
functioning. From the point of view of replication alone, units are not needed.”
According to him (443), from the perspective of socio-cultural selection, all units
are of the same size even though, from other perspectives, they appear to be of
Hull’s (445) words, “In addition to conceptual variants being of greater or lesser
generality, they are also bound together to varying degrees into conceptual
perform the same function.” As discussed earlier, just as genes are organized
into more inclusive functional systems i.e. genomes, ideas are organized into
31 Hull (1988:442) points out: “Just as selection models can be applied in biological contexts only
if the complexities of developmental genetics are bypassed, they can be applied in the context of
sociocultural evolution only if comparable complexities are ignored.”
38
Similarly, linguistic replicators (‘linguemes’) possess structure and exist in
word to a syntactic structure, and also their corresponding semantic values (Croft
2000:28). Just as genes are found in DNA, and DNA is replicated in sexual
episode < story, etc.), and produced in a range of forms. For instance, I examine
in smaller units to facilitate analysis so that the locus of change can be identified.
The following chart (modified from Givón 1984:243) shows one such conceptual
nesting system:
Chart 2: Hierarchic structure of narrative discourse – a concept’s nesting system in the story form.
39
Innovation of the concept could take place at any level in the structure. The
selection process determines the size of the replictor and, thereby, the locus of
the cowherd girls (gopīs) in Vraj is contained in its 10th Book. To the extent that
BhP’s narrative departs from the received tradition of Krishna’s legend found in
the Mahābhārata, the Harivaṃśa, and the Viṣṇu Purāṇa, BhP’s Book 10 is the
in BhP’s Book 10 — specifically, chapters 3-9 detailing his childhood sports; and
20-23 and 28-35 detailing his adolescent erotic deeds, out of its total of ninety
The stories of Kṛṣṇa in Vraj have been, and, arguably remain one of the
two most influential textual sources of religious narrative in the Hindu
religious landscape, along with the stories of Rāma from the Epic
Rāmāyaṇa, if we are to judge on the basis of the themes that have
surfaced in Hindu drama, poetry, dance, painting, song, literature,
sculpture, iconography and temple worship over the last millennium and
more. The popularity of the Kṛṣṇa of Vraj has certainly eclipsed the
popularity of the Kṛṣṇa of the massive 100,000-verse Mahābhārata Epic,
despite its Bhagavad Gītā. Hawley (1979:202-3), for example, found that
of 800 panels depicting Kṛṣṇa to have survived from the period prior to
1500 CE, only three refer with any clarity to the Bhagvad Gītā:
We are given to understand that for two millennia the Gītā has been
India’s most influential scripture, yet . . . it is remarkable how
indifferent sculptors were to this part of Krishna’s adult life . . .
instead sculptors focus on the events of his youth. The Krishna we
see is the cowherdboy who was so fond of butter as a child, [and
40
who] became such an attractive lover as a youth . . . sculpture may
at least in some respects be a more accurate index of what
people’s religious commitments were all along. 32
Hawley here is discounting the possibility that, as part of the Mahābhārata’s Book
6 (23-40), the Gītā’s text may be the most replicated artifact from the
Mahābhārata, and that the Gītā’s relation to the Mahābhārata is like the BhP’s
Book 10 is to the BhP as a whole. These are issues of differential replication and
selection, but more than that, these are issues of selection through interaction
Philosophy, theology, and art are neither produced nor transmitted in a vacuum,
and they each have, as it were, a distinct language code. Religious communities
though they may prefer to use one code rather than another in a given context.
In any case, in medieval India the BhP’s conceptualization of ‘Krishna the ideal
period of just a few centuries. In sum, then, the BhP’s Book 10 embodies the
32 Cf. Eder’s (2003:183) comment on the tendency of scholars like Ursula King to argue for the
Gītā’s limited cultural historical significance in pre-modern times on the basis of a lack of
iconographic evidence. Eder cautions: “By equating an absence of visual artifacts with a lack of
importance, however, King ignores the numerous Gītā translations in vernacular languages and
the commentarial traditions. Without a more thorough consideration of the vernacular language
and regional religious traditions, dismissal of the Gītā’s importance during the pre-British period is
premature. To the contrary, the absence of the Gītā as a subject of iconographic representations
from the pre-British period may reflect the text’s elevated, śruti-like status.”
41
genome (the narrative of ‘Gopi-Krishna’) in which the gene (i.e. the concept of
are the replicators: concepts regarding god, devotion, goals of life, the human
process, one at the cognitive level and the other at the social level, religious
concepts, too, replicate at the two-levels: internally in the mind of the practitioner
(in this case, the author/s of the BhP) and externally in discourse (the text of
practitioner’s mind that contains their knowledge about their religion, and is the
42
structure that is used in producing and comprehending religious forms” (modified
system. It consists of their mental knowledge and the processing capability which
philosophy (in the Gītā, for instance), rituals, narrative representations (stories in
prose or verse; BhP’s Book 10, for example), visual representations (painted
these forms are human brains, spoken word, books, paintings, films, and so on.
Hull (1988:434) states that “In biological evolution, variable chunks of the genetic
material are the primary replicators. As such, they pass on the information they
43
more inclusive interactors.” However, in science, conceptual replicators can
interact indirectly, that is, only through interactors like scientists. Hull (436)
transmitted largely intact from physical vehicle to physical vehicle.” Scientists are
environment).
giving rise to ideas via physical vehicles, some of which also function as
interacting with the environment, which consists of the phenomena they study or
conceptualize (the natural world), their fellow interactors (scientists), and the rest
of the society.
44
community, the social context of the speech event, and the goals of the speech
but they may also produce it in other forms, such as a ritual, a taped speech, a
written story, a painted image, a dramatic enactment — all of which are vehicles
texts, sculptures, paintings, films, etc. and the vehicle of interaction is the
consisting of knowledge of their religion plus the processing ability for practicing
practice, broadly defined, and the goals of the practice event itself — the goals of
the process itself. But first I sum up all the other related concepts in the
religion in the following table (modified from Croft 2000:38 and Clements 2009:9):
45
Table 1: The generalized theory of selection and its instantiations in biology, language, religion
46
Having thus identified the replicators and the vehicle/interactors and all the other
religion, I now turn to explicating the process itself. By now it should be clear that
presenting Croft’s model in the next section, which I use to analyze my materials
in the following chapters, I extract from the table above the equivalencies I see in
Language Religion
Speech community Religious community
Speaker Practitioner
Communication Religious practice (broadly defined; see fn. 5)
To talk To practice (communicate, represent)
Utterance Discourse form (broadly defined; see §1.1 prop.3)
Convention Custom/norm
Common Ground Tradition
Competence/Grammar Individual belief system
following chapters.
47
1.3.3 Selection
As stated above (§ 1.2), the process of evolution or change is the result of two
have causal mechanisms. The two processes of change are assessed relative to
selection thus:
48
3. Phatic function: solidarity/conformity with social norms; related to the
establishment or acceptance of a convention (i.e. selection or propagation).
language use is intentional in that “Speakers set out to achieve certain social
33 The other two phenomena are: (1) unintended consequences of unintentional communicative
performance-related mechanisms like speech errors, or articulatory and auditory failures in sound
production and comprehension (Croft 76); equivalent cases in religion would be errors in copying
in the production of religious texts, or errors in the performance of a religious ritual, etc. And (2)
intended consequences of intentional by design, therefore teleological, action to bring about
systemic changes in a language or a religious tradition. In this context, Croft (2000:64) makes two
important points for language change which are also directly applicable to religious change:
“First, a theory of language change need not appeal to teleological mechanisms in order to
account for directionality in language change. Second, language change, even directional
language change, is a probabilistic process, not a deterministic one.” Religious practitioners can
give directionality to conceptual change through rational selection — for “conceptual evolution is
purposive” (Hull 1988:457) — yet they cannot determine its success beforehand.
49
presented in subsequent chapters; therefore in this context I substitute the more
For Keller (1994:105), the intended goals of language use are ultimately
most, if not all, of the referential, poetic, and phatic functions together, that is, “we
maxims (or mechanisms) contradict each other, and in trying to achieve two of
these, we compromise.
communicative action means “to try to transform a relatively less desirable state
into a relatively more desirable one.” Therefore, our communicative efforts are
2. Communicate in such a way that you are most likely to reach the goals that
3. Communicate in such a way that you are socially successful, at the lowest
possible cost.
50
The hypermaxim governs the following maxim offered by Keller (98) that may be
conventions.”
For Keller (1994:86), then, “The human being has a goal to be socially
in the explanation of social success.” Croft (2000:88) maintains that the social
goal of language can be had only through a joint communicative activity involving
It is only through joint action that the function of language is carried out.
conventions are in turn defined with respect to speech communities. The answer
51
which speakers / practitioners are ‘multilingual’ in different languages, religions,
(2000:90) disputes the validity of “the naïve view of a speech community” derived
among themselves, and are all native speakers of that language.” Instead, Croft
(91) offers a correction: the naïve view does not account for multilingual
societies where same people may speak two or more distinct varieties, called
domains. Examples of social domains are family, friends, work, school, religion,
etc.; there are sub-domains, such as different groups of friends with whom one
engages in different activities, different types of work one may do, each with a
of society speak a variety of codes (languages and/or speech styles). That is,
52
they are multilingual, choosing to speak in one or another code according to the
different social domains they operate in.” 34 The second implication is that “a code
referential meaning, i.e. meaning in the usual sense of the word.” And the third
implication is that “no code has the complete range of communicative power;
there are things one cannot talk about in one or the other languages.”
Croft (2000:92) draws the conclusion that “The profound fact is: every
repertoire on part of the religious practitioner(s): Hindus either ‘do bhakti’ or they
‘do philosophy’ and never the two codes shall co-exist in a single practitioner! It
code Y at the other, there is a vast middle ground consisting of practitioners who
34Being monolingual members of multilingual speech communities would indicate their non
participation in the social domain(s) which require use of the language(s), or rather codes, they
do not speak. Hawley’s (1979) understanding of the presence or absence of certain religious
motifs in Indian sculpture is limited because it assumes a ‘monolingual’ religious community or, at
least, a community that prefers one code in all domains.
53
are conversant in multiple codes in varying degrees who choose some code over
in the theory of language change.” And, I would argue, this is also the case in the
variants. They use and thus introduce these variants into their own primary
social network and vice versa. Such individuals are ‘introducers’ (Croft 179);
they transfer a linguistic feature or a religious concept from one social network to
the other. In the next chapter, for example, a group of ‘bilingual’ or ‘multilingual’
Brahmins in Vedic times emerges as ‘introducers’. They are the most likely
authors of the Mahābhārata (MBh) and the Bhagavad Gītā (BhG), and in these
texts they introduced new elements from various codes and produced a new
54
variant of god called Krishna. The new religious or linguistic variants over time
purpose is to communicate meaning for some social goal. But, even though
and innovative language use. For instance, in the MBh innovative ideas are
presented in the Vedic code of sacrifice, and even the new representation of
Krishna is built of various older Vedic Aryan and non-Aryan elements. There is
is but one act in the constantly evolving process of meaning interpretation. Since
35Defined as “a system of conventions for evoking a meaning in the hearer’s mind that is in some
sense equivalent to the meaning in the speaker’s mind”, (Croft 2000:243).
55
leading to the evolution of the mapping between form and function/meaning in
language and religion. This is one among various causes for change in language
and religion summed up in the following table (modified from Croft 2000:79):
36 I have modified Croft’s table by including only those mechanisms that I find useful in analyzing
the materials to be examined. In this table, I have economy in square brackets because its status
as an intentional or unintentional mechanism is ambiguous; also form-function reanalysis is
unintentional in language use but a new meaning interpretation may be an intentional act in
religion. Interference and intraference, discussed in the next section, are in square brackets
because (i) they also can be intentional mechanisms, and (ii) they are absent in Croft’s table. He
discussed the two processes in a different context but I believe it is right to include them here.
Also, in teleological mechanisms for altered replication, Croft has language-specific processes
that I do not find useful; therefore, I introduce just two possible (and non-linguistic) candidates in
that category to account for either religious authorities’ deliberate efforts to preserve their system,
or for any religious figure’s deliberate attempts at introducing religious change in the form of a
new interpretation of a tradition or the founding of a new sect. The initiation of these changes
may be considered either teleological or merely intentional, but since their acceptance and
establishment in society cannot be determined beforehand, I, like Croft, prefer to explain them in
terms of intentional, not teleological, action.
An additional note: Keeping in mind that knowledge of conventions in an individual
speaker’s mind is his competence or grammar and that competence is a psychological
phenomenon, Croft (2000:72) calls ‘entrenchment’ the psychological habit of competence or
routinization of behavior — the more entrenched a behavior, the less control an individual has in
using it. And to that extent, it functions as nonintentional mechanism of normal replication. The
level of entrenchment (i.e. grammatical knowledge) itself varies relative to exposure to language
use; and this makes its variation a mechanism for selection.
56
1.3.3.2 Mechanisms for altered replication / innovation
leading to some being ‘selected’ and perpetuated, that is, they become
one can say that the selection process — of differential replication and differential
based on their social values, such as overt or covert prestige, the relative social
‘activation value’ refers to the increasing ease of access one develops the more
the more entrenched it becomes in that person’s cognitive structure. Thus, the
57
social aspect both presupposes and enforces the cognitive aspect in the
processes of selection. One notices all these processes of change in the early
changed after his representation in the MBh as the highest Brahmanic god. I
language change that are also pertinent for religious change, one can say that (i)
change does not mean an abrupt shift from variant A to variant B; there is an
individual practitioners use more than one variant of a variable, and (iii) the
interlocutors, etc. (modified from Croft 2000:54). Thus, in this theory, the causal
A study of ‘innovative’ Hindu religious texts like the BhG or the BhP
that not only connects them to older traditions but also in a way that makes them
58
6. Communicate in such a way that you are not recognizable as a member of
the group.
economy for altered replication, there are some nonintentional mechanisms that
then based on these produce new forms in new contexts. In so doing, they bring
sacrifice to ascetic practice and then to devotional practice. In religion, the form-
59
an existing form are offered in a philosophical commentary, or when a concept is
given new meaning, like sacrifice defined in terms of selfless action in the BhG,
description to religion, one can see these changes originate with practitioners
who are ‘bilingual’ in different languages, belief systems, and cultures 37 and who
may have minimal bilingualism, but have some knowledge of both languages and
are able to create connections between the structures and meanings of the two
practitioner’s mind, the counterpart forms in the two languages or religions are
37 Within the context of religion, throughout I use the terms ‘bilingual’ or ‘multilingual’ broadly to
signify the knowledge and capacity of religious practitioners in two or more languages, religions,
and cultures.
60
I explore in the next chapter, if a religious practitioner is ‘bilingual’ in early
Hinduism and Buddhism, Krishna and the Buddha could be two variants of the
It is this identification that ‘creates’ the variants, that is, gives the potential
for replication of one variant in the other system as a novel variant; therefore,
involves religious rituals: Vedic sacrifice (yajña) and devotional worship (pūjā)
61
identification. Intentionally or unintentionally, it is the favored innovation process
to achieve convergence for social-religious goals, from the Vedic times to the
modern times. Michaels calls the idea of ‘Identificatory Habitus’ his working
correspondences (bandhu) between the sacrificial rite and the cosmos, between
the performance of the sacrificial ritual and the maintenance of the cosmos,
mechanisms are those that favor the adoption of a particular form among
These social mechanisms presuppose the cognitive. While we find the operation
62
linguistic explanations of these mechanisms which pay equal attention to the
linguistic situation arising when two or more groups speaking different languages
Wilson 1971 in Croft 2000:234). The locus of convergence is the structure of the
demonstrated in two studies, one by Morales (1995) and the other by Gumperz
The first study is on ‘The loss of the Spanish impersonal particle se among
63
Impersonal Pronoun Use Among Bilingual Puerto Ricans
(Morales 1995)
English they we ----- one you (2singular)
X
(1995), the use of the impersonal se was disfavored significantly, whereas this
was not the case in the Spanish of monolingual Puerto Ricans. The reason for
English and Spanish. The conclusion is that it is cognitively simpler, and more
construction, and the replacement of it with other forms from within the system
itself.
social. The results of this and the second study to be discussed now support
very many to many fewer. The study on ‘Convergence and creolization: A case
The inhabitants are multilingual in the Dravidian languages Kannada and Telugu,
and the Indo-Aryan languages Marathi and Urdu. The inhabitants maintain a
separateness” of home life and the language associated with it results in the
assume the co-existence of different codes relating to, for example, devotional
religion and philosophy in a religious practitioner’s mind, and their use in different
domains of the practitioner’s life, much like the separate use of different codes or
languages. 38
with the community of the interlocutor. This can take the form of shifting to the
variants associated with the higher social group. It is related to the notion of
prestige in a class-based model where the variants used by the more powerful
38 In the context of Hinduism, Doniger (2009:44) sees this phenomenon in terms of “eclectic
the inversion of the preceding dynamic (Croft 2000:74, 181-182). The existence
of covert prestige indicates that the factor of social identification rather than
situation.
‘low’ Hindu caste, or tribal or other group, changes its customs, ritual, ideology,
and way of life in the direction of a high, and frequently, ‘twice-born’ caste.” To
this I would add that, along with the upward mobility of a group of people, their
at the top of the caste/class hierarchy, Pocock (in Srinivas 1971:7-8) mentions a
Kshatriya or Kingly model which “is represented by the dominant political power
in any area, and is mediated by the local dominant non-Brahmin caste or castes
of that area.” The adherents of the two models vied for supremacy in early Indian
66
history and can also be seen in the rivalry between Vedic Brahmanism and
preaching a new philosophy which was utilized by their followers for asserting the
1971:31). The epic MBh took shape during this period, and I see in it an effort to
promote the brahmanical model and thereby regain the prestige and power of
Vedic Brahmanism and the Brahmins which they had lost under pro-Buddhist
attuned’ Kshatriya god to rival the Buddha. I develop this argument in the next
chapter.
meaning. The regular use of a particular conceptual variant not only conveys a
(Croft 2000:183).
67
Representations of gods in the early history of Vaishnavism, which I
examine in the next chapter, present a virtual case study of movement toward a
multiple forms with the same meaning and same social (community) value, so it
seems in religion as well. Croft (2000:177-178) describes the three ways people
synonymy: (1) by division of meaning such that alternate forms are used for
distinct functions i.e. meanings; (2) by associating distinct forms with different
communities by the speakers; and (3) by speakers selecting one form over the
(Yādavas and Vṛṣṇis) and the fusing of their two tribal/clan heroes (Krishna and
community of worshippers. I find that the selection of Krishna from among all the
68
other gods for representation as the highest brahmanical god in the BhG is an
example of the third. The Vedic Brahmins’ selection of Krishna from among
Hinduism. 39
39 Replication of one form instead of another can occur as a result of exposure to use (measured
by token frequency) rather than as an act of identity or accommodation; that is, differential
replication can occur independent of any intentional goal of the speaker. This effect would then
be an instance of language or religious change as a phenomenon of the third kind.
69
this theoretical framework to analyze the history of the conceptualizations of
are members of multiple speech communities and social domains and have
multiple communities and domains, and are conversant with/in various codes.
religious change. That is, the difference is one of degree, not one of kind.
70
representation is made to a fellow-member of a religious community or to a
person from another community — the interaction will combine both normative
properties of a tradition.
71
2. The evolution of Krishna of the Mahābhārata and the Bhagavad Gītā
Krishna is to mention it in a paragraph or two at most and then begin with his
story in the MBh (Cf. Bryant 2007). The focus is mostly on a detailed analysis of
the MBh and other texts produced subsequently, with a brief consideration of the
texts’ social-historical environment by a few scholars (Cf. Malinar 2007). Yet, the
MBh onward.
back in order to analyze the processes that led to his representation in the MBh,
40 ‘Recombination’ is the key word here, for Hull (1988:414) reminds us that “Although genuinely
novel ideas crop up once in a while — quite rarely — most progress in science occurs by means
of recombination.” Similarly, Croft (2000:104) says, “Most innovative use of language is also
partly conventional, because it is based on the recombination of conventional [meaning]
coordination devices (words and constructions).” I suggest that this phenomenon of innovation
through recombination is also present in religious practices.
72
because, of course, representation presupposes earlier ‘presentation(s)’. My
working assumption is that the elements that make up MBh’s Krishna evolved in
a certain direction, and that this directionality was due to agency of a group of
Brahmins may also be the most likely candidate for the MBh’s authorship. Since
This involves studying social-political environment in the Vedic times and its
impact on the evolution of these elements. I find the processes and mechanisms
of change in the Vedic times to be no different from such processes in the later
includes its earliest history. Taking a step in that direction, I consider the more
during Vedic times: all factors that shaped early representations of Krishna and
his constitutive elements in Vedic texts and his later representation in the MBh.
medieval, early-modern, and colonial India have been treated in some detail in
earlier scholarship, I spend relatively more time on the history of the Vedic times,
73
which has been largely ignored in Krishna studies. Thus, I divide the history of
The first phase culminated in the epic Mahābhārata (MBh) and its most iconic
victory and to a just kingship. The most replicated portion of the MBh has been
the Bhagavad Gītā (BhG), 41 and, by extension, the most replicated image of
Krishna from the entire epic is that of Krishna as Arjuna’s charioteer. According
to Rao (1986; in Bryant 2003:x), out of nine major iconographical forms under
which Krishna has been worshipped in India, seven relate to his childhood in
Vraj; one is of Krishna with his consort Rukmiṇī, and the other is of Krishna as
representation of Kṛṣṇa in the role of teacher and speaker of the Bhagavad Gītā.
(Kṛṣṇa had agreed to drive Arjuna’s chariot and delivered the Bhagavad Gītā to
41 As Bryant (2007:4) points out, the BhG is “the best known and most often translated Hindu
text.” While it may be fashionable to argue that the British colonialists and European Orientalists
brought it to prominence, Bryant reminds us that “anyone over the last twelve centuries or so
interested in founding a new line of Vedanta — the school of philosophical thought that has
emerged as the most influential and definitive of ‘Hinduism’ — was expected to write a
commentary on the Gita as one of the three main textual sources of scriptural authority.” The
other two canonical sources for Vedanta were the Upaniṣads and the Vedānta/Brahma-sūtra.
The tradition of commentary on these select texts had been active for at least five centuries
before Europeans discovered India in 1498 CE. (Cf. also chapter 1 fn.32 above.)
74
him on the Mahābhārata battlefield immediately prior to the war).” Thus, apart
from the Vraj Krishna of later texts, the most entrenched representation of MBh
identifying them with Vedic Vishnu and making them ‘Vaishnava’. In the MBh,
sensitive to the brahmanical order of society, unlike his the then competitors, the
Buddha and Mahavira. Thus, ‘brahmanic’ denotes all three meanings together.
Krishna’s early history began perhaps in pre-Vedic times and led up to the MBh,
representations). In the MBh, the BhG is the more precise locus of innovation.
Krishna’s early history culminated in the MBh, a text in which Vedic religion
transitions into Hinduism. In Hull’s (1988) terms, the MBh can be viewed as a
42 By ‘extra-Vedic’ I mean elements initially outside of but later incorporated into the Vedic culture.
75
new ‘vehicle’ of ideas of its Brahmin authors or ‘interactors’, who interacted with
their environment in a way that led them to re-work and re-present older
concepts innovatively in the MBh. Thus, within the MBh, especially its BhG, the
concept (tribal warrior hero). As later history shows, the new variant became
changes we find articulated in the MBh. Among the intentional mechanisms for
some people in two historical periods of state formations — the formation of the
Kuru state c. 1200-900 BCE, and the formation of the Maurayan empire c. 324-
certain religions prevailed: Vedic Brahmanism under the Kurus and Buddhism-
seers (ṛṣis) Kaṇva, Aṅgirasa, and Bhṛgu, gradually brought into the Vedic
76
identifying them closely with Vedic gods such as Mitra, Varuṇa, Indra, the
Chāndogya Upaniṣad, and the MBh eventually gave us the brāhmaṇya Krishna.
religious practitioners had cognitive and social reasons. Cognitively, the new
definitions of the divinities became entrenched because the forms of these Vedic
for another because of their increasingly identical form and function. 44 Social
were identified with the Vedic Vishnu, the factor in play was Vishnu’s prestige as
43 Henceforth, unless they are in a direct quotation employing diacritics, I use the Anglicized
spelling of the names of these deities. Also, with reference to class/caste designations, I use
their Anglicized spellings unless the designations with diacritics occur within direct quotations. In
this context, Brahman and Brahmin are interchangeable forms, of which I use the latter while
some authors use the former.
44 Cf. Hardy’s (1990:79) view that the concept of Bhagvān (God, Lord) as a “single, all-powerful,
eternal, personal and loving God . . . is an empty slot, to be filled by concrete characteristics
which then make up a specific Bhagavān-figure who serves as (the one and only) God to a given
group of people.” Depending on the devotees’ perspective, ‘Bhagvān’, then, can be seen as a
variable for which Vishnu, Narayana, Krishna, Rama, or the Buddha at one point or another
become the competing variants.
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The brahmanical authorities attempted to bring under their influence the
communities, the acts of identity brought benefits. At the social level, the extra-
Vedic communities and their gods became mainstream and were accepted as
part of the larger Vedic society. At the religious level, the new composite deity
reconciled the idea of a ‘human’ god on earth (like Krishna) with his status as a
the Vedic god Vishnu. Moreover, as represented in the MBh, Vishnu’s earthly
social-philosophical issues of the day brought to the fore by the rise of Buddhism
and Jainism. Thus, from the Vedic texts to the MBh, the representational trend
bent toward the conceptual categories of the politically more powerful group that
Maurayans) and toward the more prestigious variant of God (Vishnu, the
Buddha).
playful Vraj Krishna), and the cognitive and social motivations behind the
Studies that can illuminate the trend’s background during Vedic times leading up
to the MBh. 47 Only against this background can one appreciate the composite
The MBh is an epic that contains the story of a war that took place in the
47 In the following discussion, I use Witzel’s (1999b:2-3) definitions of languages, texts, and
periods involved. Languages involved are Vedic, Dravidian and Munda, belonging to three
different language families (respectively, Indo-European, Dravidian and Austro-Asiatic). “The
Vedas provide our most ancient sources for the Old Indo-Aryan variety (IA; OIA = Vedic Sanskrit)
of the Indo-Iranian branch (IIr. = Old Iranian, Nuristani and Old Indo-Aryan) of the Indo-European
language family (IE = Celtic, Germanic, Italic, Slavic, Greek, Hittite, Tocharian, etc.) that are
spoken in the subcontinent. However, these texts also contain the oldest available attestation for
non-Indo-European words in the subcontinent (Dravidian, Munda, etc.).” Indo-Iranians or Indo-
Aryans/Vedic Aryans were speakers of IIr. and IA/OIA — these are linguistic, not racial, terms.
The Vedas were orally composed (c. 1700–500 BCE) in parts of present-day Afghanistan,
northern Pakistan and northern India. The Ṛg Veda (RV) is a Bronze Age OIA text of Greater
Panjab (= “with the inclusion of many areas of Afghanistan from Sistan/Arachosia to
Kabul/Gandhara”), composed after the demise of the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) c. 1900 BCE.
Witzel recognizes three periods within the RV: the early (RV I, c. 1700-1500 BCE), the middle (RV
II, c. 1500-1350 BCE), and the late (RV III, c. 1350-1200 BCE) “on the basis and by the internal
criteria of textual arrangement, of the ‘royal’ lineages, and independently from these, those of the
poets (ṛṣis) who composed the hymns. About both groups of persons we know enough to be able
to establish pedigrees which sustain each other.”
In terms of substrate languages in the RV, in the later three Vedas (Atharva Veda [AV],
Yajur Veda [YV], Sāma Veda [SV]) and the epics, Witzel (1999b:5) sees the following trends: (1)
a Central Asian substrate in the oldest Ṛgvedic; (2) no Dravidian substrate in RV I period, but that
of an Austroasiatic (= Para-Munda) substrate plus a few hints of Language “X” and some others;
(2) the first influx of Dravidian words in the RV books of RV II and RV III periods; (3) in the post-
RV texts (i.e. AV, YV, etc.) and in “the educated Vedic speech of the Brahmins,” a continuing
influx of vocabulary from earlier substrates, plus the occurrence of Proto-Munda names in eastern
North India; and (4) a presence of other substrates, including Proto-Burushaski in the northwest,
Tibeto-Burmese in the Himalayas and in Kosala, Dravidian in Sindh, Gujarat and Central India.
79
philosophies that developed mostly in the region (lower Ganges valley) south-
east of that. 48 The MBh covers more than the distance between the two regions,
it also expands the horizon of religious developments from the Kuru state to the
Mauryan Empire, and the compilation of the Vedas in the former and the
composition of the MBh in the latter: “Like the Vedas, the Mahābhārata has
gathered textual representations of all the gods into a single compendious whole.
Unlike the primary Veda, the Mahābhārata made all of this available openly and
widely” (Fitzgerald 2004:73). I suggest that the authorial group that bridges this
distance originated in regions even further west than Kurukṣetra. They brought
the various threads of extra-Vedic mythologies and rituals together with the Vedic
48 See Thapar (2003:98-102) and Doniger (2009:261-262) on issues of the war’s dates — most
probably c. 950 BCE; Indian tradition’s 3012 BCE — and possible archaeological evidence. Witzel
(1995b:335-336, 1995c:1) argues that there was a Ṛgvedic archetype of the epic MBh in the
hymn of the ‘Ten Kings Battle’ (RV 7.18, 7.33), which took place further west on the river Paruṣṇī
(modern Ravī in Pakistan), near Mānuṣa, a locality west of Kurukṣetra, suggestive of the origins
of the Bharata in eastern Iran. In this battle the Bharata and the Yadu (Yakṣu, ‘sacrificer’) were
victorious allies, just as in the MBh.
49 To be clear, by ‘bilingual’ I mean ‘being conversant with/in two languages, cultures, and
religious belief systems’ as well as ‘being conversant with/in philosophical and devotional codes
of a religious language’. I gloss ‘multilingual’ similarly. See also Table 1 and fn.37 above.
80
1977, 1978) have argued that the MBh was redacted by a historical clan of
50 In terms of seeing the MBh as a thematically-integrated text that has religious and conceptual
unity, I find useful Biardeau’s opinion that the MBh as we have it today was composed by a family
group over a relatively short period of time, and Hiltebeitel’s view that it was produced by a team
of experts under the guidance of a principal author (in Sutton 2006:83). Referring to the
Bhārgava Brahmin Śaunaka in the MBh, Hiltebeitel (2001:173 n.148) argues that it is more fruitful
to think of the contributions to the MBh by his “school” of Vedic exegesies rather than his “clan”.
Hiltebeitel (2001:105ff.) has vigorously questioned Sukthankar-Goldman’s theses
regarding the MBh’s Bhārgava authorship, calling it “a pervasive myth about Mahābhārata
mythmaking” (2001:107). Hiltebeitel (2001:109-110) considers Śaunaka and other Bhārgavas as
simply epic characters, and says “there is nothing to suggest that the composing Brahmans were
Bhārgavas. Indeed, it is far more likely that they were not, or not just [them alone];” for instance,
there are more references in the epic to Āṅgiras Brahmins, like Bṛhaspati and his incarnation
Droṇa (Shende 1943 in Hiltebeitel 2001:107). But in citing this criticism, Hiltebeitel disregards the
close alliance between Āṅgiras Brahmins and the Bhārgava in Vedic literature.
Hiltebeitel’s (2001:110-112) rejection of Bhārgava authorship is mainly based on the evidence of
negative portrayal of Bhārgavas in the MBh, summed up by Sukthankar (1936) and Goldman
(1977), in which these Brahmins appear as irascible sages, domineering, arrogant, unbending
and revengeful; as degraded, military, violent, caste-mixing Brahmins, whose central concerns
included “death, violence, sorcery, confusion and violation of class roles (varṇāśramadharma),
intermarriage with other varṇas (varṇasaṃkara), and open hostility to the gods themselves”
(Goldman 1977:5). Hiltebeitel (2001:111) comments: “Convinced, however, that this mythology
of the Bhārgavas is mythology by the Bhārgavas, neither Sukthankar nor Goldman ever asks why
Bhārgavas would have portrayed themselves so unfavorably.” While arguing that the Bhārgavas
“are portrayed as vehicles for defining, and if necessary correcting, the status relations of
Brahmans,” Hiltebeitel (2001:111) does not entertain the possibility that the bad Bhārgavas may
be the Brahmin counterpart to the epic’s villainous Kshatriyas, the Kauravas. Indeed, Hiltebeitel
(2001:108 and n.54, 116) had noted that Minkowski’s (1991) and Sullivan’s (1990) analyses of
“the countless parallels” and “analogs” between the Bhārgava myth cycle and the Bharata story of
“caste mixture, degraded Brahmans, Brahmans as kings, black magic, curses, feuds, extreme
and uncontrolled violence.” Then why deny the possibility that the authorial group of Brahmins
may have been Bhārgavas who were defining what was wrong in their contemporary
Brahmanicial world through the portrayal of a group of “‘flawed’ Bhārgavas and Āṅgirasa
Brahmans” like Paraśurāma and Droṇa? (Hiltebeitel 2001:113). After all, the MBh’s authorial
group is partial toward other Bhārgavas and one in particular — Krishna — who is descended
from Bhārgava Śukra and his grandson Yadu through maternal descent. (Hiltebeitel 2001:112,
116 n.74). Cf. BhG 10.25 in which Krishna identifies himself with Bhṛgu among all the Vedic poet-
seers, and among the Vedas, with Sāma Veda, BhG 10.22. Krishna’s first unambiguous mention
is in the Sāma Veda’s Chāndogya Upaniṣad (3.17), as a disciple of a Ghora Āṅgirasa (an
Āṅgirasa-Bhārgava?). Sāmavedic strophic structure is the distinguishing feature of the Ṛg Veda’s
Kāṇva (identified with Āṅgirasa-Bhārgava) books. Indeed, Krishna’s conceptualization in the epic
incorporates some principal elements of Bhārgava mythology, such as Purusha, Narayana, and
the Nasatyas/Ashvins.
81
Jāmadagnya by other scholars, including Hiltebeitel, has led Fitzgerald (2004:58)
(2002:15) writes that the MBh “presents the ideology of brāhmaṇas of various
under the influence of non-Āryan and mystical ideas.” Hiltebeitel, too, writes of
Whether the authors of the MBh were Bhārgavas or other Brahmins, they
brought together Vedic and extra-Vedic, Aryan and non-Aryan ideas in the epic.
I suggest that these authors were bilingual and that bilingualism was perhaps a
tradition in their lineage going back to pre-Vedic times. 51 In such a case they
as Brahmins are supported by the following arguments. Noting the remnants of Dravidian (Brahui)
in Baluchistan, Witzel (1995a:107-108) writes of a very likely early contact in the north-west
between Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, and Munda-speakers such that “Vedic Sanskrit is already an
Indian language.” Kuiper (1991 in Witzel 1995a:108) concludes that, contrary to what is normally
thought, much longer period elapsed between the arrival of the Aryans in the region and the
composition of the oldest hymns of the Ṛg Veda (RV). Of the long period of acculturation, Witzel
(1995a:113) writes, “By the time they reached the Subcontinent, [the Indo-Aryans] were already
racially mixed: emerging from the lower Volga region and passing through Central Asia” where
they may have completely “Aryanized” a local population, for example, of the BMAC (Bactria-
Margiana Archeological Complex) area, in terms of language and culture. Witzel imagines a
complete acculturation of both groups before a part of this new people moved into the Panjab
assimilating (i.e. Aryanizing) the local population. This group of “’Aryans’ combined racial,
linguistic and cultural characteristics” (Kuiper 1991 in Witzel 1995a:114), and was “politically
dominant because of its new military technology and tactics,” especially the horse-drawn chariot.
82
would be people with weak ties to their communities, and would therefore be
shared, mixing them in the process. Some of their mixed traditions (mythologies
and rituals) may have had pre-Ṛgvedic roots, which they developed further in the
Brahmins is not far-fetched if we recall the case of Kupwar village in India where
spheres, between language used at home and in public and thereby ensuring
We may have a similar case here in that the Atharvans may have maintained
their extra-Vedic mythologies and practices within their community even while
‘Aryans’, therefore, also included those who imitated the Indo-Aryans and adopted their
Vedic culture to become completely ‘Aryanized’, such as the “Aryan” chieftains with “non-Indo-
Aryan” names like Bṛbu and Balbutha, “who is explicitly called a Dāsa” (Witzel 1995a:113). Cf.
Witzel’s (1999b:23-24) example of a Dravidian, Ailūṣa, a Ṛgvedic poet-priest, whose great-
grandson Tura Kāvaṣeya later developed the Agnicayana ritual in the Kuru realm: “This case
shows the inclusion of a Dravidian into the fold, and underlines the important role a new ‘convert’
to Ārya religion could play in its very development. . . . Further, he was not classified as Śūdra but
obviously as a Brahmin who had learned to compose RV hymns in the traditional poetic IA
language! All of this is indicative of a high degree of amalgamation and language acquisition at
this time, during the middle and late Ṛgveda period [c. 1500-1200 BCE].” Perhaps Atharva Veda
priests like Bhārgavas were also such ‘mixed’ Brahmins. Note Hiltebeitel’s (2001:107 n.53)
criticism of follow ups to the MBh’s Bhārgava authorship hypothesis that the Vedic poet-seer
Bhṛgu was a Dravidian, or that the Bhārgavas may have been responsible for the bhakti elements
in the epic, etc. I suggest that in light of Witzel’s scholarship on Vedic materials, the idea of
Bhārgava authorship of the MBh is at least plausible.
83
participating in broader Vedic religious life and contributing some extra-Vedic
elements to it. Once the Vedic canon was formalized, they were responsible for
preserving it. We must also consider the following description of the Vedic
We owe the transmission and preservation of the [Vedic] texts to the care
and discipline of particular religious, or better, priestly schools (or śākhās).
It should also be emphasized that both the composition and the
transmission of the texts were completely oral for the entire Vedic period
and some considerable time afterwards — hence the critical importance of
the schools in their preservation. From the beginning, the various schools
were favored by particular tribes, and later on by particular dynasties. 52
Pañcāla, and Kosala-Videha (out of about 35 Vedic tribes/clans). Apart from the
52 Jamison and Witzel 2003:66. Witzel (2003a, 1997, 1995a, 1995b) has suggested the historicity
of the Kurus, especially of the Kuru king Parīkṣit and his son Janmejaya, and of their role in the
formation of the Vedic canon and in the establishment of the first larger polity or state, c. 1200-
900 BCE.
53 Note that the RV’s books 2-7 are the work of seven Vedic poets and their clans or schools, out
of which these three become particularly prominent. I am using ‘Atharvan’ as a handle for all
three together since they are interconnected, possibly through real or ‘spiritual adoption’ among
the lineages (Cf. Witzel 1995b:316). As discussed later, Witzel, Parpola, Insler have noted their
complete identifications or close relations, enough to allow me to group them together. Not all
are exclusively connected to the AV, but their mythologies related to Krishna and his constituents
Purusha-Narayana, even when in non-AV texts, are somehow placed in relation to Atharvan
elements. For example, the first unambiguous mention of Krishna is in Chāndogya Upaniṣad of
the SV, but there he is a disciple of an Atharvan, Ghora Āṅgirasa. SV itself is almost entirely
made up of RV books 8 and 9, dominated by Kāṇva school (Witzel 1995b:338). Articulating all the
myriad connections among the three lineages is beyond the scope of this study but I mention a
few in the following discussion.
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Vedic sacrificial religion, 54 other important practices or religions were the non-IE
like Bhāgavatism. And of the various divinities, the following had a more
prominent role in Vaishnava history: Aryan gods (Mitra, Varuna, Indra, the
Rama).
inter-cultural identifications, the beginnings of which may lie in the region known
54 The Vedic religious practice consisted of singing the Vedic poems, chants, or other sacred
utterances, ritual fire sacrifices (with offerings of milk, honey, clarified butter, and animals, like
horse or cattle), and sharing the sacrificial meal with the community (viś) as well as the gods, like
Indra, Vishnu, etc. Jamison (in Flood 1996:40) and Thapar (in Doniger 2009:107) call it a
“portable religion” in that it had no fixed places of worship, images, or texts, and it could be
carried in the saddlebags and the heads of the nomadic practitioners. For an overview of Indo-
Aryans and their Vedic religion, see Larson (1995:57-65), Flood (1996:30-50), Michaels (2004:33-
36), Thapar (2003:104-136), Witzel (2003a), and Doniger (2009:85-198). It was a priestly religion
with a strong social dimension. Thapar (2003:126-132) discusses this in detail in the section
‘Sacrifice as Ritual and as a Form of Social Exchange’.
55 The first four Vedic gods are mentioned in the Hittite-Mitanni agreement of the middle of the
14th century BCE; “The Mitanni had been exposed to early Indo-Aryan (not: Indo-Iranian)
influences a few hundred years earlier, exerted by a branch of those tribes who entered the
Bactro-Margiana area around 2100 B.C. and who then proceeded to India” (Witzel 1995c:4 n.17).
Vishnu was a minor deity in the Vedic pantheon at that time.
56 The question-mark is deliberate as the meaning and etymology of these names is not clear.
Krishna of the Ābhīra tribe as described in the Harivaṃśa, the late supplement to the MBh. That
is another story that belongs with the next phase of Krishna’s history.
85
between the area, the above-mentioned group of bilingual Atharvan Brahmins,
the mythologies and practices associated with the divinities identified with
Before there were Vedic Aryans, there were early Proto-Indo-Iranian speakers
who moved southward from the Siberian steppes in southern Urals into the
BMAC sometime in the latter half of the third century BCE (Parpola 2005, 2002). 59
Parpola suggests an Aryan contribution to the rise of the BMAC from that point
on, and identifies this wave of early Proto-IIr. speakers as the Dāsas or Dasyus
58 In the following discussion, I provide evidence in support of my arguments primarily from the
scholarship of Parpola and Witzel, who have synthesized a great deal of archaeological and
linguistic data from various other scholars (including archaeologists, philologists, historians), and
are themselves variously cited by Flood (1996), Hiltebeitel (2001), Thapar (2003), Doniger (2009),
etc. For in-depth linguistic and archaeological data and data-analysis refer to Parpola, Witzel,
and the scholars whose work they analyze. I am employing their conclusions in building a
historical narrative of conceptualizations of Vaishanava divinities.
59 The area considered an early habitat of Proto-IIr. is the Andronovo cultural horizon’s Bronze
first took over the rule of the BMAC and spread to South Asia during the final
phase of the IVC (Indus Valley Civilization). “Their religion fused with the
60 Cf. Witzel’s (2003b:53-54, 2000:4-5) doubts regarding the theory of early Aryan presence at the
BMAC in terms of presence of horses and chariots. However, Parpola (2005:4-6) points to more
recent, archaeological finds in a grave in Tajikistan, like horse-bits and cheek pieces for chariot
horses along with a horse-topped bronze scepter, and pottery typical of the BMAC, especially c.
2034-1684 BCE. He also mentions some other evidence like depictions of horses on seals, etc.,
both at BMAC-related places and Syria and Anatolia with which the BMAC had trade relations at
the beginning of second millenium BCE).
61 Based on arguments of Lamberg-Karlovsky (2002:72ff.) and other scholars, Witzel (2003b:54-
55) suggests that non-IIr. speaking mountain people from the BMAC area, “as yet only marginally
influenced by IIr. languages and customs,” probably carried the BMAC materials into the northern
Indus (= Harappan) and southern Indus (= Mohenjo-daro) areas, c. 2250-1750 BCE. Furthermore,
“A similar move may have brought speakers of P[roto-]Dravid[ian] to Bolan and Sindh.” Witzel
(2003:54 n.200) speaks of “a remarkable overlap between BMAC and Indus shamanistic
concepts” as evident in certain IVC seals.
62 Parpola (2006) connects Dāsas to Vedic Vrātyas (‘People who have taken vows’), variously
described as wandering band of warrior ascetics by Doniger (2009:120) and “promiscuous, extra-
societal group of Veda students ‘on leave’”(Witzel 2003a:72, 88). Jaiswal (1981:168) cites
Manusmṛti’s (10.23) description of Sāttvata-Vṛṣṇi tribe of Krishna’s birth as the descendents of
Vaishya Vrātyas, because they engaged in food-production by cattle-raising, agriculture and
trade, and argues that it was only later when Krishna’s legends had been absorbed into the
Vedic Brahmanical religion that Krishna’s tribe was assigned a Kshatriya status.
In the context of Vrātya-Dāsa-Śākta associations, Parpola (2006:173) finds in their rites,
vrātyastomas, which included horse/human sacrifice, the construction of the fire altar
(agnicayana), and ritual copulation, “fossilized remnants of the archaic preclassical [Vedic] ritual.”
Later, due to social and economic changes, codification and formalization of Vedic ritual, the
violent and sexual elements were reduced to symbols. Parpola (2006:176) connects the Vrātyas
with goddesses Vāc, Durgā, and the Sumerian Nana(ya), “A lion-escorted martial goddess
imported from the Near East” depicted on the seals of the BMAC and IVC and still worshipped in
Afghanistan as ‘Bibi Nanni’. He also sees a close resemblance between the violent and sexual
practices of the Vrātyas and aspects of the later Hindu navarātri festivals of goddess Durgā, the
guardian of Dāsas’ fortresses (durga, pur). Parpola and Jaiswal, in developing their arguments
87
Witzel (2000:5-6) writes that “there was a mixture in the BMAC of many
Asian and the IIr. languages is evident not only in the borrowed vocabulary
relating to agriculture and village life, but also in certain prominent words and
their underlying concepts, like terms for priests (“atharwan”), rituals, and
deities. 64
For Witzel (2003b:56), the process of Aryanization in Iran and India was
shift took place, i.e. the peoples of BMAC and others, though in majority, adopted
the IIr., but not without leaving clear traces of their own languages as well as of
“customs, beliefs, rituals, religion, and material culture.” Perhaps this is where
regarding the history of early Vedic religion and origins of Vaishnavism, respectively associate
religious rituals involving sexuality with settled pre-Vedic agricultural society of BMAC or IVC.
63 Witzel (2000:8) sums up the situation thus: “during the 2nd mill[enium BCE], we find, in all the
agricultural regions from the Kopet Dagh to the Eastern Iranian plateau, in Mesopotamia and in
the Indus valley, a shift to a less stratified and complex organization, with an almost synchronic
development of the very expansionist BMAC adaptation throughout the desert oases of Central
Asia, and the development of complex mobile herders on the Eurasian steppe’ (Shishlina and
Hiebert 1998:230).” When this immigrant Aryan civilization joined the local BMAC one, the former
lost its own material culture, transformed the latter local one, took on many of its aspects [like the
body of language and social organization] and spread this innovative culture by moving further
south into Greater Iran and toward the Panjab leading to what Witzel calls the Aryanization of
South Asia (2003:56, 2000:9).
64 Witzel (2003b:52) believes that the non-IE BMAC religion “directly influenced the Avestan and
Vedic form on certain IIr. beliefs,” such as the transformation of the IE and Eurasian myth of the
hero killing the dragon into one of fighting the dragon of drought (Vṛtra), i.e. “one of releasing the
waters by the late spring snow melt in Afghanistan (Avesta) and in the northwestern Indian
subcontinent (RV).”
88
the Atharvan’s initial acculturation with the Indo-Iranians took place (see fn.53
above).
The BMAC and its successor settlements were abandoned c. 1700 BCE,
and the (now) Indo-Aryans moved south-eastward into another intermediate area
feature of retroflex consonants, missing in Old Iranian and the other branch of
The Hindukush may be the place of origin of the later Ṛgvedic ‘Purusha’
various reasons not least of which is that it is the first articulation of the Vedic
Aryan social structure with Brahmins at the top of the hierarchy. Doniger
(2009:119, 131) calls it the foundational myth of the Brahmin class, and Witzel
through divine-human sacrifice, much like the MBh, which is also about
MBh 5.57.12-18). 66 Given that it is later explicitly identified with Krishna 67 in a text
65 See Flood’s (1996:120) view that Narayana is identified with “‘the cosmic man’ (puruṣa), who
possibly originates outside the vedic pantheon as a non-vedic deity from the Hindu Kush
mountains.” RV’s ‘Poem of the Primeval Man’ or the Puruṣa-Sūkta (PS = RV 10.90) is about
cosmogony and the origins of four social classes of the Aryan society.
66 See Malinar (2007:49, 181, 186) for a discussion of the ‘sacrifice of war’, and (115, 196; van
the Hindukush religion in between the IIr., BMAC and Vedic religions,” Witzel
(2004:3-4, 12) finds echoes of the Purusha myth in the mythology of the Kalash
god Munjem, who is the Lord of Middle Earth and who, like Indra, killed his
demon father in a way “reminiscent of the Puruṣa/Ymir and Chin[ese] (< Austric)
Pangu myths.” 68
But the Purusha myth may go further back to the BMAC. On the basis of
Indo-Aryan culture and articulated in the Purusha myth may have come from the
BMAC. 69 Parpola (2006) finds even more connections between the BMAC, the
where the creator is regarded as embodied in creation, and cosmogony as a template for the
creation of individual bodies. Also see Malinar (7, 140, 157-158, 192-199, 202-206) for an
analysis of the divinity of Purusha as Krishna in the BhG.
67 BhG 8.9; 13.20-24; 15.16-19. BhG’s representation of Krishna as Purusha transforms the
dyadic structure of the previous myth into a triadic one in which Krishna is re-presented as the
‘highest Purusha’ (puruṣottama, 15.19). But at the same time it is closer to the Ṛgvedic Purusha
myth in that the female creative principle is not independent of Purusha (Cf. RV 10.90.5): “In
contrast to non-theistic Sāṃkhya philosophy, [in the BhG] prakṛti “is not considered independent
of the (divine) puruṣa principle” (Malinar 2007:205).
68 See also Witzel 2003a:71.
69 For Fairservis (1995:207), the archaeological evidence for connection between the BMAC and
the Puruṣa-Sūkta (RV 10.90), comes from the excavations at Altyn Depe in the foothills of Kopet
Dagh mountain range on Turkmenistan-Iran border. The digs represent a continuous occupation
by sedentary farmers from about 4000 BCE to its urban phase around 2300 BCE. He sums up the
findings (208) like this:
In all, archaeologists have been able to isolate at least four groups integral to the
settlement who, in general, played different roles in society and had, for the most part,
different funerary practices, dietary habits and traditional roles of descent. These were:
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Dāsas, the Purusha myth of human sacrifice (puruṣamedha), the mythology of
The Atharva Veda’s (AV) ritual background was different from that of the
RV (which was mainly concerned with “worship of gods with recited and chanted
hymns and offerings of an invigorating drink called soma”); the AV, in contrast,
emphasized “royal rites (with bloody sacrifices), rites of ‘white’ and ‘black magic’
that “Vedic texts do indeed attest to real human sacrifices performed within the
memory preserved by the authors,” and that the actual practice began to diminish
by the time of the Brāhamaṇa texts. He believes that the concept of ‘cosmic man’
(puruṣa) and his sacrifice becomes suddenly important in the youngest hymns of
those who were associated with the platform tower [i.e. vegetarian priests who did their
own cooking, who possessed a gold bull’s head and other objects apparently amuletic in
nature]; those who lived in the large houses with rather rich trappings [like lots of metal
seals and female terracotta figurines; they did no cooking but ate lamb meat]; those who
had individual homes more humble in their attributes [who cooked at hearths and
courtyard ovens, and ate mature sheep and goats]; and those who lived in small rural-
type structures close to the industrial areas in which they worked [like kilns, and they ate
sheep, goats as well as wild animals, suggesting hunting]. There were also outlying
settlements, satellite villages, presumed to be encharged with the agricultural production
and conveyance necessary for the subsistence of this large community postulated to
have more than 10,000 inhabitants.
The four distinct groupings seem parallel to the later IA classes of priests (Brahmins),
warrior/aristocrats (Kshatriyas), food-producers (Vaishyas), and artisan-workers (Shudras)
mentioned in the RV (10.90.12). Another parallel may exist between the female figurines and the
new active female creative principle in the RV (10.90.5) virāj, which is later replaced by the
female principle prakṛti in Sāṃkhya philosophy.
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the RV due to contact between the Ṛgvedic Aryans and the Dāsas, “whose
Between the arrival of the Dāsas into the BMAC c. 2500-2000 BCE and the
speakers came to the BMAC with horse-drawn chariots, in whose religion the
group, who had close contact with Assyrians, the first wave of Ṛgvedic Indo-
Aryans (i.e. the early tribes including the Yadu) moved into the Panjab area c.
1600 BCE. Then another wave of Aryans arrived at the BMAC “who had the
Soma-drinking Indra as their leading deity.” From this latter group the second
wave of Ṛgvedic Indo-Aryans originated and moved into the Panjab area c. 1300
70 Parpola acknowledges the connections between the IE myths of human sacrifice found in the
RV, and Slavonic, Roman, German, and Iranian sources, but believes that the tradition of actual
human sacrifice was inherited by the Vedic Aryans from the BMAC-IVC (2006:170-171, 175-177).
He sees the connection between the Śākta and Vedic human sacrifice to have formed via the IVC
(2006:174-175), and he argues that the IVC was introduced to the “head hunting and skull cult” of
BMAC/Afghanistan/Nuristan by the Dāsas (2006:177). The Atharvan Brahmins continued the
Dāsas’s BMAC traditions within the Vedic religion — as evident in the conceptualizations of
Purusha, Narayana, and later Vishnu — in the PS (RV 10.90), the AV, the Śatapatha Brāhamaṇa
(ŚB of the YV), and perhaps in the tantric Pañcarātra ritual of human sacrifice. Parpola’s (2006)
arguments regarding Vedic human sacrifice are supported with archaeological evidence
presented by Bakker (2006); and, in relation to the concept of Purusha-Narayana, Parpola’s
arguments are anticipated by Jaiswal (1981 [1967]). Cf. Doniger’s (2009:151-152) and Flood’s
(1996:41, 184, 218) views discounting the possibility of actual human sacrifice during Vedic ritual.
Parpola (2006:159) expressly argues against Flood’s (1996) views.
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2.4 Vedic multilingualism – setting the stage for Krishna’s appearance
Before moving the narrative further into the Panjab, I propose a possible scenario
in which the Atharvan Brahmins were native to or familiar with non-IE language,
religion, and society in the BMAC and the Hindukush region from which they
derived notions like four-fold social stratification, human sacrifice, a male creator
god and a female creative principle, and either combined them, or not, with
Primeval Man’ Puruṣa-Sūkta (RV 10.90). The BMAC region had some presence
have had some connections with Sumerians. The most prominent (non-
71 ŚB belongs to the White YV, and it has two recensions one of which is ŚB Kāṇva, “which
differs little in content and phraseology” from ŚB Mādhyandina (Jamison and Witzel 2003:70).
Witzel notes a close relationship between YV and AV priests not only mythically but also in terms
of close relation between certain texts (1997:282 fn.105; 292 fn.150).
On the question of Narayana’s possible non-Aryan, Sumerian antecedents, see Jaiswal
(1981:47). Witzel (email, February 23, 2010) draws on the traditional ‘etymology’ and links the
name ‘Nārāyaṇa’ with “nara- 'water', an adaptation of Dravidian nīr 'water',” which appears first
in ŚB in the river name Sadānīrā ‘always having water', “if not from nīla- 'blue' as some suppose.”
Cf. Witzel’s (1999b:39-40, 1999c:47) comment that Dravidian nīr is not found in the neighboring
North Dravidian languages (Malto, Kurukh) in the Gangetic plains, but is only found in Baluchistan
(Brahui dīr): “This may be accidental, but it may also indicate that Brahmanical educated speech
of the Kuru with their IA-Drav[idian]-Munda symbiosis and acculturation had incorporated some
Drav[idian] words which appear only now in the texts.”
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Atharvans had a lower status among the Vedic priests, possibly due to
their BMAC origins or their association with sorcery, black magic, human
sacrifice, etc. They were motivated to improve their status and carve a niche
formal rituals for royal consecration and other household rituals that would make
them most eligible candidates for royal priests (purohita). The other way they
Purusha, Narayana, and possibly also Krishna, into the Vedas perhaps by
identifications, perhaps beginning with their own identification with the gods they
the Vedic Vishnu, they eventually became the highest gods in Vedic
influential new text, the MBh, produced by the Atharvans, the RV god Vishnu
takes a back seat to Narayana, and even Krishna is identified with Narayana.
associated with the first group of Indo-Aryans to migrate to India from the BMAC
and later disperse to the east. It is in eastern India that Atharvans give shape to
their most influential texts. It is also in the east that non-Vedic traditions like
94
Buddhism and Jainism developed which then influenced the conceptualization of
2005), Witzel’s (2004, 2003b, 2001, 1999b, 1999c, 1997, 1995a, 1995b), and
‘Ārya’ was a cultural term that referred to both a people and their language.
Indo-Aryans or Ārya were all those people who joined the tribes speaking Vedic
Sanskrit and adhering to Vedic cultural norms, such as Vedic ritual and poetry
There may have been a long period of initial acculturation between local
populations and the first wave of Indo-Aryan immigrant tribes, like the Yadu-
Turvaśa and Anu-Druhyu. 72 Atharvans are associated with these tribes, of which
Yadu is said to have been Krishna’s tribe. It is during this period that some of the
linguistic and cultural features of early pre-Ṛgvedic period must have evolved.
72 The earlier tribes were likely in the Panjab area before the Pūru and their sub-tribe (and later
rivals), the Bharata, came in and became prominent in the middle Ṛgvedic period (c. 1500-1350
BCE). Witzel (2001:18 n.54) points out, “The RV is, by and large, a composition of poets of the
Pūru and Bharata, and not of some earlier IA tribes already living in the Panjab (Witzel 1995).”
Cf. Parpola’s (2005) dates above; his first wave of Ṛgvedic Indo-Aryans is c. 1600 BCE, and the
second wave of Ṛgvedic Indo-Aryans is c. 1300 BCE.
95
“The speakers of Indo-Aryan and the local population must therefore have
interacted on a bilingual basis for a long period, before the composition of the
present RV hymns with their highly hieratic, poetical speech” (Kuiper 1991, 2000,
further west than the Panjab where it had a strong presence, into the Himalayas
and even in eastern Afghanistan (Witzel 1999b:12). In this context, Witzel notes
the possibility, much debated, that Para-Munda had links to Sumerian (1999b:12-
13). Likewise, there may be a link between Dravidian and Sumerian (1999b:24),
and a Dravidian presence in the mountainous eastern Iran and Baluchistan from
73Witzel (1999b:34). On relation between Para-Munda, Indus, and Dravidian, Witzel (1999b:13-
14) suggests that (1) the language of the Indus people was not Dravidian, (2) the language of the
pre-Ṛgvedic IVC was of (Para-) Austro-Asiatic nature, and (3) Para-Munda perhaps had a
northern dialect (Harappa, in the Panjab) and a southern dialect (of Mohenjo-daro, in Sindh).
96
where they migrated into the Indus valley c. 4000/3500 BCE. 74 Originally pastoral
hill tribes, they acquired agriculture only in South Asia and after a period of
acculturation with the Indus people, they practiced intensive rice and millet
The significance of all this for Krishna’s history is in the presence of non-IA
substrate in the RV, particularly of Dravidian words in the middle and late period
RV books like 8 and 10 (c. 1500-1200 BCE), including personal and tribal names,
as well as cultural terms. Witzel (1999b:21) points out that Dravidian words
occur first in RV 8, “more specifically in its Kāṇva section,” therefore, “If one
takes all of this seriously and locates at least the Kāṇva sections of book 8 in
74 Regarding Dravidian immigration, Witzel (1999b:33) writes “An early wave of Dravidian
speakers might very well have preceded the Indo-Aryans into Iran and S. Asia and some may
have stayed on in SE Iran." In that case they knew the horse already in Central Asia, but would
not have taken it over directly from the Indo-Iranians (as may be indicated by Brahui (h)ullī,
O.Tam. ivuḷi ‘horse’, etc., different from IIr. a£va [IA aśva]).” However, “the technical terminology
for chariots is IA and IE. Linguistic evidence is “that the earliest IIr. *ratha ‘chariot (with two
spoked wheels)’ . . . is old enough to have resulted in the archaic compounds Ved. rathe-ṣṭhā,
Avest. raϑaē-šta- ‘chariot fighter’, cf. Old Avestan raϑī, RV rathī ‘chariot driver.’ Dravidian has
nothing of this, but possesses words for ‘wagon’ or ‘bullock cart’” (Witzel 1999b:33).
75 Witzel (1999b:22). There is an intriguing possibility of interconnections between an IA, Austro-
Asiatic and Dravidian myth and such historical circumstances: It is in Sindh that rice was first
introduced into the IVC. We first encounter ‘rice gruel’ (odana) in the (partly E. Iranian) Kāṇva
book (RV 8.69.14, 8.77.6-11) in “the Emuṣa myth” discussed by Kuiper (1991:16ff.), who says
“the Kaṇvas, non-IA local sorcerers, introduced this myth into the RV” (in Witzel 1999b:22). The
myth is of a bow shooter splitting a mountain, finding the rice gruel, and killing a boar named
Emuṣa. Witzel comments: “Now, the suffix -uṣa (Kuiper 1991) of Emuṣa clearly indicates a name
taken from the (Para-Munda) Indus language.” On this point, I asked Dr. Witzel whether the
‘Puruṣa’ myth of the RV (10.90) might also have non-IA, Para-Munda or Proto-Dravidian
elements, given its unsettled etymology (“probably” from the Sanskrit root √pṛī ‘to fill’, M-
Williams’s SED). Quoting Mayrhofer’s Etymological Dictionary (EWAia) II.149ff., Dr. Witzel
suggests that its etymology is “not explained convincingly” and that Mayrhofer speculates
whether it relates in its final sound to manuṣa (email, February 23, 2010). Perhaps, the word
‘puruṣa’ is of IE origin but applied by non-IA priests (i.e. Atharvans) to an entity who is ritually
sacrificed in a non-IE/IA fashion.
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East Iranian lands, that is in (S.W.) Afghanistan and Baluchistan, one can also
adduce the very name of this clan of poets. K. Hoffmann (and I) have connected
the name with kṛ ‘to act magically, to do sorcery’.” 76 All this points to a real
possibility of the Atharvans’ connections with the BMAC, the early human
acculturation with the first wave of Ṛgvedic Aryans including the Yadu, also a
Within the RV, there is a correlation between tribes, the RV books and
identifies two clans, “largely the same,” that together make up the AV priesthood:
originally called ‘the (text) of the Atharvans and Aṅgiras’ or ‘the (text) of the
n.135) writes that the Kāṇvas and Āṅgirasas represent the tribes in the first wave
of immigration into the Panjab, and “their poetry [in books 1 and 8 of the RV],
76In response to Kuiper’s (1991:80) objection to this etymology by pointing to a word (Pra-
skaṇva) with the Indus prefix pra-, Witzel (1999b:21) says: “This may mean that the Indus
language extended to Eastern Iran, especially to the area west of Sindh, to Baluchistan, and to
Makran with its many Indus settlements. Book 8 would then represent an amalgam of Dravidian
and Para-Munda influences (including some pre-Iranian?).”
77 For a detailed look at this subject, see Witzel (1997 and 1995b).
78 Cf. Hiltebeitel’s (2001:112) comment that “Linked with the Āṅgirasas as Brahmans of the
Atharva Veda, [the Bhārgavas] are the Mahābhārata’s experts in black magic, curses,
dhanurveda (the Veda of the bow), and mantra-sped divine missiles.”
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with its (Sāmavedic) strophic structure, vocabulary, etc. differs from the family
books [i.e. books 2-7]” of the RV. 79 He further quotes Insler (1998) that these
poet-priests were the principal authors of the AV, and the importance of the
Vedic god Varuṇa and of the royal rites of the purohita (the royal chief priest) in
the AV “agrees well with the assumption that this collection continues traditions
of the first wave of the Ṛgvedic Aryans, in whose religion the cult of the Aśvins . .
. and their doubles Mitra-and-Varuṇa was still important. The sorcery elements
Dāsa tradition (cf. Parpola 2002).” Witzel (1997:276 n.77), too, says that many of
the AV sorcery rites may be older than the RV, though they are preserved in a
language that is younger than that of RV 10. 80 Jamison and Witzel (2003:69)
also point out that, of the four Vedas, the AV “stands a little apart from the other
three Vedas, as it does not treat the [Vedic] Śrauta rituals, but contains magical
(black and white) and healing spells, as well as two more large sections
79 Witzel (1997:263) also points to “the stylistically divergent Kāṇva collections” in the RV.
Moreover, the first wave of Ṛgvedic Indo-Aryans, like the Yadu-Turvaśa and Anu-Druhyu, are
only mentioned more frequently in the RV’s Kāṇva section of Book 8 and very little in other books
(Witzel 1995b:320).
80 Elsewhere, Witzel (1999c:3, 39) points out that the AV “contains several hundred sorcery spells
abounding in non-IA words;” including “’popular’ words of plants, animals, demons, local deities,
and the like. Their character still is, by and large, Para-Munda, with some words from the ‘local’
language (“X”), and with some Drav[idian] words included; all of which is clearly visible in the
increase of words with retroflexes.”
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domestic rituals such as marriage and death, and with royal power.” 81 All these
Parpola (2005:2) says that in the RV, “the Nāsatyas are worshipped
especially by the Kāṇva and Atri poets resident in Gandhāra [i.e. Afghanistan or
the BMAC].” The Kāṇva (Atharvans) were associated with the BMAC’s first wave
worshipped the Nasatyas instead of Indra (Parpola 2005:21). The Nasatyas are
relevant to Krishna’s history in two ways: (1) ‘Krishna’ first appears as a poet of
a hymn addressed to the Nasatyas in the RV, he may or may not be the Krishna
of the MBh, but (2) the relationship between Krishna and Arjuna in the MBh
making the following points: (i) The horse-drawn chariot was central to the
warrior and charioteer was deified and their mythology spread together with the
81 Witzel (1997:277, 282) also posits a ‘floating mass of Ur-AV hymns of sorcery and speculation,
on marriage, death, etc., some of which are also found in RV 10 where they were codified as
Ṛgvedic hymns at the time of the collection of the RV 10.
82 Parpola (2005:8, 12) notes that Vedic aśvin (possessed of horses) corresponds to Homeric
hippeύs and hippόta; that Nāsatya “is a derivative of *nasatί- ‘safe return home’ and belongs to
the same Proto-Indo-European root *nes- as the Greek agent noun Néstōr — known from Homer
as a hippόta and a masterly charioteer — and refers to the charioteer’s task of bringing the hero
safely back from the battle.” The two names are interchangeable, I use ‘Nasatyas’ except when
the other occurs in a direct quotation.
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chariot from Proto-Aryans to Proto-Greeks and Proto-Balts; 83 (iii) the charioteer
and the chariot fighter in the Vedic religion were expressly equated with the
Nasatyas; (iv) the two team members were often of equal social status; (v) the
Nasatyas, like the later Dioskouroi in Sparta, were models of dual kingship; 84 (vi)
the dual kingship in the Buddhist tradition parallels the universal emperor
wielding supreme political power with the Buddha wielding supreme spiritual
power; (vii) in the Vedic-Hindu tradition the idea of a dual kingship is found in the
integral connections of kṣatra ‘political power’ and brahman ‘sacred power’, the
two concepts being represented by the king and the royal chief priest, the
purohita; (viii) the Nasatyas were associated with two other Vedic divinities, Mitra
and Varuna, who are personified social concepts of ‘friendship’ and ‘oath, true
speech’, respectively; (ix) both sets of dual divinities represented dualistic cosmic
forces, day and night, light and darkness, white and black, and, particularly for
Nasatyas, birth and death; (x) the two other examples are of the Vedic warrior
god Indra and his charioteer and purohita, Bṛhaspati or Brahamaṇaspati, ‘Lord of
the Song’, an epithet of Indra himself, but later became a separate purohita
support his argument. Elsewhere they are not kings themselves but have the ability to bestow
royal power, especially by making the king’s chariot victorious.
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figure; 85 and (xi) the example of the MBh pair of Arjuna (‘white’) and Narayana-
Krishna (‘black’), as Arjuna’s charioteer during the MBh war and the deliverer of
The Nasatyas lost ground to Indra with the rise of the second wave of
Ṛgvedic Aryans, though they may have retained the affections of the first wave of
Ṛgvedic Aryans. From among the second group, the Bharata were most
influential in social-religious history of early India: they were responsible for the
first collection of the RV, and their descendent, the Kuru king Parīkṣit — probably
1200-1000 BCE (Witzel 1995c, 1997). Parīkṣit figures in both major Krishna-
had been established by the Kuru dynasty (Witzel 1997:260), which became a
85 Bṛhaspati also takes the form of Mātalī — abbreviation of Mātarίśvan, who is mentioned 27
times in the RV, mostly in books 1 and 10, and 21 times in the AV, all texts associated with the
Atharvans — identified as Indra’s charioteer in the MBh (Parpola 2005:26). In the RV Mātarίśvan,
also identified with the Fire god, Agni, brought the fire to Bhṛgu. The Bhṛgus are closely
associated with fire as well as chariot-building. (Parpola 2005:27).
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early Sanskritization. 86 The complex ritual structure necessitated ritual texts
which were assembled by traditional priests divided into four units: “the Ṛgvedic
Hotar, the Sāmavedic Udgātar, the Yajurvedic Adhvaryu and the Atharvavedic
Of the four types of Vedic priests, Witzel (1997:268 n.46) compares the
86 For early Sanskritization in Vedic times, see Witzel (1995b). Early Sanskritization was a
feature of the new, post-Ṛgvedic Kuru-Pañcāla state, “the first larger polity or ‘early state’ on
Indian soil,” which extended the geographical center of Vedic civilization from the north-west’s
Balhika (Bactria) and the Gandhāra/Panjab area to the eastern border of the Panjab (Kurukṣetra,
Haryana) and beyond, well into Uttar Pradesh to Kausambi/Allahabad (Witzel 1995c:9, 5).
Unlike the Ṛgvedic period of liberal intermingling and gradual acculturation whereby non-
Aryans became chiefs, “under the Kuru kings, acculturation was followed by well-planned
Sanskritization representing major changes in social format” (Witzel 1995c:10). Through
Sanskritization, the Kurus succeeded in controlling non-Aryans and the Aryans (the priests, the
other aristocrats, the third estate of food-producers and traders), and the political realm as well as
the religious (the rituals and the texts). The Kuru kings set up the complicated Śrauta ritual, and
succeeded in controlling the older, amorphous groups of poet-priests by a clear subdivision of
their ritual labor into four fields of specialization, i.e. the four Vedas and their ritual use. The
complicated Śrauta ritual was something for the aristocratic class to “worry about” and this helped
the Kuru kings to control them as well. “The new Śrauta ritual thus put everyone in his proper
station and at his proper place” (Witzel 1995c:13). In order to carry out many of the religious and
social reforms, the Kuru kings initiated a collection of the major poetic and ritual texts, and their
re-arrangement. Once the collection was fixed, there was no need to create new hymns. But
composition of new speculative hymns was carried out in the late RV under the Bharatas, and in
the AV under the Kurus. The poet of the RV “now reappeared as author of (part of the) AV, which
was at first called Ātharva-Āṅgirasa, ‘the (collection of hymns) of the Atharvans and Aṅgiras’”
(Witzel 1995c:14-15).
In all the above efforts of the Kurus, according to Witzel (1995b:15), a continuity within
great changes was achieved by means of “the artificial archaization of certain parts of the new
Śrauta ritual, the use of artificial, archaic forms in the poetic and learned language of the poets,
priests and “theologians” of this period, and of text formation and their collection. The new ritual
and its language appeared to be more elaborate and impressive but at the same time, had to give
the appearance of having come down from a hallowed past.” This is ‘Sanskritization’, and the
BhP has the same kind of achaization of language due to its efforts to be ‘Vedic’. Sanskritization
by way of forging a link to the Vedic times is also evident in Hinduism’s history under colonialism.
87 Cf. Witzel’s (1999b:34) comment that the name of the ‘Śūdra’ hints at how Dravidian influence
on Vedic was exerted. “From the late RV (10.90) onwards, this designates the fourth, non-Ārya
103
He (1997:282 n.105) also notes a close link between the Atharvan Brahmin
priests and the Adhvaryus of the YV, and says: “Both did not belong to the
Because of their low status in the early Śrauta rituals, the AV priests made
an effort to be accepted by the nobility and the other three types of Vedic priests,
and they did this by “giving their hymns a new shape, inserting many stanzas
addressed to the gods of Ṛgvedic and classical Vedic ritual,” and by providing
the king with a more solemn consecration rite (the rājasūya) than found in the
RV. This coupled with other important rites of passage or major rituals of life
cycles, like marriage, is “a clear indication of one of the major interests of the
down to the late Vedic/early medieval period (Witzel 1997:280 n.95). The
Atharvans were clearly trying to achieve social goals through religious practice.
class; it was added to the three ‘Ārya’ classes of Brahmins, Kṣatriyas (nobility), and Vaiśya (‘the
people’) only at this time. However, Greek sources of Alexander’s time still place the Sudroi
people at the confluence of the Panjab rivers with the Indus; this may still indicate their origin in
Sindh / Baluchistan.” Elsewhere, Witzel (2001:8) points out that the Indo-Iranian speaking society
had “a patriarchal, exogamic system of three classes, with tribal chieftains, and a priest/poet
class.” Cf. earlier discussion of Fairservis’s views on the BMAC or IA class system (fn.68 above).
88 In the story of “Dadhyañc Ātharvaṇa (Cf. fn. 58 above),” the YV Adharyus priests are
associated with the Aśvins, “the somewhat impure doctors of men and of the sacrifice (note the
Adhvaryus-Ātharvaṇa connections); . . . Note that it is an Ātharvaṇa, Dadhyañc, who helps the
Aśvins (and thus the Adhvaryus!) in their endeavor to learn the secret of the ritual” and who pays
with his life (Witzel 1997:292 n.148).
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2.4.3 Society and religion in eastern India in the late Vedic period 89
In the later Vedic period of Brāhamaṇa commentarial texts on the Vedas, the
next section. Witzel (1997:309 n.256) calls it “the one clearly eastern text.”
‘Eastern’ signifies the land of the Kosala and Videha tribes in the later Oudh or
present-day U.P. and Bihar. Significantly, “the dialect features of the eastern
people can be regarded as being due to the remnants of a first wave of Indo-
Aryan immigrants into India (such as the Yadu-Turvaśa) which has been pushed
including earlier para-Vedic Indo-Aryan settlers (like Kosala, Kāśi, and Videha),
the local Munda people, and some Tibeto-Burmese elements. Various new
oriented tribes but also other non-orthoprax Indo-Aryan tribes such as the Vrijji of
ideologies and belief systems and the type of polity called gana-sangha
89 In ‘late Vedic’ (c. 800-400 BCE) I am including the Vedantic or Upanishadic period as well.
105
Śākya, or a confederacy of clans like Mahavira’s Vrijji. Both were located in the
legends and practices of these oligarchies separated them from the Vedic
orthodoxy. They had two (not four) social strata — “the kshatriya rajakula, ruling
families, and the dasa-karmakara, the slaves and labourers” (Thapar 2003:148).
Among the legends regarding their clan origins, “one was that the ruling families
were frequently founded by persons of high status who, for a variety of reasons,
had left or been exiled from their homeland” (Thapar 2003:148). This is
were also systems similar to gana-sangha in western India, of which the Vṛṣṇis
Vṛṣṇis (after they fused with the Yadu or Yādava tribe; see fn.115 below).
were already part of the religious landscape; and toward the end of the late-Vedic
period (c. 600-500 BCE) and subsequently (c. 500 BCE – 300 CE), they came to the
fore. 90 Some reformists, like the Buddha and his followers, denied the authority
90The following summary of religious-historical developments in the period between c. 600 BCE to
300 CE is based on Larson (1995:60-75), Michaels (2004:36-39), Thapar 2003 (Chapters 5-8) and
Doniger 2009 (Chapters 7 and 10).
106
of the Vedas and the Brahmins. Others, like Upanishadic thinkers, stayed within
the Vedic fold even while shifting from the outward-directed practice of sacrificial-
fire ritual to internalization of the same in the form of ‘inner ascetic burning’
regarding the nature of self and its relation to the cosmos; the meaning of life and
death; the problems of action and fruits of action (karma) and their relation to
following the ‘right’ dharma (innate nature of things, cosmic law, divine order,
religious doctrine, social norm, justice, morality, truth); the issues of reincarnation
other approaches to these issues took hold at the folk level. Two dominant
tendencies were: one, the deification and veneration of a clan or tribal leader who
may or may not have been also a religious leader (Vasudeva, Krishna, Gautam
Buddha, Mahavira), and, two, a growing belief in savior figures (celestial beings,
91 Regardless of whether in the emergent Mahayana Buddhism (c. 150 BCE – 150 CE), the
Buddhists on the bodhisattva path to becoming a Buddha were really practicing hard-core
asceticism and were disconnected from lay worship, the formulation of their motivation —
attainment of Buddhahood to bring an end to the suffering of all beings — embodied the idea of a
107
particular gods like Vishnu or Narayana by members of the Bhāgavata and
of the existence of such sects at least from late Vedic times, if not earlier. 92 Main
forms of religious practice — which are recognized in the MBh — consisted of (i)
pilgrimage to holy sites including temples, and (ii) ritual worship (pūjā) involving
making flower, fruit, rice, and other offerings to an image of the chosen deity.
There were continuities between the Vedic sacrifice and the pūjā ritual in that
both involved making offerings to god(s) and the distribution of the remains of the
food offerings among the worshippers as the god’s favor or grace. 93 The
difference was that the offerings were made to a representation of god in iconic
or aniconic form. 94 These later religious practices did not need priestly
mediation.
population were made among the middle- and late-Vedic polities in the east
savior figure. For more on debates on the nature of bodhisattva practices and their connection or
not to lay Buddhist practices in early Mahayana, see Nattier (2003), and Harrison (1995, 1987).
See also Goswami (2004) for a Vaishnava view of connections between Pure Land Buddhism
and Vaishnavism.
92 See Flood (1996:119-122), Colas (2003:230-235), Thapar (2003:216-217), and Doniger
(2009:260-261). The earliest mention of a devotee of Vasudeva (= bhagavat, later identified with
Krishna and Vishnu) is in the fifth century BCE Sanskrit grammarian Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī (4.3.98),
and the first explicit mention of ‘Bhāgavata’ as a devotee of Vasudeva is in an inscription (c. 115
BCE) on a pillar in central India erected by a Greek envoy. Pāñcarātra tradition is found in the
MBh, and is often linked to the Śatpatha Brāhmaṇa (c. 800-600 BCE).
93 Witzel (2003a:90) sees pūjā as “a clear continuation of the Ṛgvedic guest worship offered to
the gods,” in which the gods were entertained with recitation of hymns and fed with sacrificial
offerings.
94 See Thapar (2003:276) and Doniger (2009:258-259) for the form of early religious practices.
108
(Witzel 1997:313-314). These were done by “adopting” these peoples as sons of
famous Ṛgvedic poets. Witzel sees the process of Sanskritization at work in such
local kings or chieftains. Thus the Kosala became a Kāṇva territory by importing
the Kāṇvas and the Taittirīya scholar Bodhāyana, who became a Taittirīya
scholar but was originally a Kāṇva (Witzel 1997:306, 315). It is possible that the
extensive materials in the late Vedic eastern texts on royal coronation (abhiṣeka)
and the horse sacrifice (aśvamedha), which Witzel (1997:315) calls “the ultimate
royal ritual;” and “These rituals received their final form and were discussed in an
encyclopedic form in [SB].” Though belonging to the YV, in this and other
material included in the SB like the mythology of Narayana and puruṣamedha, its
Thus by the time of the composition of the MBh (c. 300 BCE – 300 CE), a
practice had at least three variants: Vedic ritual sacrifices, yogic ascetic tapas,
the latter being more privileged over the former, and devotional worship of
specific god(s).
109
At the social level, the Vedic brahmanical religious practitioners were not
only interacting and competing with older communities who had pre-Vedic
religious practices, but also with newer non-Vedic religious communities like the
something else’, the ideas of ‘unity of multiplicity, multiplicity of unity’ and ‘identity
of god and man’ (Michaels 7, 206, 208) — is evident in the fusing of four divine
95See Larson (1995:62-64) and again Michaels (2004:332-344) for more on the logic of
identification in Vedic-Hindu tradition. For an in-depth cross-cultural comparative study of such
Indian and Chinese traditions, see Farmer, Henderson, and Witzel (2000).
110
personae to give us the Vaishnava god Krishna: Vishnu, Narayana, Vasudeva,
and Krishna. 96
The point of this long discursive journey was to recreate the environments
The social-religious environments for Brahmin authors of Vedic and epic texts
languages and cultures do not exist, nor did they at c. 1500 BCE.” The
conceptualizations of gods in the RV, the SB, and the MBh were the result of the
Vedic features of ‘Vedic’ gods (more on this in the next two sections below).
Religious practitioners then did, as they have done since, practice religion in
conjunction with striving for social goals. In their efforts the likely Brahmin
authors of these texts employed the full arsenal of mechanisms for either
articulating the change underway in society or initiating the change in the status
accommodation and social identification with the powerful class and its
96Matchett (2001:4-5) writes that Vishnu is only one of the names of the Supreme God of
Vaishnavism, and that just because the tradition is known as Vaishnavism, it does not follow that
the process of identification of these four divine figures was one in which Vishnu was always
dominant or the process began with his followers. She believes it more likely that it was the
growth of Krishna’s ‘cult’ which drove the process of fusion, “a process which appears to have
taken place somewhere between the fifth and second centuries BCE” (5).
111
prestigious conceptual categories. In either case, with these mechanisms, the
authors emphasized those divine aspects that had the most cognitive salience
the representations, and integrated the most significant elements for Krishna’s
shall call these Atharvan Vaishanvite elements. These elements were nascent in
the RV but came together noticeably first in the SB and then in the MBh, and the
mythology. The SB and the MBh are possibly of east-Indian provenance as they
In both the SB and the MBh, the Atharvans re-presented the Vaishnavite
the SB, especially Vishnu, and through identification of Purusha, Narayana, and
Vishnu, leading to interference and convergence. Notice that by the end of the
97 Though Malinar (2007:15) dates and locates the final redaction of the BhG in the first century
CE Mathura, where a plurality of ‘highest’ beings, new practices of image worship and the concept
of the king as representing and serving a highest god for the sake of the ‘welfare of all beings’
thrived, because these were characteristic of the teachings of the BhG. However, based on ideas
regarding dharma, bhakti, and the doctrine of disinterested action within the text, in relation to
Buddhist ideas and Ashoka’s politics, Malinar (261) suggests that the BhG’s theological
framework may have been composed c. 180 BCE – 50 CE. Perhaps the final redaction of the MBh
as a whole, which may have been ‘brewing’ for some time over a larger expanse of the Kuru state
and which incorporated wider array of ideas, took place further east?
112
fewer: only Krishna and Vishnu emerge enhanced. On the social side, in the
MBh, the Atharvans selected the most popular and (covertly) prestigious concept
Vishnu’s divinity was first recorded in the RV. But, compared to other Vedic gods
such as the warrior god Indra or the Fire god Agni, Vishnu was not yet a
prominent deity and was represented almost only in his role of taking three steps
associated with the etymology of his name from the Sanskrit verb √viś (to enter,
to enter in or settle down on, to pervade). 100 He is the god of the three strides or
steps (vikrama, pada) who enters or pervades the universe for the benefit of all
living beings, especially mankind, 101 and is his most prominent aspect. Vishnu’s
highest step (paramam padam) is his station, where men and gods dwell and
98 Cf. Matchett (2001:5, 204 n.23), who calls Vishnu “not an insignificant” figure in the RV, despite
the fact that Vishnu has only four hymns addressed to him alone (1.154; 1.156; 7.99; 7.100) and
two addressed to him in conjunction with Indra, compared to 246 alone and 45 jointly with some
other god for Indra, or 195 and 17 for Agni. See also Preciado-Solis (1984:1-6), who measures
Vishnu’s significance in terms of the totality or universality of his various fertility, vegetative, solar
characteristics that make him a creator and protector god.
99 RV 1.22.17; 1.154.1-4; 3.54.14; 4.3.7; 5.87.4; 6.12.2; 8.12.27; etc.
100 See Gonda (1969:4 n.11, 54-55) for a detailed account of theories regarding the etymology of
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rejoice. 102 He is the cowherd or protector (gopa) of this supreme abode (RV
3.55.10), who ensures that divine injunctions are kept (dharmāṇi dhārayan, RV
These are the most relevant characteristics of Vishnu that play a role in the
process of his assimilation with Krishna. In this context, certain MBh passages
(2001:28) statement that “the idea of the Supreme God entering his own world to
perform salvific deeds was originally connected with Kṛṣṇa rather than with any
epithet Narayana, was the subject of the ‘Poem of the Primeval Man’ (RV 10.90).
Gonda (1977:8) points to the ancient tradition that Narayana is the seer-poet (ṛṣi)
was identified with the god he preached.” 103 The man-god in the RV ‘Poem of the
Primeval Man’, Purusha, is both the being sacrificed and the being to whom the
— to the status of a god who gains the power of transcendence and immanence
and who beheld the ritual human sacrifice performed over five days (sa etam
being the sacrifice, through the sacrifice he surpassed all beings and became all
103Also see Gonda (1976:26) and (1975:137). Matchett (2001:5) says that apart from being
considered the seer-poet who composed the Poem of the Primeval Man, the figure of a divine ṛṣi
named Narayana also appears in many epic and puranic texts, including the MBh.
Michaels (2004:208) comments on the implications of such identification between Vedic
seer-poets and gods: “This open boundary between god and man has meant that a man who
makes himself into a ‘god’ is identified with him in asceticism, that kings are considered
manifestations of gods, that an actor who plays Rāma in the film is almost worshipped as the god
Rāma himself.”
115
that there is (teneṣṭva’tyatiṣṭhat sarvāṇi bhūtānīdaṃ sarvamabhavat, SB
the sacrifice also in SB 12.3.4.1ff. 105 He, therefore, becomes more like Vishnu.
In the SB Vishnu is also identified with the Vedic sacrifice. 106 In fact, the SB
where Vishnu is the sacrifice who obtains the all-pervading power (vikrānti) for
the gods and also for the sacrificer, also identified with Vishnu, (etāmvevaiṣa
etasmai viṣṇur yajño vikrāntiṃ vikramate). Gonda (1969:77) notes the constant
identification of Vishnu with the sacrifice in the Brāhmaṇas (like the SB), and
104 Jaiswal (1981:32) renders it: “by performing the pañcarātrasattra, or the five-day sacrifice,
Nārāyaṇa gained superiority over all beings, and became identical with all beings.”
105 The notion of Purusha-Narayana as the totality that contains all existence is then interpreted
through the etymology of ‘Narayana’. According to Bhandarkar (1913:30) and Jaiswal (1981:34),
based on Mahābhārata (MBh, 5.68.10) the name means the resting place or goal (ayana) of men
(nāra or narāḥ). Biardeau (in Matchett 2001:204-205) offers another interpretation leading to a
similar conclusion of the relation between totality and its fractions. Biardeau sees Narayana as
“He who is formed from (the sixteen parts or creatures) who have their course directed towards
the Puruṣa.” Biardeau derived this from the use of puruṣāyaṇa in Praśna Upaniṣad (PU 6.5),
where ‘the sixteen parts of the perciever’ are ‘puruṣāyaṇāḥ’ in the same way as rivers are on their
way to the oceans (samudrāyaṇāḥ) to be submerged. ‘Nara’ was substituted for ‘Puruṣa’.
The other meaning of ‘Narayana’, based on MBh 3.187.3 and 12.328.35, is derived from
Narayana’s resting place, the waters or nārā. This interpretation allows an iconographic linkage
between Narayana and Vishnu, often represented asleep on the cosmic waters. Cf. Witzel’s
explanation in fn.71 above.
106 ŚB1.2.5.1-7; 3.6.3.3, 16; 4.2.2.10; 4.3.5.8; 4.5.1.16; 5.2.5.4; 5.4.5.18; 11.1.4.4; 12.4.1.4, 5;
13.2.2.9; 14.1.1.13; see Matchett (2001:204 n.33). See also Gonda (1969:77-80) for further
references on the topic of Vishnu and Vedic sacrifice.
116
the identity of Vishnu and the sacrifice was that what could not be brought about
The parallelism between the objects and presumed effects of the all-
important ritual, the mighty means of securing the fulfillment of any desire
on the one hand, and the activity of a god who was believed to obtain, for
men and other beings, control of those powers which were considered to
be of vital importance, and to prepare the way for the representatives of
fertility and productivity on the other, might have led to an early
identification of that divine power and activity which was denoted by the
name of Viṣṇu and the mighty instrument in the hands of the priests.
Gonda (1969:5) grants some room for the supposition that “the ethnic substratum
has much contributed to the divinity” known as Vishnu and that his ascendancy
I believe that in the later Vedic texts like the SB, Vishnu’s identification
with sacrifice and representation as sacrifice and the sacrificer was driven by
entrenched popularity and influence of the extra-Vedic god Narayana. I see the
their having ‘created’ the universe and all beings through either sacrifice
(Narayana) or strides (Vishnu), (2) their encompassing the whole existence, (3)
their connection to sacrifice, and (4) their being beneficial to other beings, all of
which allow a cognitive link between the two in the practitioner’s mind. The two
could choose one or the other variant depending on the context. The frequency
117
of their occurrence would depend on answers to questions like ‘which form has
practitioners).
sacrifice and the sacrificer. Vishnu, more than any other Vedic gods associated
with him, like Indra, Agni, or the Sun god, had the above-discussed
characteristics that made possible his conceptual identification with Narayana. 107
Purusha, Narayana, and Vishnu. In this text these deities become variants for
of sacrificial rituals in the assumption of royal powers ever since the formation of
the Kuru state. The Śrauta rituals instated by the Kurus were the means to
107See Gonda 1969 (Chapters 2-5, and 15). Vishnu and Agni both ‘abide in ghee’ and are
associated with ritual sacrifice and wealth; Vishnu and the Sun god are conjointly associated with
power of penetration, spatial expansiveness, and fertility; both Vishnu and Indra are associated
with welfare and wealth, fertility, combat action, protection, beneficial power, etc. Though
considered a warrior god and associated with royal power, Indra does not have the powers of
transcendence and immanence; and though Agni’s aspect of ‘purity’ is brahmanic, he lacks the
aspects of transcendence and immanence or creative power; and the Sun god could not be
equated with ritual sacrifice.
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achieve Sanskritization. Being on the fringes of the Kuru state, the eastern
polities of older Aryan tribes were especially concerned with elevating their status
in the Vedic realm and therefore the Vedic Śrauta rituals assumed great
categories associated with the ruling class who actively regulated the religious
sphere.
sacrificial religiosity, for the larger society the period in between the organization
first to the upper- and then the lower-Ganges valley and a gradual shift toward
trade, and accumulation of wealth. Outside of the sacrificial rituals in the context
119
especially rice. 108 Apart from the Brahmins who were most involved with the
sacrificial rituals and Kshatriyas who exercised royal powers legitimized through
108 This change has significance in Vaishnava bhakti traditions in the following way. Classical
Vedic sacrifices involved animal or vegetarian offerings, like rice, and the sacrificial meal was
distributed among community members as a part of religious practice. A connection exists
between these practices and the later understanding of bhakti, and between both sacrifice /
bhakti and Vishnu-Narayana’s conceptualization as a sacrifice and its deity.
Narayana was conceptualized as representing the totality that subsumes fractions i.e. the
whole community made up of individuals (fn.104 above). Symbolizing the entire tribe, he was the
possessor and dispenser (bhagavat) of communal wealth (bhaga) — which in early communities
was equated with the sacrificial meal — to individuals forming part of the community. According to
Jaiswal (1981:38), in its earliest uses bhakta meant ‘meal’ and when rice became the principal
meal of the community, bhakta became synonymous with ‘boiled rice’. The meaning of bhakta as
food or meal is also found in the MBh (SED), and the ŚB 7.5.1.21 identifies Vishnu with food as
does MBh 12.47.71 (Gonda 1969:14). See also RV 10.60.5, addressed to the god Bhaga
described as bhagavān, where ‘bhagavat’ refers to possessor of the bhaga (good fortune,
happiness, welfare, prosperity, RV), and by implication is also its giver (bhaga = ‘dispenser’,
gracious lord, patron – applied to gods; RV).
Cf. Thapar 2003 (119-120), where she shows the interconnections of the terms bali
(sacrifice), bhāga (share), śulka (the value or worth of an item, later, a tax), the leadership of a
chief (rājā) in generation and distribution of wealth in the form of cattle, etc., especially during
Vedic sacrificial rituals. The rājā was imbued with elements of divinity by the priests through the
performance of sacrificial ritual. The parallels between these historical practices and the
Narayana legend are remarkable.
All these notions are related to the Sanskrit verb √bhaj ‘to divide’ ‘distribute’ ‘allot’ ‘share
with’ or ‘partake of’. In the Vedic times, it did not mean ‘to adore’ or ‘to serve’ — the connotations
which became prominent later. Bhakti originally denoted ‘a portion’ or ‘share’, and “In its
extended meaning bhakta came to imply not merely the wealth which was distributed but also the
individual who had been allotted his share of wealth. That is why in early uses bhakti and bhakta
have a passive sense referring to the thing one belongs to or is partial to” (Jaiswal 1981:38). She
concludes (117) that “The original conception of the bhakti was material and concrete, and the
favours of the gods were conceived in terms of worldly objects; hence in its early uses bhakti is
sometimes convertible into prasāda (favour),” and an idea of fondness, love between the bhakta
and the bhagavat was based on kindered spirit without implications of inferiority to its possessor.
Earlier, even gods had bhakti for men; later, the dynamic of love changed.
When the social-political circumstances changed in the late-Vedic period and kinship
bonds loosened and tribal structure gave way to a class/caste structure (by the end of the
Mauryan age, c. 300 BCE), stability in society and smooth functioning of the state was ensured
through emphasis on a religion based on devotion and faith, which was also promoted as a way
of life – selfless service or desire-less action in the performance of one’s social and religious
obligations. From the late-Vedic period onward, gradually the bhagavat became a transcendent
being and the individual bhakta became a devotee. Therefore, in the MBh, Vishnu-Narayana
came to be represented as the object of devotion. Bhakti was now primarily an act engaged in by
the devotee (bhakta), not an act of distribution of wealth or happiness by the bhagavat. Thus, the
120
the sacrificial rituals, the rest of society was more concerned with food production
and wealth creation (and veneration of ascetic or divine superior beings). In this
from the warrior god Indra toward Vishnu-Narayana. In later tradition, both
Vishnu and Narayana were often associated with the Vaishyas (from viś, the
discussed above, that fused Vishnu and Narayana into one idea of ‘the Highest’,
(13.6.1.1), and second, the incorporation of their adherents into the fold of the
tendency also in the MBh, especially in its Nārāyaṇīya section (MBh 12.321-339),
theology, respect for asceticism and Vedic sacrificial rituals relative to the
121
recognized superiority of bhakti, etc. In the Nārāyaṇīya (MBh 12.322.1 ff.),
Krishna is only one of the forms of Narayana, and bears the name of Vasudeva,
the Supreme Soul, whose religion is the monotheistic (ekāntika) Bhāgavata faith.
In the same Nārāyaṇīya (MBh 12.337.63 ff.), Bhagavān Nārāyaṇa, the Supreme
Krishna’s career in the BhG, like that of the legendary ṛṣi Narayana, may
have begun in the RV where there is a ṛṣi named Krishna who composed a hymn
(RV 8.85) dedicated to the Nasatyas, and his son Viśvaka also dedicates his
hymns RV 1.116 and 1.117 to the Nasatyas and explicitly mentions Krishna as
110 Jaiswal (1981:37-38, 45-47) critiques this position, and argues that followers of both traditions
worshipped Narayana as the supreme deity, i.e. Bhagavān or bhagavat, and that the difference
between the two was social rather than theological orientation (46):
The main difference between the Bhāgavatas and the Pāñcarātras seems to lie in the
fact that whereas the Bhāgavata devotees of Nārāyaṇa had accepted the brāhamaṇical
social order, the Pāñcarātras were indifferent to and were perhaps against it. It is
generally accepted that the Pāñcarātras had prominent Tantric leanings, and Tantricism,
on the whole, was more popular with the lower classes. Bhāgavatism, on the other hand,
gained support of the ruling classes and championed the varṇa system.
Cf. Flood (1996:122), who makes a distinction between ‘tantric’ Vaishnavism, evident in the later
(c. seventh or eighth centuries CE) Pāñcarātra texts, and an ‘orthodox’ Vedic Vaishnavism of the
Bhāgavatas. Flood (123) also believes that, as used in early Vaishnavism, “The term bhāgavata
might have referred to a general tradition or orientation towards theistic conceptions and modes
of worship, particularly of Vāsudeva-Kṛṣṇa, rather than a specific sect in the sense that the
Pāñcarātrins or Vaikhānasas were specific sects.”
122
his father (avasyate stuvate kṛṣṇiyāya ṛjūyate nāsatyā sacībhiḥ . . . RV
1.116.23). 111 Macdonell and Keith (1958, in Preciado-Solis 1984:12) believe that
this Krishna may be identical with a ‘Kṛṣṇa Āṅgirasa’ mentioned in the Kauṣītaki
Āṅgirasa, who taught Krishna the secret meaning of Vedic sacrifice. Some
scholars see parallels in the sage’s advice in this passage and certain ideas
found later in the Bhagavad Gītā, like self-control and selfless action. Other
scholars dispute this and see no link between the ChU’s Krishna and the MBh’s
Krishna. Malinar (2007:249 n.9) comments that “While a direct connection seems
111 Cf. Parpola’s (2005:21) belief that since the Vedic tribe/clan of Yadu (traditionally identified as
Krishna’s tribe/clan) belonged to the first immigrant wave of Ṛgvedic Aryans, they probably
worshipped the Nasatyas rather than Indra – the preferred deity of the second wave of Ṛgvedic
Aryans.
112 Note Bryant’s (2007:4, 16 n.5) skepticism regarding such an identification. Preciado-Solis
(1984:12) speculates on the possibility of another poet-seer also named Krishna in the RV who
composed hymns RV 10.42, 10.43, and 10.44 dedicated to Indra. Given the association of other
Atharvan Vaishnavite elements with Krishna, including the Nasatyas, at least the first poet-seer
may be linked to the later deity Krishna, who is represented as the Lord-charioteer in the BhG? If
a link is made, some brahmanical aspect of MBh’s Krishna had been foreshadowed by the RV.
123
The connection of Krishna, son of Devaki and pupil of Ghora Āṅgirasa, to
devotees, the ChU allusion places Krishna in the Vedic frame of reference. 113
on, through the c. fifth to third century BCE texts, like Yāska’s Nirukta (2.1.2),
deification” of Krishna “from a clan hero (as he is depicted in the epic) to the god
and then the ‘highest god’, provided with a fully fledged theological interpretation
in the BhG.” According to Flood (1996:119-120), “By the second century BCE
113 See Jaiswal (1981:73) and Preciado-Solis (1984:24-27) for this debate. Also, Preciado-Solis
(11-16) examines in detail the various references to ‘kṛṣṇa’ in the RV (1.140.3; 1.164.47; 4.7.9;
8.43.6; 8.96.13-15; 10.3.2; 10.20.9; 10.61.4; etc.) and concludes that these are instances of the
adjectival form for ‘black’ or ‘dark’. Nevertheless, according to Preciado-Solis (36), Vedic texts,
including the RV, have several mentions of tribes, like the Vṛṣṇis, Yādavas and Bhojas, who are
traditionally associated with Krishna, and this may suggest that these tribes and families “had
already a tradition of a certain hero of this name” as far back as the Vedic times. Or, like
Narayana, Krishna was also an ‘Atharvan’ ṛṣi in the RV who comes to be deified by his lineage.
Certainly, his worship of the Nasatyas in the RV, the gods’ connection with the Yādavas, and
Krishna’s representation as the Lord-charioteer in the MBh, etc. should be considered.
114 Also, see c. 150 BCE Patañjali’s Mahābhāṣya commentary (on Pāṇini 4.3.98, 4.3.64, 3.1.26,
Viṣṇu in the Mahābhārata, appearing, for example, three times in the Bhagavad
By the second century BCE, Vedic sacrificial religion had come under heavy
criticism of ascetic traditions, like Jainism and Buddhism, and the Mauryan
Emperor Ashoka. Yet, in the BhG, “Kṛṣṇa’s supremacy is in various ways related
to sacrifice: he was made the protector of all sacrifices and asks his followers to
115 ‘Vāsudeva’ is Krishna’s patronymic, perhaps acquired through identification with the supreme
deity of the Vṛṣṇi or Satvata/Satvant clan, who initially may have been a Vṛṣṇi hero or king.
Vṛṣṇis became fused with the Yādava clan of the north-west city of Dvārakā. Krishna, the son of
Devakī, may have been a deified warrior hero of the Yādavas, and after the fusion of the two
tribes/clans, came to be identified as Vasudeva-Krishna (Flood 1996:119). Witzel (1997:305 n.
222) says that ‘Satvants’ are “already known to the RV; according to later texts they lived south of
the Yamunā.” Of all the other tribes / clans / lineages associated with Vasudeva or Krishna, like
Surasenas (Greek “Sourasenoi”) – a branch of the Yadu dynasty, Andhakas, Bhojas, and Vṛṣṇis,
the Yadu tribe is of the oldest repute, since it features in the RV as one of the five major Ṛgvedic
Aryans to have first migrated into the Panjab area (Witzel 1995b:327-328). Vṛṣṇis are mentioned
in later texts like the c. 900 BCE Taittirīya Saṃhitā (TS 3.2.9.3) and the c. 700 BCE. Śatapatha
Brāhmaṇa (3.1.1.4). It may be that the Vṛṣṇis were a Yādava clan from the RV times, or that they
later identified themselves as Yādava in a process of Sanskritization. In the latter case, the
Vṛṣṇis fused themselves with the Yādava because of the Yādava’s Ṛgvedic credentials, which
made them a desirable target group with which to identify for prestige reasons. In this scenario,
the warrior hero of the Vṛṣṇis would then be identified with the warrior hero of the Yādavas due to
similar characteristics, both becoming competing variants for the variable of ‘warrior hero’. In
order to conventionalize one variant and avoid synonymy, the fused tribe would reinterpret
Vasudeva as Krishna’s patronymic. Identification of ‘Vasudeva’ as Krishna’s father was a
retrospective narrative act. The earliest, unambiguous mention of Krishna (ChU 3.17.1-6) is by
his metronymic, Devakīputra. For a detailed discussion of varied epigraphic and numismatic
evidence relating to the worship of Vasudeva and/or Krishna in early history of Vaishnavism, see
Malinar 2007 (252-256).
125
dedicate their lives to him as a continuous sacrifice” (Malinar 2007:4), 116 alhough
now, after the Upanishadic and non-Vedic Buddhist-Jain ascetic reformation, the
emphasis was on the sacrificial fire of knowledge. Within the same context, the
The MBh was shaped by social, cultural, political events beginning c. 400
BCE, and it contained a brahmanical response to the rise and success of Veda-
Nanda empire at Patliputra (c. 340 BCE), followed by the Mauryan dynasty (c. 317
or 314 BCE) and its overthrow by their Brahmin general Puṣyamitra Śuṅga (in
187 or 185 BCE), followed by the Kāṇva dynasty, which was also Brahmin and
ended 30 BCE. 117 Fitzgerald (2006, 2004) sees the MBh as initially an anti-
Mauryan ideological enterprise of some Brahmins who did not like the Mauryan
emperor Ashoka’s royal patronage of Buddhists, Jains, etc. over Brahmins, his
particularly, his teaching of dharma through his various edicts. In short, Ashoka
teachers of dharma. Citing Ashoka’s eighth rock edict in which he talks of his
spiritual interests and the seventh rock edict containing praises of the efficacy of
116 Krishna proclaims himself to be the Lord and enjoyer of all sacrifices in BhG 9.24, 5.29.
117 See Fitzgerald 2004:54 and 2006:276-277.
126
his dhamma policy, Malinar (2007:263) notes that Ashoka “depicts himself as a
ruler who commands not only weapons, but also knowledge.” In this respect,
king. 118 The Buddha and Emperor Ashoka represented the form of mixed secular
and kṣatriyas” favored by earlier tradition and again argued for in the MBh
major causes for anxiety were material and philosophical competition with
118 Cf. Parpola’s (2005:15-16) reference to Gautama/Gotama Buddha in the context of the subject
of dual kingship: “In India, the Buddhist tradition parallels the universal emperor wielding supreme
political power with the buddha- wielding supreme spiritual power.” Harvey (1990:16) notes that
“This paralleling of a Cakkavatti [Skt. Cakravarti, ‘Wheel-turning’, emperor] and a Buddha is also
made in relation to other events of Gotama’s life, and indicates the idea of a Buddha having
universal spiritual ‘sovereignty’ – i.e. influence – over humans and gods. It also indicates that
Gotama renounced the option of political power in becoming a Buddha. . . . He did, however,
teach kings and give teachings on how best to govern a realm.”
In Hinduism, Parpola (2005:16) notes, first “The idea of such a dual kingship manifests
itself above all in the integral connection of kṣatra ‘political power’ and brahman ‘sacred power’,
the two concepts being represented by the king and the royal chief priest the purohita;” and
second “This dual kingship is associated with the chariot and therewith the [horse-related divine
twins] Aśvins.”
119 Cf. Malinar’s (2007:100) comment that “While in Buddhism the royal and the soteriological
functions are separated in the figure of the cakravartin and the buddha respectively (cf. Reynolds
1972), the BhG and also later texts combine both in the figure of the highest god, who protects
the created world, but also guarantees liberation from it.” However, the Buddha did combine
aristocratic and brahmanic functions in his person, while Ashoka combined rājañya (royal) and
brahmanic (teaching and promoting dharma) functions, though they both may be promoting a
different understanding of dharma. In this context, it is noteworthy that “Ashoka does not depict
himself as a cakravartin in the Buddhist sense” of a “dharma-promoting king” (Malinar 264, 266)
even when he was clearly and explicitly promoting dharma. She believes that “self-perception of
kings as cakravartins” may have been a later development.
127
Buddhists and Jains, and the erosion (saṃkara) of the varṇādharma system of
clearly demarcated social functions. At issue was more than biological mixing
kinds of work for their varṇā type and the social, political, and economic
Brahmin-supporting king like Ashoka, and Brahmin kings like Śuṅga and Kāṇva.
four classes/castes (4.13), and there is a great emphasis on doing one’s own
proper duty (svadharma, svakarma): “Better [is] one’s own duty done imperfectly,
than duty of another [class/caste] well performed” (BhG 3.35) and “Devoted to
one’s own duty, a man attains perfection” (BhG 18.45, also 18.46).
two of the most important arguments governing the text’s basic formation
were: the covertly anti-Mauryan (especially anti-Aśokan) argument that
proper rule should be brāhmaṇya, that is, based on reverence for unique
Brāhamaṇ priority in the determination of social, political, and cultural
matters; and the argument (against the Śuṅga and Kaṇva examples) that
governance and its intrinsic violence are inappropriate for men of the most
refined natures and sensibilities, that is, Brāhmaṇs.
128
Citing the “polyphonic” voices in the text, Fitzgerald (2006:270) does issue
a note of caution that “I do not think that the main MBh was regulated exclusively
and entirely by the ideological program I see operating in it.” He then writes of
the history of the epic: “it is my belief that many elements of a heroic narrative
centering upon a great Kuru-Pāñcāla war existed before the ‘main’, anti-
Depending on one’s point of view, the purge was instigated or aided by Krishna,
who functioned as the charioteer-guide to Arjuna (Indra’s son in the MBh). 121 In
120 Fitzgerald (2004:55) relates the purge to the concept of avatāra “in the original sense of that
term, avatāraṇa — a ‘taking down’, a relieving of a burden that oppressed the earth (Hacker
[1978]). (Only later did this term come to signify the ‘descent’ of a deity for such a rescue
mission.)”
121 Cf. Hiltebeitel 1982 and 1984, where he discusses the relationship between Krishna and
Arjuna as fellow-charioteers, and suggests certain affinities between Arjuna and Shiva in terms of
their destructiveness.
129
of association with a successful religious teacher and a powerful emperor.
royal patronage and protection of the Brahmins and their regaining the top-most
position in the social hierarchy and thus their sacred authority. The model of
kingship privileged in the MBh is dualistic, in which the Brahmin priest wields
brāhmaṇya Krishna the mixed royal and spiritual authority represented by the
Buddha and Ashoka. Krishna was a warrior/Kshatriya hero but in his pivotal role
In the BhG — the part of the MBh which found most resonance in the
conceptual pool — the above aspect of Krishna’s character was favored over two
other aspects found in the rest of the epic: the pastoral cowherd (Gopala) aspect
and the epic hero (Vasudeva) of questionable morality. First, the authors of the
co-wife and all five Pāṇḍavas’ wife, Draupadī, and asked to change ‘into the
130
dress/disguise of a cowmaid’ (gopālikāvapuḥ, MBh 1.213.17). “As argued
who also — in full awareness of the epic poets — takes on his famous cowherd
Draupadī is that of the junior wife to the senior wife, and perhaps of the cowherd
pastoral background of the two most prominent Kshatriya religious figures of the
time, Mahavira and Gautama Buddha, whose teachings and followers were
accorded royal patronage and more, the Brahmins authors of the MBh were
compelled to emphasize those aspects of Krishna’s character that would put him
aspect of a Kshatriya hero would also not have done the trick, because, outside
epic, Krishna gives the Pāṇḍavas “frequently devious and unscrupulous advice,”
the epic, especially during the war. These were nicely summed up by
Duryodhana in MBh 9.61. Thus, in the absence of the BhG, the image of Krishna
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in the MBh would have been at best complex and at worst unflattering.
The Brahmin authors of the MBh selected and emphasized the royal-
a contrast to the Buddha and Ashoka, the authors represent Krishna as the
brahmanic warrior who recognizes the four-fold class system (BhG 4.13), grants
some validity to the Vedic sacrifice and the Vedas (BhG 3.10-15; 4.12; 10.22),
as the highest god recalibrates power relations: “The king is now defined in
relation to the highest god, who unites the ascetic power of the detached and
liberated yogin with the creative and protective dimensions of his being the
overlord of all beings, including kings. This limits the chances of kings to depict
122For instance, see Malinar’s (2007:264-265) discussion of Ashoka’s model of kingship in which
the king is required to behave correctly, practice self-control and restrict royal power through
adherence to dharma.
132
and present themselves as divine.” Malinar (2007:98-100) relates this to the idea
of avatāra nascent in BhG 4.6-8 (the word itself does not appear in the BhG).
She interprets the BhG’s idea of avatāra not as ‘descent’ but as ‘appearance’,
and finds a connection between “Kṛṣṇa’s birth and the creation of ‘apparitional
reordering through his favorite, royal devotee, Arjuna: the ideal model of
123Though, to be sure, the ideal was not always followed in practice: many Brahmins, like the
Satavahanas for instance, continued to assume kingship in the centuries following the
composition and transmission of the MBh. The Satavahanas (c. 50 BCE – 225 CE), who ruled in
the middle peninsula of southern India (Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh today) claimed to be
Brahmins who destroyed Kshatriyas (khatiyas), but, interestingly, they “refrained from taking
imperial titles” (Thapar 2003:226-227).
133
Krishna’s cosmic and royal aspects also converge in his cosmic or universal form
cosmic form as a royal god with a specific ‘four-armed iconography’ 124 that Arjuna
the BhG — where Krishna proclaims that ‘Among the Adityas I am Vishnu’
manifestation as Aditya’. In either case, the identity between the two was
speak.
Hiltebeitel (2007:24) says that the MBh was “written to move people, that it
succeeded in doing so, and that what it has to say about Krishna is vital to both
the authorial motivation and the text’s success. Krishna’s divinity is not a literary
124 Following Srinivasan (1997), Malinar attaches some significance to this ‘iconography’ and
remarks on its repetition at other junctures in the epic (MBh 16.9.19-20; 5.129). She also relates
it to “the structure of Vedic kingship expressed in the consecration and other royal rituals”
(2007:170).
134
Krishna as Arjuna’s charioteer-guide during the pivotal part of the epic and in the
times — that of the Nasatyas, the divine charioteer / purohita / brahmana guide
(Krishna) and his teammate the warrior / king (Arjuna). 125 The relationship
between the two, now represented as a relationship between a god and a king,
can also be read in terms of bhakti. 126 For instance, while discussing the epic
125 Cf. Malinar’s (2007:180-181) view that sees the relationship between Krishna and Arjuna in
these roles as the opposite: for her, in the imminent ‘sacrifice of war’, Krishna is the sacrificial
fire, the presiding god and the royal patron of the sacrifice. Krishna is the king; whereas Arjuna is
a rājarṣi, ‘a royal seer in the position of a priest’, who articulates his vision of Krishna’s cosmic
form in a hymn. Malinar makes no reference to the model of dual kingship in the mythology of the
Nasatyas as a possible paradigm for the relationship of Krishna and Arjuna. One final note on the
identification of Krishna-Arjuna team with the Nasatyas: the equine gods have twin ‘sons’ who
are also part of the MBh story as Arjuna’s youngest brothers, but they have a low status in the
fraternal hierarchy and ‘bit parts’ on the epic stage. There is more to identification of divinities
than ‘blood relations’ as we have seen in the other cases covered in this discussion.
126 Though appearing to define bhakti as an exercise as easy as ‘offering a leaf, a flower, a fruit,
or water in devotion’ (BhG 9.26) and a path to god accessible to ‘women, Vaishyas, even
Shudras’ (BhG 9.32), the emphasis throughout the BhG is on ascetic, self-less, disciplined action
dedicated to god.
135
Kṛṣṇa’s power and, ultimately, his transcendent state of being (cf.
Biardeau 1997).
Malinar (13) continues with the argument that in this paradigm bhakti is a ‘secret’
Bhakti here is no different from ascetic discipline and sacrificial activity, and
philosophy in the MBh and the BhG, beside some aspects of Upanishadic,
Buddhist and Jain philosophies, like asceticism and the ethic of nonviolence.
Fitzgerald (2004:72) says that “Because many in the Brāhmaṇ tradition had
yoga and the ethics of harmlessness between 700 and 200 BCE, the reaction of
the Mahābhārata carried many of these ideas along with it.” The second most
(2004:72) was in “the abundant and open way that the Mahābhārata presented a
That the authors of the MBh/BhG were bi- or multilingual in non-Aryan and
Aryan, extra-Vedic and Vedic languages and cultures should by now be clear.
The epic’s inclusion of both philosophical arguments and devotional bent in its
127 See Kuznetsova’s (2006) discussion of the conceptual continuities for more detail.
136
structure and stories, and most importantly in its representation of Krishna’s
divinity, perhaps indicates that the authors were also bilingual in both these
The degree of familiarity with both codes is relative to one’s interests, family
two groups at two ends who are exclusively monolingual in one of the two codes.
There is a large middle class that maintains both codes, and uses them
code and the religious ideals are foregrounded, even when the other code and its
2.7 Summary
Perhaps reflecting similar concerns of earlier Vedic times, the authors of the MBh
who were negotiating the transition from Vedic to Hindu society had three
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overriding concerns: kingship (relationship between Brahmins and Kshatriyas),
society (social relations, kin relations, and family relations), and devotion
In the epic text, the Brahmin authors captured the change that had
society gradually shifted and changed the nature of religious conceptual input,
and this in turn changed the cognitive patterns in practitioners’ minds and
sacrifice to selfless action to bhakti. There was a shift in emphasis on the kind of
To meet the challenges of that time, the Brahmin authors tried to establish
new norms of religiosity different from those of the Vedic times, which had less
social value at the time. These new norms subsequently became entrenched and
Vedic religiosity faded though the idea of Vedic prestige remained. The authors
across the dominant traditions at the time and thus had cognitive salience. This
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maximized the possibility of attracting people of various persuasions to their fold.
Also, to attract attention and followers, they made some innovative re-
from the MBh with fewer independent, unassimilated, unique gods than the many
more we went in with, who had been introduced into the Vedic pantheon over
centuries.
dualistic Sāṃkhya-Yoga ideas into the Vedic religion and into the MBh. The
ascetic-teachers’ who were attracting royal patronage for their followers and their
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yogic-teacher’ or brahmanic warrior — his teachings, and the traditions
associated with him then became the new norm. Thus, through the MBh and
especially the BhG, the Brahmins caused differential replication of the concept of
Krishna. They changed the ‘activation value’ of the variant of Krishna as the
preferred religious figure among many by incorporating him in the Vedic fold and
The authors of the MBh were successful because they presented their
religious philosophy through selecting particular concepts and terms that were
140
more familiar to the people due to frequency of use — this meant that the
concepts and terms were more easily processed cognitively, as well as more
easily entrenched. The authors of the MBh seem to have followed Keller’s
hypermaxim (§ 1.3.3.1 above): ‘Communicate in such a way that you are socially
authors set him apart from other competitors of people’s devotional attention. In
the MBh and particularly the BhG, the authors also followed the maxim:
‘Communicate in such a way that you are noticed’. At the same time for reasons
the new with the old because it is important to ‘Communicate like the people
around you’.
religion and altered it in order to accommodate to the new audience who were
more familiar with ascetic ideals and devotional practices focused on a singular
religious figure like the Buddha or Mahavira or Vasudeva-Krishna. This led to the
Brahmins also maintained their Vedic heritage albeit in a newer form which was
141
translatable across various communities leading to assimilation of more people to
They adjusted their religious paradigm to the variants associated with the
social-religious group made powerful by virtue of royal patronage. But they did it
142
3. The evolution of Krishna of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and Vraj
aspect of Krishna’s legend was not emphasized in the main text of the MBh,
with Vishnu made Krishna of the BhG a prestigious god worthy of increasing
royal patronage and association. Calling the BhG the central text of the
broad basis with royal and brahmanical support.” 128 The connection between
developments in the political and religious worlds since the Vedic times
continued in the first millennium CE. This period culminated in the c. tenth-
128 For a brief overview of royal patronage of Vaishnava Bhagavata tradition in the centuries
between the composition of the MBh and the BhP see Colas (2003). There is epigraphic evidence
of aristocratic devotion to a Bhagavat Vasudeva from the second to first centuries BCE: two
inscriptions from Besnagar (near Sanchi, Madhya Pradesh), two from Chitorgarh district of
Rajasthan, and one from Nanaghat cave in Maharashtra. Two of these inscriptions also mention
the patronage of Vedic rituals by the same devotee or their family. One Besnagar inscription
sums up the requirements for a place in heaven — self-control, generosity, and vigilance (dama,
tyāga, apramāda), three virtues also extolled in the MBh 11.7.19; 5.34.14 (Malinar 2007:254,
Brockington 1998:266, Colas 231). If we take into account Malinar’s (267-269) separation of
three layers within the BhG — the earliest from the Ashokan period; the second, when Krishna is
made “the model of ideal royal and yogic activity in that he is declared to be the highest god,”
dated between the second and first centuries BCE; and the last layer, including the final redaction
of the entire text in Mathura, dated to the early Kushana period c. first century CE — then these
inscriptions would be evidence for increasing royal support of Vasudeva-Krishna during the
period when he comes to be seen or represented as ‘aristocratic-yogic-teacher’ god related to
Vishnu.
143
century text Bhāgavata Purāṇa (BhP), which marked the next big turn in
Krishna’s story when his Gopala aspect came to the fore in full force.
During this period, the MBh’s narrative tradition of itihāsa (‘so it was’ or
history) evolved in the new genre of Purāṇas (stories of the ancient past), which
included the Viṣṇu Purāṇa (ViP) and the BhP. 129 These two Sanskrit texts
considered a Purāṇa because of its content and also because “It acts as a hinge
which holds together the epic-purāṇic diptych of Kṛṣṇa” (Matchett 2001:23). 130
What began in the HV found its fullest expression in the BhP’s Book 10: in both
129 Rocher (1986) and Matchett (2003), Bailey (2003), Rao (2004) detail the various aspects of
the genre. There is an interesting connection with materials covered in chapter 2 above: “The
earliest known appearance of the word purāṇa, as a name for a literary genre, is in Atharvaveda
11.7.24, and it occurs several times, both in singular and the plural, in the Mahābhārata”
(Matchett 2003:132). The Purāṇas document the brahmanical expression of assimilated popular
traditions and as such “must not be seen as random collections of old tales, but as highly
selective and crafted expositions and presentations of worldviews and soteriologies, compiled by
particular groups of Brahmanas to propagate a particular vision” (Flood 1996:111).
130 Matchett (2001:12) believes that like all the Sanskrit Purāṇas, the HV, the VP, and the BhP
were “produced by Brahmins, so that they all three express some kind of brāhmaṇical ideology.”
According to her, each version of this ideology varies a little due to the particular circumstance of
each text’s composition. In terms of place and date of composition of each, she suggests (1) for
the HV, on the basis of coinciding textual and sculptural representations (around Mathura) the
Kushana period sometime between the first and the third century CE; (2) for the VP, on the basis
of historical political events and numismatic evidence the Narmada region in western India
around 400 CE; and (3) for the BhP, the generally agreed upon place and date suggested by
Hardy (1983:488), that is, the Tamil Pandya kingdom in South India the ninth or early tenth
century CE. Cf. Doniger’s (2009:370, 475) dates for the HV (c. 450 CE) and the VP (c.400-500 CE).
It is possible that the HV was composed in the Kushana period but became the MBh’s
supplement only in the Gupta period. The social-political environment during the latter was
favorable toward the brahmanical order and the need for exclusively highlighting Krishna’s
artistocratic-yogic-teacher aspect was a little less urgent thus making room for a supplementary
text full of stories of a very different nature.
144
texts, cowherd Krishna’s pastimes as a child and youth spent in Vraj were
described in detail with some small but significant differences, discussed below.
Just as the Brahmin authors of the MBh transformed the variant of epic hero
variant, similarly the Brahmin authors of the BhP altered the variant of ‘pastoral
teacher’ Krishna. I use the term ‘ludic’ to refer to the playful aspect of Krishna, 131
preferring it to ‘erotic’, because ‘erotic’ does not encompass his childhood sports.
with the gopīs, not Krishna. The adjective ‘ludic’ connects well with the Sanskrit
term ‘līlā’ (pastime, play), which defines Krishna’s activities in Vraj during his
131 ‘Ludic’ (playful) is derived from the Latin verb ‘lūdo’ (I play), which by transference can mean
‘to amuse oneself with doing’, and can also mean ‘to deceive, delude’. The de-verbal noun form is
‘lūdus’ (play, game, sport, pastime), and the corresponding derived form for the person who plays
is ‘lūdĭus’ (m. an actor). All these connotations have significance for Krishna’s character and
story in the BhP, particularly its Book 10. Cf. Ali’s (2004:156) observation about what lay at the
heart of courtly aesthetics in early medieval India, which I believe shaped the BhP’s Book 10:
This is the idea of ‘playfulness’ or ‘sportiveness’ – an important and polyvalent concept
denoted by a large lexical set, including various derivatives from the verbal roots √krīḍ, to
play; √ lal, to play; √ram, to rejoice or play; (vi +) √las, to shine, glitter or frolic; (vi +)
√nud, to pierce, play (a musical instrument [Krishna’s flute!], or entertain; and perhaps,
most importantly, the noun līlā, sport or play, from which the denominative verb līlāyati
was derived. In the courtly context, these terms could refer to specific games, contests
and entertainments enjoyed by men and women at court (the chief of which, as we shall
see, was the game of romance), but also, partly by extension from this, a sort of physical
inclination and even behavioural disposition.
132 See Matchett (2001:171-173) for a discussion of Krishna’s representation as līlāvatāra
(manifestation for fun) and Brayant (2003:xxii-xxvi) for an analysis of the various meanings of ‘līlā’
in the BhP. Bryant makes a distinction between the stories of Krishna’s childhood and youthful
145
To the extent that the authors of the BhP represented Krishna as a
detached teacher — they framed the tales of Krishna’s childhood pastimes and
12.13.11) — they did not alter his by then well-entrenched brahmanic character.
altered from the HV — such that now Krishna himself was desireless but multiple
cowherd women attained him explicitly through sexual desire (kāmāt, BhP
the relationship between god and his devotees. As I argue below, both changes
and continuities in Krishna’s legend in the BhP were due to social, political, and
religious continuities and changes in the first millennium in North and South
India.
and east in tracing the conceptual evolution of Krishna of the MBh; I now do the
same between north and south in order to understand the conceptual evolution of
Krishna of the BhP, as the text is most likely from India’s Tamil-speaking region.
I begin with the transition from the first millennium BCE to CE.
pastimes (Vraj līlā), and those of his adult activities as a warrior, statesman, and king. However, I
propose that Krishna’s Vraj līlā also has a regal dimension — which becomes apparent when
viewed in relation to courtly literature and political life — that should be taken into account. I
discuss this in detail further below.
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3.1 On the threshold of social-religious change
The period between the empires of the Mauryan dynasty (c. 324-185 BCE) and
the next biggest, the Gupta dynasty (c. 320-550 CE), saw a few significant
the influx into India of Greeks (Yavanas), Scythians (Shakas), Bactrian Kushanas
routes resulting in increased trade with Greece, Central Asia, West Asia,
Northeast Africa, and Southeast Asia (Thapar 2003:234-244). This influx, and
merchant classes, had several consequences for social-religious life in India, one
of which was the rise of Vraj’s Gopala-Krishna. Below I look at the origins of the
cowherd god and his assimilation with Vasudeva-Krishna in the MBh’s HV during
this period.
Matchett (2001:7) writes that although the stories of Krishna Gopala became part
of the main Vaishnava tradition later than those of Krishna Vasudeva, they
probably circulated for some centuries earlier among the cattle-rearing tribes of
north-west and western India, most often identified as the Ābhīras. She notes the
147
concludes that “it is generally accepted that they were settled there by the third
century BCE.” Jaiswal (1981:83-88) explores the debate in detail and indicates
that the theory of the tribe’s foreign origins has some merit. Indian scholars like
Sircar and Mitra believe that the Ābhīras came to India from Central Asia almost
at the same time as the Scythians in the second century BCE. Sircar (1971a:32)
connects the Ābhīras with ‘Abiravan’ area between Herat and Kandahar in
The argument for a Central Asian identity of the Ābhīras gains support if
the cowherd god of the Ābhīras. Without making any connections with the
Central Asian and Caucasian customs of marriage by abduction, 133 Jaiswal (86-
87) discusses similar marriage customs of the Ābhīras and the Vṛṣṇis which were
Krishna’s tribal kin after they fused with Krishna’s ancestral tribe, the Yādavas
(see fn.115 above). In the MBh (1.213.5) Krishna declared the abduction and
133Cf. for instance, Kyrgyzstan’s version of the ancient practice with nomadic roots called “grab
and run” (ala kachuu), which has been featured in recent film/television (Lom 2004) and print
journalism (Matthews 2010) because of its revival since the country’s independence due to
economic reasons. Though outlawed, the custom is still practiced to varying degrees also in
Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, and in the Caucasus. Unlike the mostly non-consensual
abduction-marriages in these countries, Kazakhstan distinguishes between abduction with
consent and without consent. Compare also Ingalls’s (in Hardy 1983:70) opinion that Krishna’s
story in the HV is closer to folklore, less pious, less puritanical, pointing to a world of nomadic
cattle herders of the ‘tribal areas of the west’, whose life-style and moral codes were less
constrained and whose sexual mores were freer.
148
marriage of his sister, Subhadrā, by Arjuna to be in accordance with dharma.
detailed in the HV (87.33ff.) and the BhP (10.53.1ff.). On the basis of textual
evidence from the Purāṇas, Jaiswal concludes that the Abhiras acquired wives in
“These tribes must have lived together in close contact to have identified their
deities completely.”
The other point of overlap that allowed the identification of the two tribes
and their deities, according to Sircar (1971b:29), was the possession of large
Saṃhitā (3.2.9.3) and the Jaiminīya Upaniṣad Brāhmaṇa (1.6.1). Like the earlier
social identification including prestige, the Ābhīras, too, may have gradually
assimilated with the Yādava-Vṛṣṇi tribe for similar reasons, facilitated by similarity
Krishna was completed with the division of meaning of the two deities such that
one was made the other’s patronymic. Now the identification of a cowherd god
with the warrior hero was completed in the MBh’s HV by accommodating the
149
Krishna, and cowherd Gopala are examples of the ‘first law of propagation’ of a
variant (§ 1.3.3.3 above), that is, these processes are instances of the human
communication. They merged all these gods into one and, at the same time, they
tradition. I believe this is why the Bhāgavata practitioners and their god Krishna
were successful within the larger Hindu society from the time of the composition
As discussed earlier (§ 2.6), there is evidence that the authors of the main
text of the MBh knew of the cowherd aspect of Krishna’s character. Matchett
objects to Krishna being made the guest of honor at an assembly of kings and
allusions to many of the events included in the HV though the order in which they
appear in the MBh passage is not as in the HV, which indicates that the HV was
activities during his cowherd days was indicative of the general brahmanical
attitude toward these stories at the time of the main epic’s composition. In
150
arguing thus she discounts two things: first, she notes in passing and then
cowherd Krishna’s deeds come at the end of a long litany of objections begun
five chapters earlier (MBh 2.33). These deeds are not singled out for contempt;
they are part of a larger speech full of other insults. Second, Śiśupāla’s
summary of Krishna’s misdeeds during the war (MBh 9.61). I have suggested (§
2.6) possible cognitive and social reasons for the non-appreciation of certain
aspects of Krishna’s character in the MBh’s main text, given the environment in
which it was composed. The Brahmin authors of the MBh may well have
appreciated the stories of Krishna’s cowherd youth but may not have found them
Dating the HV to the Kushana period between the first and the third
century CE, Matchett (2001:13) questions why at this particular time the story of
increased prosperity and influence of the merchant class due to the opening of
trade with the Mediterranean world and Central Asia under foreign kings. She
believes that the rise of one branch of the Vaishya class (i.e. merchants) “created
151
became welcome” (14). She points out that in the HV 59.20-21 “the values of all
three branches of the vaiśya class (agriculture, trade and animal-rearing) are set
out forcefully.” These values are voiced by Krishna. Matchett (15-16) relates the
bhakti that developed between the time of the Mauryas and that of the Guptas,
and concludes:
Now in the Harivaṃśa Kṛṣṇa himself lives as a young vaiśya, even though
he is a kṣatriya by birth. This marks the culmination of the process which
Dandekar calls ‘the Kṛṣṇaisation of Viṣṇu’. From now on the image of the
young cowherd dominates the Vaiṣṇava imagination more and more. The
Bhagavadgītā as the teaching of the kṣatriya sage remains influential. But
at the level of the imagination and the emotions it is Rāma who comes to
be seen as God’s representative in kṣatriya terms. The figure of Kṛṣṇa
gains a more universal appeal than this, by incorporating vaiśya as well as
kṣatriya elements into his story.
brahmanization.
3.2 Society and religion in the first millennium CE North and South India
152
influence on religious matters, and (iii) the reorganization of knowledge in social-
religious texts (the Vedic texts, the MBh) by Brahmins. Other shifts were in
literature (the Vedic texts ➜ the epics), religious practices (yajña ➜ tapas ➜
processes worked in conjunction and were articulated in texts that set the stage
for the next series of transformations. This was the state of affairs in the period
As mentioned above (fn.130), the BhP was composed by Brahmins as were the
other two texts under consideration, i.e. the HV and the ViP. Matchett (2001:12)
says that all three “show a high degree of ‘creative compilation’ in their selection
cosmology. I submit that the Brahmin authors of the earliest of the three texts,
the HV, were bilingual in Vedic and folk traditions, in Sanskrit and Prakrit
languages, and in philosophical and devotional codes (Cf. § 2.2 fn.49 above).
The Gupta-period authors of the ViP were preoccupied with Hindu revival
and the retreat of Buddhist and Jain doctrines. Discussing a key passage
(3.17.9-3.18.4) and others (1.6.29-31; 1.20.28) in the text, which tells the story of
153
the defeat of the ‘demonic’ ideas of the Buddhists and Jains at the hands of the
gods with the help of Vishnu, Matchett (17) writes that the ViP as a whole was
“The figure of Viṣṇu combines Vedic resonances with the newer appeal of bhakti,
according well with the tendencies of the Gupta kings, who ‘used the mystique of
the Vedic rituals and symbolism to legitimate their authority’ while showing a
personal preference for Vaiṣṇvaism.” As its text demonstrates, then, the ViP’s
Current scholarly opinion for the provenance of the BhP points to its
the literary quality of the text and its referencing of wide range of earlier literature
may or may not have been Brahmins. Matchett (20), who believes the BhP’s
134Cf. Hardy’s (1983:493-494) statement that “besides accepting the traditional varṇa-system
with bhakti as the additional modifying factor, the author of the BhP also betrays a personal,
unreflected inclination towards brahmanism.” He analyzes the BhP’s elaborate description of the
utthāpanam ceremony of taking the new-born baby Krishna out of the house (10.7.4-17), which
was “a very elaborate Sanskritic-brahmin affair” compared to its earlier (very brief) mention in an
earlier Tamil source. From this example Hardy concludes that “the author of BhP is personally a
154
achieving pan-Indian status for the BhP, saying that even when they were critical
of Vedic orthodoxy they identified themselves closely with the Vedas and other
prestigious Sanskrit texts, and reinterpreted them in their own way. She also puts
that the BhP may have been composed in the north as the work of a group of
Pandya Brahmins who migrated from the south to some area further north
favorable to Vaishnavas after the Shaivite Cola ascendancy in the early tenth
century CE; that they then set out to incorporate within the culture of their
northern environs the values and world-view of their southern home. She
believes this idea would account for the BhP’s particular blend of Sanskrit and
Tamil qualities and “the various changes, noted by Hardy [1983:424], which it
audience.” It would also explain Ramanuja’s neglect of the BhP in his writings in
the south around the eleventh century, as well as its presence in Alberuni’s
Whether they were located in South or North India, the composers of the
BhP were Brahmins who were bilingual in Tamil and Sanskrit languages and
cultures. Just like the Atharvan Brahmins of the Vedic times, they too had social-
devoted follower of brahmin religion and accepts the claim that its representatives are superior
beings.”
155
(1966) insights into the social goals of the BhP’s southern Brahmin
group and their practices vis-à-vis orthodox (smārta) Brahmins, who followed the
‘remembered’ (smṛti) traditions having an affinity to the Vedas. 135 Van Buitenen
neither in time nor in ambience nor, probably, in space too far apart from the
how the Bhāgavatas thought of themselves and how they were thought of by
others whom they had to accommodate” (26). After quoting from the text, “a
135 Within the Tamil region, brahmanism’s presence was complex, according to Hart (1975:51-
58). There were various kinds of Brahmins, Tamil and northern migrants who were acculturated
to varying degrees: “Some of the Brahmins accepted the Tamil language and its culture
wholeheartedly, for many of the finest Tamil poets were Brahmins, and their poems do not
mention Aryan or Sanskritic ideas or customs any more than those of non-Brahmin authorship.
Thus it is clear that some of the Brahmins of ancient Tamilnad had so accommodated themselves
to the customs and beliefs indigenous to Tamilnad that they bore little resemblance to the
northern ideal of a Brahmin.” He continues, “At the same time, some Brahmins retained much of
their Northern outlook and way of life;” they introduced Vedic sacrifices, etc. Hart believes that the
earliest Brahmins associated themselves with the kings and attempted to gain their patronage
(54, 55). Some of them became poets, envoys for kings and their advisers (56). Thus, some
were more “Tamilized” than others.
156
the Bhāgavatas laid claim to being Brahmanas; it is also clear that those
who made the claim were the priests among the Bhāgavatas. The
Smārtas vehemently disputed their claim, because Bhāgavatas/Sātvatas
were traditionally (i.e., by smṛti) known to be very low class: the issue in
fact (according to the usual Dharmaśātra system, by which caste
hierarchies are made intelligible by degrees of evolution from mixed
varṇas) of a Vaiśya Vrātya. And not only does the Bhāgavata stand
condemned by his heredity but his lowliness is compounded by his
sacerdotal occupation; priest to his idol he lives off his priesthood, and,
whatever his social pretensions, he is a common pūjārī. 136
Van Buitenen (31) is convinced, and Hardy agrees with him (490), that in
Yāmuna’s text and the BhP there is a conspicuous concern with persuading
Vaishnava preoccupation. The Vedicism of the BhP is in its use of archaic Vedic
Sanskrit, and in the Bhāgavatas’ claim that it is the essence of the whole
Vedānta (BhP 12.13.15; Cf. fn.86 above). Beside the linguistic, there are social
and conceptual accommodations made in the text toward arguably the more
prestigious variants. Hardy (490) writes of the Vedas, as “the most powerful
symbol” of Hindu, northern culture which made the southern “justify its own
religious expressions in terms of the Vedas.” He notes that the BhP conformed to
the Vedas, but preserved a southern religious identity by claiming that Vishnuism
and Vishnu are what the Vedas are essentially about; it conformed to the varṇa-
system but redefined it as a scale of bhaktas, the ideal bhakta being the highest
category which even the orthodox Brahmins had to accept in order to be a true
composers of the BhP Sanskritized themselves, their practices, and their text. 137
If the BhP was indeed composed in the Pandya kingdom c. tenth century
humanism’ was formed by fusing Tamil anthropocentric attitude with the northern
which valued desire and passion directed toward a god who was both immanent
in the temple idol and transcendent beyond this ‘symbolic representation’ (Hardy
association of the royal court with the temple and of Pandya kings with Krishna in
137 Van Buitenen’s (1966:37) description of the ‘literatus’ (śiṣṭa) in the Sanskrit tradition applies to
the Bhāgavata composers of the BhP. According to him, the śiṣṭa was always bilingual in a
regional vernacular and in Sanskrit — “And his bilingualism implied a biculturalism. Just as the
bilingual man is the mediator of loans between two languages, the śiṣṭa was the mediator of
‘loans’ between his vernacular culture, as small as a village or as wide as a nation, and the
Sanskrit culture. On his capacity of absorption depended the free interflow. . . . [A text’s context]
is the way of life that local śiṣṭas, rooted in their subculture, hold to be Sanskritic.” Thus the
Bhāgavatas were the bilingual and bicultural exemplars who made the context of their Tamil
Vaishnava bhakti culture Sanskritic in their text, the BhP.
138 In the period leading up to the BhP’s composition, according to Champakalakshmi, there were
rivalries between Vedic Brahmins and those Tamil bhakti poet-saints who were also Brahmins. At
the same time the bhakti poets indirectly affirmed the status of the Vedas when they tried to
acquire a Vedic status for their Tamil hymns (2004:57, 62). The more serious opposition though
was between the Tamil bhakti poets and Buddhists and Jains: there was a “vehement
denunciation of the Jains and Buddhists as non-believers, heretics, and hence as ‘heterodox’
(55). In both Vaishnava and Shaiva Tamil bhakti poems, the privileging of embodiment, the
metaphor of human body as a temple and the emphasis on the use of the senses in the
apprehension and worship of the divine, was expressly set against the Jain idea of self-
mortification for salvation (62). In her words, the hymnists were propagating bhakti in a situation
of rivalry with the Jains and Buddhists — whose influence and dominance in royal and urban
centers like Kāñcīpuram and Madurai had been established in the pre-seventh-century period —
for social dominance and royal patronage (69). Their conflict and change resulted in decline of
Buddhism in the south and the survival of Jainism due to its adoption of the institutional and ritual
forms of Puranic religion, namely temple worship (70).
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the classical Tamil literature (Cf. Hardy 155-156, 225-226), similar associations
are not explored in the later conceptualization of Krishna in the BhP. In most
studies on the BhP, scholarly attention focuses on the conception of the religious
individual or the bhakta and their bhakti, especially with reference to the episodes
of the cowherd women’s passion for Krishna, but not on his dispassion. I believe
the realities of courtly life in early medieval India. On the basis of Ali’s (2004)
observations regarding courtly culture and political life in early medieval India
(discussed below), I venture that the BhP’s representations of Krishna and his
sources — were shaped by the mores of a royal court. Thus, the Brahmin
composers of the BhP must have been conversant with/in the language of courtly
culture and classical literature besides temple culture and religious literature that
evolved during the first millennium in Sanskritic north and Tamil south India. In
the following section I provide the broad outline of these developments that
3.2.2 Language & literature, court & temple, politics & devotion
Ramanujan and Cutler (1999:232) write that “In the culture of this time, the two
‘classicisms’ of India, that of the Guptas and that of Tamil classical poetry, seem
159
to have met.” Their meeting led to the transformation of classical Tamil genres
into the genres of bhakti. 139 Changes in language use and literature during this
period reflected changes in society and religion at large. For instance, in the
north the newer invasions, migrations, and mixing of peoples in the early
centuries of this period increased Brahmin anxiety over social order. It led them
prohibitions regarding all aspects of life including dharma, politics and material
gain (artha), and pleasure (kāma). They extended their concerns to subjects of
sciences and arts, and set about ‘disciplining’ all knowledge into grammar,
The language of these disciplines of science and art as well as religion and
used only, or primarily, for sacred texts but also as a vehicle for literary and
139Flood (1996:113) argues that the Purāṇas’ compilation and bhakti’s development must be
seen firstly in the context of the stability of the Gupta period and secondly, after the collapse of
the Guptas, in the context of the rise of regional kingdoms, particularly in the south. Cf. Doniger’s
comment that “Bhakti was created in a world “in which there was a synthesis between North
Indian and South Indian cultural forms, active interaction between several religious movements
and powerful patronage of religion” (2009:339).
160
In this context, Ali’s (2004) theses regarding the c. 350-750 CE Sanskritic
courtly culture and courtly literature are noteworthy. 140 His analysis demonstrates
that the ideas enshrined in art and literature were identical to the key concepts
found in the texts on political actions of the king and his men (14). Keeping in
mind that most of our knowledge of devotional religion’s evolution comes from
the worlds of art and literature, I argue the following. While some historiographies
of bhakti readily link its development to medieval feudalism 141 and while
scholarship on the BhP recognizes the influence of secular poetry, the impact of
140 According to Ali (2004:20), during this period a common political culture developed,
crystallized and proliferated throughout all major regions of the subcontinent. Lineages and courts
in the north (the Guptas, c. 350-550 CE) and the south (the Calukyas and Pallavas, c. 550-750
CE) adopted “a series of cultural and political conventions which included not only Sanskrit as a
lingua franca but a host of gestural, ethical, aesthetic and sumptuary practices which were
distinctly courtly in nature.” These courtly practices were next reconfigured only in the twelfth
century with the establishment of the Islamic courtly culture. Ali’s larger argument is that courtly
culture was “a complex set of practices which were formative and constitutive of political life in
early medieval India” (24).
141 See, for instance, Jaiswal (1981) and Kosambi (1970, 1961). Other scholars like Sharma
(2002) and Goyal (1989) have, respectively, dubbed the views of the former set of scholars as
‘unjustifiable’ and ‘unfounded’ ‘Marxist’ and ‘subjective’ interpretations. However, Ali (2004:104)
— who has “bracketed out the question of religion” in his study on courtly culture and political life
in early medieval India — illustrates the undeniable conceptual overlap in the religious and
political spheres. Commenting on their common key terms and concepts when analyzing the
protocol of the court he writes:
The evidence for the origin of early medieval religious ideas points instead to significant
interaction with contemporary practices and conceptions of human lordship, and the rise
and proliferation of many important ideas in both contexts seems to have been broadly
contemporaneous. In fact, religious and political notions of lordship differed more in
degree than kind. They formed part of a continuous and homologously structured ‘chain
of being’ which linked the entire cosmos. This, on the one hand, meant that the king’s
authority and mystique resembled and participated in that of the temple god, giving a
theological dimension to relationships at court. On the other hand, however, it meant that
the life of gods, housed in their sumptuous palaces, shared striking resemblances to
those of princes.
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largely ignored. 142 I see close parallels in representations of Krishna, his
devotees, and their relationship in the BhP and the courtly literature’s
142 On the general subject of southern bhakti and its milieu, Champakalakshmi (2004:67) links the
pre-BhP Tamil Vaishnava and Shaiva poetry to notions of temple service and royal service
(attāṇicēvakam), and to the chieftain-bard or patron-client or lord-servant relationship of the ‘court
model’. Hardy (1983:460-465) makes the same linkages, but he places them within the category
of ‘intellectual bhakti’, which he frames in opposition to the category of ‘emotional bhakti’,
categorized as viraha-bhakti ‘devotion in which the sentiment of ‘separation’ is cultivated’ (9). He
identifies ‘intellectual bhakti’ with northern brahmanical and ‘emotional viraha-bhakti’ with
southern folk traditions. And he considers the former as an integral part of what he calls
‘normative ideology’ or Vedantic/Upanishadic spirituality, whose spiritual premise was (14-15):
a particular form of mystical experience style brahman, the evaluation of man’s empirical
situation as saṃsāra governed by the laws of karma, and the systematized ‘spiritual
exercises’ of yoga, designed to lead to the state of liberation, mokṣa. (In Buddhist
terminology this appears as nirvāṇa, duḥkha, pratītyasamutpāda, and dhyāna.) Whether,
as ‘Hinduism’, related back to the Vedas or, as Buddhism, on new grounds, both the early
Upaniṣads and the Buddha’s teaching share, in my opinion, the same ideology, in
contrast to the earlier Vedic approach to the world.
Hardy assails against the normative ideology’s “negative attitude against the whole empirical
personality,” which of course includes the mind, ego, sense-impressions, and emotions (16). He
believes that, for instance, objections against sexual desire (kāma), enumerated in the Kāmasūtra
40-45 before its author proclaims its validity in sūtra 51, are “objections behind which we can
sense the prejudice of the normative ideology against physical pleasures” (390). Elsewhere, he
writes of the normative ideology’s “tendency to suppress the senses, sensuous enjoyment and
sensual beauty” (465); and its intolerance for “emotionalism” (480). In Hardy’s nearly 700-pages-
long celebration of emotional bhakti, only once does he recognize the role of intellectual, mental
faculties in the expression of emotions in southern bhakti poetry and its culmination in the BhP,
but qualifies it with this: “The difference lies in the fact that the emotions, fed by the senses, are
here the primary locale and means of religious experience” (542 fn.205). Granted, but the
categorical distinctions he draws throughout his book are problematic, because of his complete
disregard for the possibilities that (1) the earlier, ‘normative’ Vedantic yogic intellectualism itself
could only have emerged in and become a norm through religious practice, that is, it was not
foisted by some abstract authority; (2) the so-called ‘brahmanical normative intellectual’
enterprise may in fact have been grounded in the concerns of very worldly courtly culture and
political life; and (3) the emotional bhakti represented in the BhP was enmeshed in a distinctive
gender-biased view of female sexuality, which was not flattering to women. I infer the first point
from tracing the social-religious history of the late Vedic period (§ 2.4.3 above); the latter two
critiques are based on the studies by Ali (2004) and Coleman (2002, 2001) discussed below. The
focus of analyses by Hardy, Champakalakshmi, and Coleman is on the bhakti side of the
equation, not on the conceptualization of Krishna per se. Ali’s insights, derived from non-religious
Sanskrit sources (i.e. excluding classical Tamil literature), are pertinent to analyzing the
representation of Krishna in his relationship with the cowherd women in the BhP.
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relationships. Indeed, I view the BhP’s representation of earlier pastoral
production of a (dramatic) text for a courtly audience. The authors of the BhP
reworked the HV’s story using the conceptual categories familiar to its courtly
audience. I discuss this further in section 3.4 below. Therefore, Ali’s conclusions
regarding political life and literature of the period preceding the BhP’s
Gopala-Krishna.
According to Ali (2004), the dominant concerns of the people of the court
were procedural, aesthetic, and ethical in nature. Codes of style and protocol
medieval society” (8). 143 These ideas shaped the conception of individual and
social being. Courtly manners (i.e. appearance, outward bearing, and etiquette –
for human relations, produced a certain type of ethical ‘subject’ and defined his
143The courtly concept of beauty was a domain of bodily, gestural, verbal and ethical refinement:
“the practice of alaṁkāra, or adornment, functioned both as a ‘technology’ of self-transformation
and an idiom of communication” (Ali 2004:23). Court poetry and other practices were thus
acculturative mechanisms through which aspiring men and local élites entered into the ‘good
society’. In the context of bhakti literature, compare for instance Hardy’s (1983:534-538)
discussion which points to the BhP’s emphasis on Krishna’s “ravishing beauty” which has “the
direct consequence and the necessary effect” of making the cowherd women of Vraj love him to
the point of forgetting their dharma and family responsibilities.
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career. The various hierarchies of relations at court converged in the single
functions of all the king’s men were grounded in personal obligation to him. And
“Both in terms of ideology and realpolitik, the measure of this obligation was
loyalty,” which was usually denoted by the terms bhakti (devotion) or anurāga
(attachment). 144 Ali (105) continues: “Loyalty or attachment to the lord was the
inner disposition which was to inform the actions and labour which constituted
service (sevā).”
dispositions in courtly texts, and a single affective language was used to denote
both personal and political relationships. 145 Therefore, even formal interactions,
like the court protocols, were conceived in affective terms (184). The delineation,
the emotive response to phenomena experienced [so how is this different from Ali’s northern
materials and the shaping of disposition, etc.?]. Elements emerging from ‘folk religion’ were
164
the poetics and poetry shaped the formation of an ‘interpretive community’ of
authors and audiences at the court (189). Ali reads the structure of emotions and
dispositions laid out in aesthetic manuals like the Nāṭyaśāstra (NS) and
was about teaching people how to feel (191). Thus the aesthetic was also
didactic. The BhP also combines these two functions in its text: it can be seen as
Poetry and drama played an integral part in educating the people at court
coloured by it, just as in the encounter with Northern influences it was to play the dominant role”
(149). He writes that during the classical caṅkam period (up to the third century CE)
Krishnism/Vaishnavism had grained access to two royal courts: “that of Kāñcī at the very fringe of
Tamil culture but more open to Northern influences, and that of Maturai.” Krishna/Vishnu was also
known at the popular level, and Hardy (157-158) speculates on a possible distinction between
royal Kshatriya Vishnu and popular Shudra Krishna at that time. Krishna/Vishnu is identified as
Māyōṉ (‘person of dark complexion’, “a Tamil translation of the Skt. kṛṣṇa / Kṛṣṇa” 153), who was
peripheral during this period and not yet knows as ‘the lover of the gopīs’ (157). His greater
integration into the literary tradition, more specifically into the poetic ‘landscape of jasmine’ (the
mullai tiṇai), was advanced by the poetic theory formulated in the Tolkāppiyam, c. third to fifth
century (158). The landscape has the following poetic-emotive-symbolic associations (160-161):
wife waiting for the return of her husband (from abroad, from work), separation from lover; the
rainy season and the late evening (both related to the return home of travelers, warriors, and
monks); jasmine flower which blossoms in early winter, in the region of the forest, inhabited by
cowherds (in turn related to cows and bulls, milk products, and Krishna the Cowherd ‘Gopala’).
Hardy also acknowledges the association of the rainy season (the monsoon) with waiting in
Prakrit and Sanskrit lyrics.
According to Hardy (1983:218), the various Tamil names of Krishna/Vishnu, Māyōṉ,
Māyaṉ, Māyavaṉ, and Māl, have at their base the nominal root *mā ‘black’. On the basis of the
evidence he analyzes, all these names “are different Tamil renderings of the Skt. name Kṛṣṇa ‘the
Black One’.” The root *mā has further semantic fields of ‘great’ and ‘confusion’, thus Māl is also a
‘great man’, and one who ‘infatuates the mind’ thus is the ‘mysterious, inscrutable one’ (219).
165
through outward signs was “a strategic preoccupation” for both subordinates and
men of rank and power (Ali 2004:194-196). The literature on political policy
exclusively ‘internal states’ — “all affective states had gestural and behavioural
symptoms” (197-198). All this must have contributed to something like a ‘science
a capacity, springing from the necessities of court life, which enabled men
and women to understand the dispositions, designs and mental make-up
of other people. It was complemented by a pronounced self-regard or
circumspection, for just as a man was to know the dispositions and
capacities of others, he was to know his own if he was to deploy them to
his advantage. This may be one way in which we can understand the
tireless recommendations towards affective self-restraint mentioned in the
manuals on artha and kāma. This was less an expression of any
‘ascetical’ or renunciative tendency in Indian culture than very worldly
advice to worldly men. Utmost care and regard were to be applied to the
proper management and display of inner mental states. 147
dynamic tension in court life. Besides observing others, guarding and managing
the external signs of one’s own disposition was important (200). The mastery of
147 Ali 2004 (198-199) and Elias 1983 (104-106). Cf. Hardy’s (1983:13-17) definition of ascetical
or renunciative tendency in Indian culture as a ‘normative ideology’, and then his repeated
assertion of its opposition to the earthy, sensual, sexual, erotic, emotional, beauteous aspects of
secular or religious life (46, 76, 103, 112, 127, 197, 390-391, 401, 465, 480, 484-485, 537-538).
166
precondition for worldly success (204). Aesthetics thus provided its courtly
but also a ‘subjective’ orientation to this system so that it enabled men and
effectively (206).
The preferred theme of courtly poetry was erotic love, and Ali places the
associated with ‘brahmanical’ or religious ideology, but which have rather more to
do with worldly concerns (2004:237). 148 The texts on polity were emphatic that
the prince’s training should begin with a turning inward to master his own self,
particularly the senses (239). Self-discipline and mastery over the senses were
148 For instance, Ali (2004:239-240) writes that conceptions of the self had long used political
imagery in conceiving of the inner relations of the self. He presents the famous Upanishadic
formulation (Cf. Kaṭhopaniṣad 3.3-4) in which the self (ātman) is like a king in his chariot, with his
driver (the intellect) using his reigns (the mind), to control the five horses (the senses). He says
that by the early medieval period of our discussion, the image had changed considerably. In an
eighth-century inscription, “the soul is compared to the king, the mind to his minister, the group of
senses to his circle of feudatories and speech and the other organs to various royal servants.
Such metaphors not only reveal the evolution of political structures as ways of imagining the
insides of people but, just as importantly, reveal something about the relationships that men at
court were enjoined to have with themselves. So the normal and properly ‘functioning’ self not
only implied relations of internal hierarchy, but also involved active mastery and even coercion.”
In texts on polity, victory of the senses (indriyavijaya) was equated with vinaya (self-discipline,
restraint, humility), and ‘vinaya’ is conceptually and etymologically related to concepts of nīti
(policy) and naya (directed conduct) in relation to others “which formed the goal of the prince’s
and the courtier’s training.” Kauṭilya calls ‘conquering the senses’ the whole of his teaching
(Arthaśātra 1.6.3).
167
and the Kāmasūtra (7.2.58), which at the same time enjoin the king not to
The point here is that the discipline in regard to the senses, which texts
like the Arthaśātra and Kāmasūtra recommend, need not be seen as part
of some other-worldly yearning for ascetical transcendence. The control of
the mind and victory over the senses recommended in courtly manuals,
then, had less to do with any critique of worldly life as such, but instead
were forms of ethical self-regard that men of the world were to develop
within themselves driven largely, I shall show, by exigencies at court. In
these manuals the discipline of the senses was not opposed to sensual
and worldly enjoyment, it was its precondition.
Sensual pleasure was problematic not in and of itself but because the
pursuit of pleasure could potentially lead one to neglect other important spheres
of life at court and therefore leave one vulnerable to enemy attacks (Ali
2004:241). Sexual desire (kāma) and its resultant attachment (anurāga, āsakti),
destabilise the internal hierarchy and proper order of the self” and affect an
parallels to the wider arena of the court, because they were concerned with
training the political élite for a successful career at court. The king’s mastery over
self ideally meant the proper mastery over his kingdom. The idea was
149This last point is also articulated by Kauṭilya in his Arthaśāstra (1.7.3). As Ali (2004:240) points
out, the Nāṭyaśāstra includes dhīra (self-control) as an integral characteristic in all of its
categorization of nāyakas (heroes), even the sporting and playful hero (dhīralalita). And the
Kāmasūtra ties the knowledge, pursuit, and achievement of worldly goals with one who has
conquered his senses (jitendriya).
168
intrinsically linked with gaining and maintaining one’s sphere of influence. Yet the
king’s mastery was complex for it relied upon and subsumed within it the
agencies of other elements of the body politic, each of whom exercised relative
mastery over its own sphere(s) of competence. There was a hierarchical order of
the emperor was dependent on his servants and ministers (Ali 2004:245-247).
Even though independence was celebrated in the gnomic literature of this period,
autonomy and independence was relative, which often appears as “the capacity
not to act as a ‘free agent’ but to dispense favour and support others as one’s
own dependants” (247). The goal then was to become a ‘refuge’ (āśraya) for a
large number of people; “one of the explicitly stated ends of self-cultivation was
oneself” (249). 150 Ali writes: “So it is that kings and courtiers sought to acquire
service at court and within its chain of dependencies. . . . It is these men who
150 Both Arthaśāstra and Kāmasūtra discuss in their final sections secret (aupaniṣadika)
practices, as last resorts, for winning over the minds of others. The recommendations are
extracted from the Atharvaveda (for instance, 7.12; 6.94). Ali writes that these hymns speak of
‘drawing the minds’ of others to take delight in the aspirant [here, courtier/king], ‘grasping’ or
‘seizing’ (gṛhnāmi), ‘bending’ the mind of others with one’s own mind. Such hymns anticipate the
logic of attachment, and “Attachment was thus envisioned as a ‘leaning towards’, or ‘inclination’ of
the mind in the direction of another” (250). The discourse of attachment, influence, and control
(vaśa) between individuals – the issue of struggle for the minds of men – was deadly important.
Ali (251) comments that the goal of the prince’s policy was not commitment to a ‘social ideology’
or the ‘improvement of society’, but “simply acquiring and retaining his kingdom — attracting
virtuous and powerful servants, retaining their support and winning over ‘seducible parties’.”
169
formed the audience for the prescriptive and aesthetic literature of the court”
(248); and it is these men, I should add, who formed the audience for the
terms of attachment: “anurāga along with bhakti denoted the ideal disposition
that any dependent or servant was to have towards his superior and, as such,
at court: “Servitude, devotion and attachment were, on the one hand, elevated to
the most perfect of virtues and, on the other, denigrated as the basest of
conditions” (Ali 2004:252). I argue that the BhP’s conception of bhakti and of
erotic love be analyzed in this very context, because the language of court
affiliations, of courtship and erotic love was the same. Ali states that “This
attachment is even more apparent in the discourses on courtly love” (252). 151 The
151After analyzing 680 Sinhala graffiti inscriptions of c. eighth to tenth centuries from the Sigiriya
Palace complex in Sri Lanka built around the fifth century, Ali (2004) notes the remarkable degree
to which the language of sexual attraction was open to martial imagery and agonistic
conceptions. Erotic attachment was effectively indistinct from ‘capture’ and ‘enslavement’ (259).
He notes the similarities between the discourses on sexual love and those between men at court.
They had the same complex tensions, and hierarchical relationships associated with authority
and property: “The contexts of courtships, in other words, were the contexts of the court, and as
such were governed by the same principles and strategies. It is thus natural that these tensions
formed the internal dynamics of courtship” (259).
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which partners were not equal nor were their strategies (254-257). Moreover,
erotic love poetry was invested with wider concerns; it was not a straightforward
In her study of the depictions of Krishna’s love games with the cowherd
women in the HV, the ViP, and the BhP, Coleman (2001, 2002) comes to
precisely the same conclusion as Ali (2004) does in the quote above, though Ali’s
is based on erotic court poetry. While Coleman frames the religious texts’
representational strategies in terms of gender politics, she does not explore their
relation to the world of court politics. I discuss her views further in the next two
sections. Ali’s (260) evaluation of the significance of the high profile of erotic love
and a devotee’s relationship with him. According to Ali, in practice the game of
courtship allowed men to learn the strategies of conduct and forms of self-
courtship was directly linked to success at court; therefore, “The king as the most
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powerful man at court had to constantly represent himself as the most perfectly
skilled player in the contest of love.” Yet as discourse, the language of love
self-mastery and autonomy. In Ali’s words, “I believe that this, more than
anything, explains both the nature and prominence of the depiction of love in
courtly literature” (261). This may also explain the nature and prominence of
erotic love in Krishna’s story in the BhP and the subsequent success of its
representations in the court poetry and painting in the era of Islamic rule.
Apart from the Shastric and courtly literature, the growth of Puranic
literature was one of the hallmarks of the early medieval period under discussion
here. According to Doniger (2009:304), the format of choice for the Śāstras was
lists. This penchant for lists was carried over into the Puranic literature for
solidifying Vaishnava credentials during this period. However, toward the end of
when the BhP declares kṛṣṇastu bhagavān svayam (‘Krishna is the Lord himself’,
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1.3.28). 152 Therefore, the MBh and the BhP can be seen as bookends to the
more fully developed in the Purāṇas during the reign of the Guptas. The Gupta
enlisting particularly Viṣṇu and his heroic incarnations for their politics.” 153 But
the Guptas extended royal patronage to Buddhism and Jainism as well. 154 There
was a great deal of variation in religious life under the Guptas. Their sectarian
diversity distinguished them from other rulers, “such as those in the South India,
and Jainism, and between court and village were manifest in the early Purāṇas,
152 See Clooney and Stewart (2004) for a summary and Matchett (2001) for book-length study of
the Vaishnava avatāra theory and the relationship between Krishna and Vishnu. The ambiguity in
relationship status between the two gods results from the avatāras often being described
“centrifugally, as various functions of the god emanating out of him and expressed as many
manifestations,” whereas historically “they came into being centripetally, as various gods already
in existence” (Doniger 2009:474-475).
153 For instance, the Allahabad inscription of 379 CE identifies Samudra Gupta with Vishnu
(Thapar 2003:244). The Guptas put the figures of Vishnu’s consort, Lakshmi, and his Boar
incarnation on their coins (Ramanujan and Cutler 1999:232).
154 Chandra Gupta II was a devout Hindu, but he also patronized Buddhism and Jainism. In the
Gupta capital, Patliputra, the Chinese pilgrim Faxian (Fah-hsien) witnessed an annual Buddhist
festival in which Brahmins took an active part. In the same period that the earliest Hindu temples
were being built, Gupta emperors dedicated many Buddhist buildings, like stupas, monastaries,
and prayer halls (Doniger 2009:379). Several inscriptions on copper plates register Gupta
endowments to Buddhists and Jains, as well as their land grants to Brahmins for performance of
specific rites and for maintenance and service of Hindu temples (Kulke and Rothermund
2004:94).
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like the ViP. In the words of Doniger (2009:379), “Gupta literature came first and
reworked folk and epic materials in its own way; then the Puranas came along
and reworked both folklore and Gupta literature.” Although in this process the
them in a Sanskrit medium, the Purāṇas were less fastidious than the Vedic texts
or even the MBh. 155 Doniger therefore calls them ‘the pulp fiction of ancient
erase local color and regional flavor. Sometimes the value system survived the
journey (383). The growth of temples during this period made it a two-way
Temples, then, may have facilitated the acculturation of tribal people and their
gods into Hindu society during this period (Cf. Nath 2001:67).
Temples were directly tied with the growth of Vaishnavism and its
patronage by the aristocratic and mercantile classes. For instance, Clooney and
Stewart (2004:162) write that in the early centuries CE the sedentary ruling clans
honor of Vishnu: “Appropriate to this permanent setting, Viṣṇu was from the
earliest times associated with protection and sustenance, while his consort Śrī
complemented this strength by nurturing the general weal, from hearth and
grew into the Bhāgavata tradition of Pāñcarātra, and their texts dealing with
rituals of image worship were called Āgamas. Colas (2003:233) states that “A
main trait of the early Pāñcarātra view of ritual is non-injury, perhaps in answer to
organized Vaishnava ascetic communities in this period (c. third to fifth century
CE) and that the early Pāñcarātra tradition promoted this “yogico-ascetic-
devotional tendency.”
and practice of bhakti from the beginning. The foundational text of Vaishnava
bhakti is the BhG, but the earliest articulation of the idea of bhakti was in the
text. Placing bhakti in a context of ‘knowing’ (viditvā, jñātvā 1.7-8; 2.7) the
ultimate reality brahman or the ‘one god’ (deva ekaḥ, 1.10; 6.11), the SU in 6.5-6,
6.17 advises the religious practitioner to ‘worship’ (upāsya) the ‘adorable god’
(īḍyam devam), who is the ‘lord’ (īṣa) and the ‘protector’ of men (gopa). In the last
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verse of the SU, 6.23, the word ‘bhakti’ appears — as ‘deepest love for god’ that
makes the topics of the text visible to a practitioner — its only occurrence in the
early Upaniṣads. 156 Bhakti was associated with knowledge of God from the
BhG to the ViP to the BhP has been deemed by scholars to be either ‘emotional’
reasonable to argue that all these texts contain elements of both intellectual and
156 Olivelle (1998) and Lorenzen 2004 (187-188). See also Prentiss (1999:17-24) for a detailed
discussion on the early history of bhakti, and for the dynamic of renunciation-engagement or
intellection-emotion inherent within its doctrine and practice. “The tension in bhakti is between
emotion and intellection: emotion to reaffirm the social context and temporal freedom, intellection
to ground the bhakti religious experience in a thoughtful, conscious approach” (20). The BhG
resolves this tension in the doctrine of selfless action whereby a life of action within the social
world is affirmed and a detachment toward the fruits of action is cultivated. Single-minded
devotion to god made renunciation possible in everyday life. And this understanding of bhakti as
committed engagement continues in later regional bhakti traditions. Therefore, Prentiss criticizes
the Orientalists’ misunderstanding of bhakti as ‘uncontrolled emotion’ by pointing out that “in
bhakti texts, emotion is freed from social and temporal constraint, not moral principles.” Modern
scholars of bhakti seem to make a similar mistake in drawing a contrast between saguṇa (with
attributes) and nirguṇa (without attributes, formless) imagination of god. They come to associate
the latter with an intellectual approach and the former with an emotional one. Ramanujan
(1999c:295) questions the usefulness of this distinction first in the context of Shaiva poetry and
then all devotional poetry:
The distinction iconic/aniconic is a useful one, as nirguṇa/saguṇa is not. All devotional
poetry plays on the tension between saguṇa and nirguṇa, the lord as person and the lord
as principle. If he were entirely a person, he would not be divine, and if he were entirely a
principle, a godhead, one could not make poems about him. The former attitude makes
dvaita or dualism possible, and the latter makes for advaita or monism. . . . It is not
either/or, but both/and; myth, bhakti, and poetry would be impossible without the
presence of both attitudes.
Bhakti, then, holds in tension both knowledge and emotion, engagement and abandon; and the
negotiation of these tensions functions as strategy for living an active social-religious life.
157 See, for instance, Hardy (1983:7-48), van Buitenen (1968:1-41), and Sharma (1987:109-129).
176
emotional bhakti, each text with a different emphasis on one or the other.” In
light of this discussion, a strong contrast between northern and southern forms of
bhakti seems questionable, at least in terms of its formal and informal aspects. 158
As Cutler (1987 in Prentiss 20) argues, in Tamil Shaiva and Vaishnava bhakti
structure.”
hearing and seeing: hearing and telling stories and songs about god, and visual
contemplation (darśana) of god’s image. 159 Public temples provided a space for
most meaningful darśanas for devotees. “The historical growth of bhakti religion
158 In this context, Ramanujan’s (1999b:279-281) discussion of the various types of religious
figures prior to the medieval ‘saints’ in India’s Vedic and Epic periods comes to mind. Already in
the Vedas there are seers who were “the Quakers and Shakers (the vipra), the keśin or long-
haired ones,” who were not “the fire-tending hearth-watching priests or purohits.” They were
ecstatic, psychedelic soma-drinking visionaries. Then there were kavis (poets), Upanishadic
philosophers and teachers, sādhus (ascetics), and ṛṣis (sages). Sometimes the sages were also
poets. According to Ramanujan, by the sixth or seventh century CE, all these types came
together in the singing, wandering poet-saints. The point is that such figures were also known to
northern traditions of Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Jainism before the medieval developments in
the south. Also worth consideration is the fact that the great Vaishnava religious leaders of the
late medieval period (eleventh-sixteenth century) — Ramanuja, Madhva, Nimbarka, and Vallabha
— who “mapped a formal intellectual justification” of bhakti were from South India (Cf. Clooney
and Stewart 2004:166). Even Shankara’s dates (c. 788-820 CE) and place of origin in Kerala next
to Pandya territory suggest that he must have been familiar with Āḻvār-inspired ‘emotional’
religiosity. Following Hacker (1965), Hardy (1983:495) believes that Shankara grew up in a
Vaishnava environment and that Vaishnava conceptions and sentiments are present in his works,
and that his disciples show a similar Vaishnava inclination.
159 According to Doniger (2009:352), darśana may have been inspired, in part, by the Buddhist
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that the devotees periodically visit. When the temples are located far from the
secular and religious literature in the north in the first half of the millennium
discussed above — particularly the connection of courtly life and literature with
temple religion and religious literature — continue developing in the south of the
second half of the millennium. 160 Doniger (2009:340) suggests that after the fall
of the Gupta Empire many northern artisans moved to the South and “contributed
settlements in the south begin. This gradually introduced Sanskrit into the local
language, but Sanskrit speakers also learned Tamil and used it professionally. It
their Sanskrit language and sacred texts, the Brahmins brought the ideology of
160 See Thapar 2003 (229-234), Kulke and Rothermund 2004 (104-108), and Doniger 2009 (339-
340) for a brief overview of early history of South India relevant to this discussion. Ashoka’s
inscriptions make reference to peoples of South India as Colas, Ceras, and Pandyas. These
chiefdoms later became kingdoms toward the end of mid-millennium. The earliest sources for the
region’s history are short dedicatory inscriptions in Tamil dating to the period about the second
century BCE to the mid-first millennium CE. The inscriptions record donations made by artisans or
merchants, or Buddhist or Jain monks. There was constant contact and trade between North and
South India at least by Mauryan times, in the fourth century BCE. Unlike in the north, the thrust for
urbanization in the south did not result from agriculture but from the increasing demands of trade,
including trade with the Roman Empire. This period saw the transition from chiefdoms to
kingdoms, with the formation of states, which may have coincided with the establishment of
Brahmin settlements in the south.
161 See also Hardy 1983 (123).
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Hindu kingship which the local rulers eagerly adopted for the purposes
2004:98).
As with Sanskrit and the North Indian vernaculars, Tamil was the
language of royal decrees and poetry (Doniger 2009:341). 162 Early Tamil literary
practices flourished in courtly context and were related to the later poetic
expressions of devotion for Shiva and Vishnu (Cutler 2003:147). As noted earlier,
the growth of bhakti is intimately connected with the growth of sectarian temples
and later replacing Vedic sacrifice as the ritual de rigueur for kings. 163 Much like
the Kurus did with the Vedic Śrauta rituals, the Colas in the South successfully
162 The Guptas were patrons of Sanskrit and adopted it as their court language in a move of
“conscious archaism,” according to Doniger (2009:374). Prior to this, kings used Prakrits, like the
Magadhi of the Buddha and Ashoka, for communicating with their publics. However, as Doniger
points out, “Brahmins had continued to use Sanskrit in such a way that a bilingual literary culture
underlay such great texts as the Mahabharata and the Puranas” (374).
163 In Kulke and Rothermund’s (2004:130-148) survey of the medieval period’s emergence of
regional kingdoms and regional cultures, what emerges is the intricate links between the move
from tribal chiefdoms to early kingdoms to imperial kingdoms and the emergence and centrality of
imperial temples in these kingdoms. They write (140) that “The settlement of Brahmins and the
establishment of royal temples served the purpose of creating a new network of ritual, political
and economic relations.” Doniger (2009:351) also writes that “Temples were central to the
imperial projects of the upwardly mobile dynasties; every conquering monarch felt it incumbent
upon him to build a temple as a way of publicizing his achievement. Brahmins became priests in
temples as they had been chaplains [purohits] to kings.” The broader context of temple-building
may also have been a response to the Buddhist practice of building stupas or to the Jain and
Buddhist veneration of statues of enlightened figures (Doniger 345).
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temple rituals, and having the bhakti hymns collected” (Doniger 351). Not only
did the temples ‘ground’ the gods, they also provided the gods with a territory of
influence; and both gods and kings came to be identified ever more closely. 164
Many scholars have written about the deification of kings, but for medieval
India the converse evolution of a ‘royalisation of gods’ is as important. The
legitimacy of a ruler was enhanced in this way. The more ‘royal’ the cult of
the territorial god, the more legitimate the claim of the king — represented
as the deity’s temporal embodiment — to rule that territory on behalf of the
god. The Bhakti cults contributed to this devotion to gods and kings in
medieval India.
For instance, South Indian religion grew with help of royal patronage by
Colas and Pallavas, and their kingship provided one model for bhakti, which,
according to Doniger, “from its very inception, superimposed the divine upon the
royal.” Or, as Kulke and Rothermund have it and, I argue, is the case with
Krishna’s representation in the BhP: bhakti superimposed the royal upon the
divine. Some of the early Tamil poems praise the god just as they praise their
patron king; one can substitute the word ‘god’ wherever the word ‘hero’ or ‘king’
occurs in some of the early royal panegyrics, and s/he will end up with hymns of
divine praise, such as in the Paripāṭal hymns to Tirumāl, i.e. Vishnu or Krishna
164 In the context of Tamil bhakti poetry, Ramanujan and Cutler (1999:240-241) and Doniger
(2009:351) consider sacred places the counterparts to the king’s domain, his capital and his forts:
“The temple was set up like a palace, and indeed Tamil uses the same word (koil, also koyil, ‘the
home [il] of the king [ko]’) for both palace and temple” (Doniger 2009:351).
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shifted the center of public activity from the courts to temples: “Now the temples,
not the courts, were the hubs of pilgrimage, meeting places, and markets for
souvenirs” (Doniger 348). The temple was both the god’s home and a palace, “a
public site where people could not only offer puja but look at the deity and be
looked at by him” in an act of darśana or ‘seeing’ (351). 165 Thus, the concept of
darśana came to the world of the temple from the world of the royal court. It was
linked by the gaze (Ali 2004:134). In the new bhakti-oriented religion, according
to Doniger (352), darśana was also a response to the aspect of god with flesh
and blood qualities who was right before your eyes (sākṣāt) in the temple.
From the royal court also came early classical Tamil literature — in the
form of a corpus of over 2300 poems collected in the eight Caṅkam anthologies
of lyrics, ten long poems, and a work of grammar and poetics called the
Krishna’s story. 166 Hardy (1983:124-125) dates the Caṅkam corpus from the first
165 Ali (2004:123, 133-134) writes of bodily ‘grammar’ of gestural protocols at court, and says that
“Seeing was arguably the most developed sense in courtly circles, and the act of looking and
viewing was imbued with heavily coded meaning.” Furthermore, “the goal of the supplicant or
man of ambition in attending court was not to receive the king’s ‘audience’ but to gain a ‘viewing’
(darśana) of him.” He points out that the concept of darśana has been explored only in religious
context, though the earlier sources are courtly in nature. Seeing is also highly significant in courtly
literature on love and desire, for desire begins with pleasure taken by the eyes (cakṣusprīti) or by
one’s gaze ‘caught’ by another (244, 256). Both its secular and religious meanings remained
centrally important for artists in medieval and modern times. I discuss this below in § 3.4 and 4.1.
166 According to Doniger, Caṅkam is the Tamil transcription of the Sanskrit/Pali word sangham
dated the fifth or the sixth century CE (203); and Tolkāppiyam’s Book 3, which for
the first time gives Krishna (as Māyōṉ) a well-defined position in classical Tamil
literature, especially in love poetry, is dated no earlier than the fifth century CE
(160 fn.140).
The Caṅkam poetry was largely secular with two broad themes
contrasting the ‘interior world’ (akam) of emotions with the ‘exterior world’
(puṟam) of politics and war. 167 The former is about experience of love, the latter
is about heroic action, kingdom, community and all else. The dramatis personae
in the akam poetry are idealized types, they do not have names or history.
However, the puṟam poems may include names of kings, poets, and places.
Tamil Vaishnava bhakti poets, the Āḻvārs, transformed these poetic conventions
Buddhists and Jains, who termed their own communities sanghams. “The Cankam anthologies
demonstrate an awareness of Sanskrit literature (particularly the Mahabharata and Ramayana),
of the Nandas and Mauryas, and of Buddhists and Jainas” (2009:341-342; Cf. Hardy 1983:120).
Hardy (123) places this literature within “the highly sophisticated culture of ‘secular’ outlook”
developed due to the southern kingdoms’ flourishing trade with the Roman Empire and Han
China until about the fourth century CE. A decline then set in due to internal invasions and the fall
of their trading partners. A ‘Hindu’ revival from about the sixth century took place, “exemplified on
the political level by the Pāṇṭiyas and Pallavas, and on the popular level by the [Vaishnavite]
Āḻvārs (and Śaivite Nāyaṉārs),” and the element of bhakti took hold in literature and society.
167 Cutler (2003:147) stresses that while some poems in the anthologies reference gods identified
with Vishnu (Māyōṉ or Māl) or Skanda (Cēyōṉ or Murukaṉ), these are not religious poems as we
understand the term. References to gods are subsidiary to the actions and emotions of human
beings in relation to one another and to their environment. Notable exceptions are a number of
poems in the late anthology, Paripāṭal which celebrates these gods. Champakalakshmi states
that the Paripāṭal shows evidence of Vedic, Upanishadic, and Puranic influence (2004:49).
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in their ‘sacred compostions’ in praise of Vishnu/Krishna collectively knows as
Divya Prabandham (DP). 168 Akam poetry distinguished seven types of love, of
which the first is unrequited love and the last is mismatched love (when the
object of desire is too far above the one who desires). These two types of love
were not considered suitable for akam poetry; the middle five phases of well-
matched love — union, patient waiting, anxious waiting, separation from parents
or lover, and infidelity — were. 169 The bhakti poets took these secular themes,
168 Cf. Hardy’s (1983:44) statement that the BhP “is in fact an attempt to render in Sanskrit (and
that means inter alia to make available for the whole of India) the religion of the Āḻvārs.” He
believes that the blueprint of the mythology underlying emotional Krishna bhakti of the Āḻvārs was
developed in North India. He writes (52), “In the myths about Kṛṣṇa’s childhood among the
cowherds in the forests around Mathurā, the gopīs and their amorous relationship with Kṛṣṇa
figure as the most important theme from the point of view of emotional bhakti. This theme
appears with two facets, viz. ‘union’ and ‘separation’.” The first facet concerns their love-making
as stylized in the symbol of the rāsa dance; the second concerns Krishna’s departure for Mathurā
leaving the gopīs behind. A third facet is woven into these two; it is the theme of temporary
separation, for instance, when Krishna goes away for the day to graze the cattle.
169 The following description of landscapes in classical Tamil poetry is from Ramanujan 1999a
(200-204) and Cutler 2003 (146). The five types of love are conventionally characterized by five
matching geographical landscapes with their particular animals and flowers. Each landscape —
mountains (union), forest (patient waiting), seashore (anxious waiting), pasture or river valley
(infidelity), and desert wasteland (separation) — evokes a particular mood. There are other
elements of emotive associations, like flowers characteristic of a given region which are then
identified with a presiding deity. For instance, mullai or jasmine represents forests overseen by
the dark god Māyōṉ or Vishnu, and kuṟiñci, a variety of mountain flower, stands for mountains
overseen by the red god of war Murukaṉ or Skanda. Of course, each landscape is peopled,
respectively, by hunters and food gatherers of the mountains, herdsmen, fishermen and traders,
artisans and settled agriculturists (and later, Brahmin communities), and robbers.
Cf. the view of Kulke and Rothermund (2004:99-100) that the five types of regional
ecology indicate the pattern of gradual penetration of the hinterland of the southern region, and
also different modes of economic activity and social structure. They write, “Sangam literature, just
like late Vedic and early Buddhist literature, reflects the transition from tribal society to settled
agriculture and early state formation.”
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(viraha), and reworked them to express the theological anguish of the devotee
where the poets reference their personal experience in relation to god — that
Unlike most Sanskrit authors and Cankam poets, the bhakti poets
revealed details of their own lives and personalities in their texts, so that
the voice of the saint is heard in the poems. The older myths take on new
dimensions in the poetry: “What happens to someone else in a mythic
scenario happens to the speaker in the poem” [Ramanujan 1999c:298].
And so we encounter now the use of the first person, a new literary
register. It is not entirely unprecedented; [there are a few instances of
direct speech in the RV and the MBh]. But the first person comes into its
own in a major way in Cankam poetry and thence in South Indian Bhakti.
Henceforth, in the context of religious life the attention shifts to the experience of
the bhaktas and to their perspective of their relationship with god through
bhakti. 171
170 The foregoing description of classical Tamil poetry is based on Ramanujan 1999a (198-200),
Ramanujan and Cutler 1999 (233-234), and Doniger 2009 (342).
171 Doniger (2009:343) writes that the Tamils had words for bhakti (such as anpu and parru),
though eventually they also came to use the Sanskrit term (which became patti in Tamil). The
Tamil poets transformed the concept of bhakti by infusing it with “a more personal confrontation,
an insistence on actual physical and visual presence, a passionate transference and
countertransference.” As Hardy (1983:141) points out as well, in the ‘early caṅkam religion’,
before its encounter with the bhakti religion, there was an “absence of a clear awareness of
‘transcendence’, which allowed for a visualization of the divine within the confines of earthly
reality,” and there was a “sensual character of worship (viz. the charm of music and dancing, the
beauty of flowers, the fragrance of incense, the light of lamps and so on).” Thus, the religious
awareness was entirely of immanence of the divine, and its expression was sensual.
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to a new era in Tamil culture, a new milieu to Tamil religion and worship, namely
the temple, which was to become one of the major symbols of South Indian
tradition” (2004:48-49). Hardy links the new turn in the literary renaissance with a
Madurai, while the Pallava power arose in Kāñcīpuram where the early Āḻvārs
milieux, Hardy (225) says that Māyōṉ or Krishna is indirectly but almost
exclusively linked with the Pandya dynasty and with the royal power of the king,
while their royal capital Madurai is given cosmic significance through Vishnu
the temple-culture, at the time when the transition from the ‘palace’ to the
‘temple’ took place.” 173 Moreover, “Clearly the initial association of the Pāṇṭiyas
with Māyōṉ remained highly influential for many centuries on the development of
Southern Kṛṣṇaism, affecting milieux other than the royal court” (226). I continue
172 Cf. Hardy (1983:121) makes a distinction between ‘emotional bhakti’ and anything that
preceded it, and says that the emotional variety manifested itself in the South from about the
seventh century onward, with Nammāḻvār and other Āḻvārs. “Its various antecedents, however,
can be traced much further back, through earlier Āḻvārs and the so-called caṅkam literature, to
the first few centuries AD.”
173 Hardy states that even in the case of Pallava capital Kāñcīpuram, Māyō ṉ “also figured in
connection with the royal court and was worshipped in a temple there” (1983:226).
185
Just as the social-religious environments of the Vedic Brahmins were
profoundly multilingual (see § 2.4 above), so it was for the composers of the
Sanskrit and Tamil devotional literature in the first millennium CE. Doniger
Bhakti’s roots were royal and literary, but also folk and oral, with elements
of folk religion and folk song mixed in with Vedic and Upanishadic
concepts, mythologies, Buddhism and Jainism, conventions of Tamil and
Sanskrit poetry, early Tamil conceptions of love, service, women, and
kings, and later elements of Islam.
and northern texts were the result of the Brahmins’ interactions with such ‘mixed’
social goals (see § 3.2.1 above). 174 In their efforts the likely Brahmin authors of
the most influential texts employed the various mechanisms of change, including
accommodation and social identification with the prestigious class and its
emphasized those aspects that had the most cognitive salience and social value
174 For in-depth discussions of the social goals of religious practitioners in southern India during
the period leading up to the BhP, see Champakalakshmi (2004) and Hardy (1983). As far as the
Āḻvārs’ status is concerned, Hardy (1983:255) notes that of the twelve, six were identified as
Brahmins, chieftains, or provincial landlords and the rest also displayed a high degree of learning
and education. He concludes that the Āḻvār bhakti movement could hardly be ‘low-caste’, but was
in some sense ‘elitist’.
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representations, and successively integrated relevant elements from earlier
sources like the MBh and the BhG, the HV, and the ViP, beside the non-religious
various folk materials and courtly literature. These various elements came
together noticeably first in the DP and then in the BhP, which then emerged as
the locus of most significant innovation in Krishnaite mythology since the MBh.
In both the DP and the BhP, the Āḻvār-Bhāgavatas re-presented the Krishnaite
were made between the majesty of king and god, and between the qualities of
humanity, beauty, and passion of northern and southern pastoral gods. This led
trend since the Vedic times of going from many to fewer gods, by the end of the
BhP only Krishna remained as the supreme god. On the social side, in the BhP,
propagate their ‘regional’ interpretation of Krishna’s story which had up until then
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rhetorical needs of the practitioners. I discuss this further in the following section
3.3 Krishna / Vishnu and Māyōṉ / Tirumāl before the Bhāgavata Purāṇa
northern concepts with corresponding local elements, ignoring the other features.
For instance, early southern temple religion ignored the pastoral love aspects of
whereas early Tamil folk religion, which did not have a cognitive category for
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Accommodation also was in conceptual convergence, in which the concept not
common to both northern and southern traditions and was most abstract was
god who could be ‘seen’ (Cf. § 1.3.3.3 above). And, to the extent that the temple
and the royal court were really and conceptually identified, the association of king
with the transcendental and majestic (not pastoral) aspect of Vishnu/Krishna was
trasnscendent god with an immanent ‘god’ on earth, i.e. the king. The idea of a
transcendent god was made cognitively acceptable by presenting him in the form
an immanent god, who was still transcendent but was accessible. This concept of
to, and thus easier to worship. On the worship side of the equation, convergence
below.
traditions, and this led to formal incorporation of Krishna into the traditions of
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Krishna in a southern poetic landscape of forests and pastures, and propagation
of the legends of pastoral Krishna far and wide. The identification and
interference (see § 1.3.3.2 above) created a new variant who could compete with
the original Tamil ‘god’ Murukaṉ for the attention of poets and religious
practitioners alike. Only later were they rendered non-competing variants when
they were assigned distinct roles in the literary tradition and when Krishna was
accepted as a god who was immanent and transcendent. When Tamil classical
prestige was operating: the classical literature was enriched by the new material,
and the folk tradition gained recognition among the literati and ‘elite’ religious
Krishna by southern practitioners, and selection had both cognitive and social
dimensions.
Below, I discuss the evidence for these different processes and traditions,
which resulted in a different conceptualization of Krishna from the one in the MBh
and the BhG. The mythological origins of the newer, southern representations of
Krishna were mostly northern; the different strands were brought together in the
Āḻvār poetry before the Bhāgavata composers of the BhP made further
modifications.
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Chronologically prior sources of pastoral Krishna’s mythology, of course,
were the northern texts HV and ViP. 175 Matchett (2001:42) points to the tradition
and Krishna are identified as āścarya (miracle, wonder) which other beings can
see and benefit from but not fully comprehend. Their relationship is such that
Krishna is the miraculous human counterpart which Vishnu has created for
himself. As such, Krishna is fully divine but only in relation to Vishnu (Matchett
63). Before presenting Krishna’s story in HV 46-98, the text presents a section of
gathered together materials that present three aspects of Vishnu that have
parallels in Krishna’s story (Matchett 40). Thus, Vishnu (and, later, Krishna) is
175Hardy discusses fragments of the pastoral story found in the early northern ‘secular’ poetic
tradition. In the Satavahana king Hāla’s anthology of Prakrit poetry, Sattasaī (c. second-third
century CE), which depicts a milieu populated by farmers, hunters, travelers, but few cows and
herdsmen, there is mention of Krishna and the gopīs. In Hardy’s opinion, the poets mention the
story “because of its eroticism, and not because they are interested in herdsmen or in Kṛṣṇa the
speaker of the Gītā” (58). Taking into consideration the various extant manuscripts of the
anthology as a whole, Hardy concludes that, in the ‘authentic stanzas’, “originally Kṛṣṇa the lover
was distinct from Viṣṇu and Kṛṣṇa the speaker of the Gītā” (60). In its ‘three authentic stanzas’
focused on Krishna, he appears as a boy, “on the verge of adolescence, with whom the girls and
women of Vraja are in love; Rādhikā is mentioned as his favourite.” His dance on the head of the
serpent Kāliya is also mentioned (59).
The other significant ‘secular’ source, dated later than the HV, is the Gupta court-poet
Kālidāsa’s work (c. fourth-fifth century CE). In the Meghadūta, he compares a rainbow-touched
cloud with Krishna’s appearance, in terms of having a black body which obtains surpassing
beauty through the peacock feathers flashing brilliant (stanza 15, in Hardy 61). In it Krishna is
explicitly identified with Vishnu. According to Hardy (62-63), his Raghuvaṃśa (stanzas 48-51)
indicate that Kālidāsa knew Krishna also as the lover of the gopīs.
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shown to be a champion of gods and other allies, is identified with sacrifice, and
The HV’s Kṛṣṇacarita or Krishna’s story (HV 46-98) is the earliest known
such narrative, and it is arranged in a way to show Krishna as “divine and yet
playing a fully convincing human part which conceals his divinity for much of the
disguise and recognition (45). She divides the Kṛṣṇacarita into two parts: the first
(HV 46-78) deals with Krishna’s life from his birth to his killing of Kaṃsa and
and his declaration that ‘I am a forest dweller [who lives] among the cows with
Matchett comments that “this firm denial of any interest in acquiring sovereignty
is in marked contrast to the kingly role which Kṛṣṇa increasingly plays from this
point forwards” (57). Thus, the second part of Kṛṣṇacarita (HV 79-98) begins with
Krishna preparing to assume his royal role by learning warrior craft from a
manifestation.
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Krishna’s childhood in the cowherd community is one of a series of
he overturns a cart by kicking it over with one foot (HV 50.6); kills a female
demon, Pūtanā, by literally sucking the life out of her breasts (HV 50.24); uproots
two trees by dragging a heavy mortar between them (HV 50.18-20); and, at the
age of seven, emits a packs of wolves from his body hair in order to scare the
continues his heroic acts, such as the two famous episodes of taming the serpent
Kāliya (HV 55.56ff.) and, with one finger, holding up Mount Govardhana over the
cowherds and cows like an umbrella in order to protect them from torrential rain
him as ‘the king of the cows’ or Govinda (HV 62.43). 176 Indra not only offers
Krishna sovereignty over the celestial Goloka, he also offers him two of the four
months under his command, that is, Indra gives up the two autumn months that
follow the end of the rainy season (HV62.45-46). Matchett describes what follows
The young hero now turns his mind to the pleasures of the season which
he has won from Indra (63.15). He arranges fights between bulls and
between cowherds (63.16-17), and enjoys himself with the girls of the
176 Here a direct connection is made with the main text of the MBh when Indra requests Krishna
to be a friend of his son, Arjuna, and to help the Pāṇḍavas in the Great War (HV 62.68-88).
Krishna indicates that he knows the story of the birth of Arjuna and his siblings, and that he
intends to help them (62.89-98).
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community whom he has ‘rounded up in the night’ (rātrau saṃkālya,
63.18).
attractive with a charming face, dressed in silken and shinning yellow garment
and wearing garland of forest flowers (19-21); the beautiful cowherd women
eager for sexual pleasures cannot be held back by their families in their search
for Krishna, finding him they look at him with pleasure and press him against their
breasts (23-24); they play-act, sing, and run after Krishna (25-30); other girls
thirst for and drink his beauty with their eyes, and during the night make love (31-
32); they thrill with delight, and their eagerness to make love causes their hair to
loosen and spill down over their breasts (33-34); thus Krishna sports with them in
verses (HV 63.15-64.1), Krishna causes fights among bulls and among the
cowherds, and for his personal pleasure rounds up the girls at night, soothes
them and has fun with them — each element mentioned only once in all these
verses. Apart from the first two sporting acts and the latter three pleasure-
seeking acts, the rest of the time he delights in the autumn nights remaining
passively beautiful, joyful, and the recipient of the passionate attentions of the
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cowherd women expressely described as eager for love-making (rati-priyāḥ, rati-
Although their enjoyment seems fairly mutual in this brief early passage,
the emphasis clearly falls on the gopīs’ unrestrained passion for Krishna,
whose role in the love-play is relatively passive by comparison. This does
not mean that Krishna feels no desire, of course — he did, after all, initiate
the tryst — but the language suggests that the gopīs are far more desirous
of Krishna than he is of them, however much he, too, may enjoy their
voluptuous pleasures.
In its version, the HV employs the term ‘pleasure’ (rati) in this episode rather
than the term ‘sexual desire’ or ‘lust’ (kāma), in contrast to the BhP where kāma
is presented as a means for attaining liberation (but only when directed toward
god, specifically Krishna). Coleman points to another contrast between the two
versions: in the BhP, despite its claims of the gopīs attaining liberation and
overcoming the pain of separation from Krishna, “it is quite clear that intense
suffering is intrinsic to their experience” (41). In the HV, their desire for Krishna
leads to bliss.
In the HV there is repeated mention (63.19, 23, 26, 30, and 31) of women
thirsting for and drinking Krishna’s beauty with their eyes (Cf. fn.143 and fn.165
above). To Hardy, this alludes to the Buddhist notion of ‘thirst’ (tṛṣṇā) as the
cause of all ‘suffering’ (duḥkha), only here the thirst, ‘eagerness’ (v.24), ‘longing’
(v.32), and ‘anxious desire’ (v.34) to make love all lead to ‘bliss’ (sukha, v.29).
And Krishna himself is characterized as ‘the lord of bliss’ (sukhī, v.35). Therefore,
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Hardy sees an anti-normative interpretation and symbolic theology in this
Hardy then discusses “a definite increase of the erotic aspects, and this
recension some of the cowherd girls are understood to be married women, and
Krishna’s meeting with the cowherd women is described like an orgy where
Krishna ‘scratched a girl with his sharpened nails, pulled another by her hair’ —
Neither Hardy (1983) nor Matchett (2001), who discuss the HV’s gopī
preceded by his consecration as ‘king’ of a divine realm and his status now
among the elements of divinity, royalty, and erotic love which are expanded upon
in later literature. After the above episode, the scene shifts to Mathurā where, as
mentioned earlier, Krishna restores an old king to his rightful place, claiming for
befitting his status as a Kshatriya youth (Matchett 2001:58). After some more
adventures, he founds the city of Dvārakā and assumes kingship (HV 84.25ff.).
3.1.1).
Turning now to the ViP, Matchett (2001:65) states that as a whole it shows
no great concern for Krishna: “It is Viṣṇu whom it celebrates as the all-pervading
deity, identical to brahman, both transcendent and immanent.” 178 After detailing
the representation of Vishnu in the text’s Books 1-4, primarily as the supreme
transcendent god, she concludes that Krishna’s story was included in it to fulfill
people’s need for emotional satisfaction gained by relating to the most accessible
yet special form of god (69-88, 92). On the basis of textual analysis and inter-
textual evidence (67-68), she believes that the ViP’s Kṛṣṇacarita (Book 5) was
likely incorporated into it after it had had an independent existence and was not
‘descent form’ of Vishnu (ViP 5.7.67; 1.4.17). Matchett notes that there is a
paradox in the way Krishna is presented in the text: on the one hand he is closely
identified with Vishnu, and thus with brahman, and the identity between the two is
frequently reinforced throughout the ViP as a whole (93); on the other hand
178 Hacker (in Hardy 1983:40) holds that the ViP, and none of the other Purāṇas, was the sole
[literary] source for the BhP. Following Hacker, Hardy (39-41) calls the ViP the last text to
illustrate intellectual bhakti before the BhP becomes the first text in Sanskrit to exemplify
emotional bhakti after deriving it from the Āḻvārs.
197
becomes all-important” from that point on (95), and that the ViP lays greater
Krishna’s story in the ViP proceeds along similar lines as in the HV with a
theological dimension, such that Krishna is more aware of his own divine identity,
and the serpent praises Krishna as ‘greater than the greatest’ (parasmāt paramo,
ViP 5.7.62), while proclaiming that the universe is but a minute portion of him
(5.7.64) and that Krishna has the form of both being and non-being (5.7.65). The
Mount Govardhana episode in the ViP is more concise than in the HV.
The ViP expands the role of the cowherd women and their relationship
Harivaṃśa as a brief postulate to Kṛṣṇa’s triumph over Indra is now not only told
at greater length in [ViP] 5.13.14-62 than in the [HV] 63.15-35, but is also given a
spiritual component which the Harivaṃśa lacked.” For instance, one girl who
could not meet him stayed home and meditated upon Govinda, absorbed in him
another girl attained liberation by reflecting upon the world as the embodiment of
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immeasurable Self who enjoyed himself in the nights with them (reme tābhir
the whole passage makes it abundantly clear that Kṛṣṇa, the lover of the
gopīs, is more than a human lover. The variety of names employed
testifies to his identity with Viṣṇu, he is characterized as the Absolute and
as the goal of man’s destiny, liberation or salvation. This means that the
gopīs by meditating on this Kṛṣṇa de facto meditate on the Absolute, and
that makes their thinking of him real bhakti-yoga. This means also that the
physical presence of Kṛṣṇa among the gopīs is almost accidental: it
serves no other purpose than to stimulate through the various miraculous
and wonderful deeds their meditation about them and him.
Among the differences between the HV and the ViP versions of the gopī
episodes, Hardy finds a narrative structure with a full plot, a pronounced religious
sexual into the erotic and then into bhakti-yoga — “[the author] has removed the
earthiness of the original story and eliminated the primary importance of Kṛṣṇa’s
physical presence among the gopīs and of their sensuous perception of him”
(104). Also new were Krishna’s initiation of the tryst with an enticing song that
lures the women to the forest instead of their being ‘herded’ together by him, the
introduction of the rāsa dance, and the motif of everlasting viraha or final
separation — the ViP describes the cowherd girls’ lament upon parting from
much the same in the HV and the ViP, except that in the latter, Krishna’s divine
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identity is more emphasized and the ferocity of his actions is deemphasized. The
and marriage with Rukmiṇī are all presented elliptically. Unlike the HV, which
ends with the enumeration of Krishna’s wives and children, the ViP relates
Krishna’s death (5.37) and ends with the internecine destruction of his tribe
based upon the same or similar material, “the composers of these texts are
Krishna’s inclusion in the Caṅkam literature’s late anthology Paripāṭal was in the
context of royal court and temple worship. Earliest references to Krishna can be
found in the ‘classical Caṅkam’ (i.e. up to the fourth century CE) in three different
milieux: connected with the king, in folk religion, and in love poetry. Krishna’s
integration into the southern classical literature and religion has to be seen
179 Elsewhere also Matchett (2001:45) states that neither the ViP nor the BhP base its version of
Krishna’s story upon a naïve account provided by the HV, “but both are rearranging and
reinterpreting material which has already been carefully worked over.”
180 Hardy (1983:43-44) defines the scope of his study on early Krishnaism in South India such
that it takes into account “how, by contrast, avoidance, and selective choice, the level of myth in
Kṛṣṇa emotionalism developed, . . . [which] constitutes the result of Northern stimuli fertilizing the
autonomous Tamil cultural and religious scene and producing what might well be called a new
religion.”
200
against the Tamil definition of an ideal man, termed cāṉṟōṉ, in the classical
Caṅkam period. Zvelebil describes him as “a wise man of human proportions and
with human qualities . . . ‘a complete, a whole man, a perfect, noble man’.” This
Tamil ideal man is not a recluse or an ascetic of any kind, but “a man of flesh and
blood who would live fully his days of courtship and married life, of fighting and
commoner, the uncivilized persons, the iḻiciṉar — was a minor element in this
In the South, before Krishna, there was the Tamil god Murukaṉ (‘he who
possesses youth, beauty’), who covered the “interrelated semantic field ‘youth —
their human ideal, cāṉṟōṉ, on a divine plane, which was this world and he was
frequently in early classical poetry, though not distinctly associated with the
other hand, played a very limited role in early classical literature compared to
Murukaṉ; but when he was featured, Māyōṉ was “closely linked with political, i.e.
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dynastic factors” (Hardy 152-153). Having analyzed earliest Caṅkam sources
mentioning Māyōṉ, Hardy accepts that “it may be legitimate to speak of Māyōṉ
as a religious figure associated with Pāṇṭiya royal symbolism” (155). He was not
yet fully integrated in the Caṅkam tradition, nor was he the ‘lover of the gopīs’. In
this early period (c. second-third century CE), distinction may have been made
between the ‘royal Māyōṉ’ (i.e. Vishnu) and ‘popular Māyōṉ’ (i.e. Krishna),
because there is evidence that at the folk level Kṛṣṇacarita was known in
In the next stage of Māyōṉ’s career, a Tamil poetic theory was formulated
fn.146 and fn.169 above). This text explicitly identified Murukaṉ as a poetic
feature of the ‘landscape of mountain’. Hardy believes that once the poeticians
assigned him to one landscape, they proceeded to fill the corresponding empty
slot of divine figure for the other poetic landscapes. And Krishna (‘popular Māyōṉ’
of the Kṛṣṇacarita, not the majestic Vishnu) was the natural and obvious choice
interference. The classical Tamil literature, later formalized in its poetic theory,
cowherds in a village and associated with the symbols of cows and bulls, milk
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and milk products, late evening and the rainy season or autumn nights and
jasmine blossoms, separation and patient waiting. Kṛṣṇacarita in the HV and the
ViP discussed above has these features, and therefore northern god Krishna is a
natural fit in this particular sourthern poetic landscape. His position in Tamil
literary tradition now secure, Māyōṉ moved to center stage in the following period
In Hardy’s view it is during the Tamil renaissance that, from the ‘earthy’
folk strata, certain Krishnaite myths and customs — related to Krishna’s ‘amours’
with the gopīs — began to be incorporated into its late classical literature, like the
epic about the ankelet, Cilappatikāram. 181 According to Hardy, these Krishnaite
elements are “but mythical projections of real life events” (1983:167-169, 128).
As discussed above, prior to this point Māyōṉ was not an integral part of Tamil
the evidence for a major shift in cultural awareness that made it possible for
Thus we have here the (first) document of the Tamil South envisaging the
Northern god Kṛṣṇa within the confines of its own customs. At the same
time, we can infer an emphasis on only certain aspects, a choice from
181According to Hardy (1983:198-201), the northern sources of some southern folk materials are
derived most likely from the Hāla’s Sattasai and the HV (but not the ViP).
203
among a great number of episodes. It is probably not accidental that the
mythical episodes treated in detail in the renaissance works are erotic in
character. As yet unaffected by the (brahmin) normative ideology, and
probably reacting strongly against the negative values of Southern
Jainism (and Buddhism), the South was not scandalized by the amorous
affairs of Kṛṣṇa, and in fact sensed that in these the heritage of the
classical caṅkam spirit had a congenial correspondent. In view of the
scarcity of references to Māyōṉ in the older works, the prominence of
Kṛṣṇa the lover of the gopīs in renaissance poems must mean that during
the previous centuries when Viṣṇu, Kṛṣṇa, etc., material became
increasingly known in the South, a process of selection took place through
which those aspects were chosen which somehow corresponded to the
popular Southern sentiments. The spirit of the renaissance is closely
related to those sentiments, and thus reproduces that selective picture of
Kṛṣṇa. Thus quite contrary to the generally expressed opinion, it can be
assumed that popular Kṛṣṇaism in the South was predominantly
concerned with the lover of the gopīs, and that already some time before
the sixth century AD.
hymns to Tirumāl [= Māyōṉ = Krishna] the erotic myths are “practically ignored”
even though the Paripāṭal’s milieu was aware of those myths, and instead his
Hardy believes that the above is a totally new language and new awareness in
the Tamil tradition, which implies a distinction between “the greatness, power,
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and ‘remoteness’ implied in the symbolism of royal political power” and “the
distance of an absolute being beyond human reasoning and at the same time
pervading the universe as its life.” In discussing the milieu of the Paripāṭal he
further says “here the poets’ attention and source of patronage has shifted from
the kings and chieftains to a new cultural (and economic) focus: the temple”
general interest in, concern for, and preoccupation with, typical brahmin
elements,” though the poets or their ‘patrons’ may not have been Brahmins
themselves. He concludes (213) that though the Tirumāl hymns express a form
of Viṣṇu/Kṛṣṇa religion rooted in the general context of Tamil society and culture,
182 For instance, in these hymns, Krishna the lover, who is popular among the folks in the same
environment and at the same time, is almost totally ignored, and so is the whole complex of
poetic landscapes — because both deal with eroticism which would be considered inappropriate
in a brahmanical religious setting focused on worshipping a transcendent god. Hymns addressed
to Murukaṉ in the same anthology represent him as a granter of bliss associated with passionate
love-making (Hardy 1983:214-216).
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The institutionalization of temple worship of Vishnu-Krishna was promoted
religion to Tamil masses in their vernacular. The Āḻvārs brought together, on the
one hand, the folk religion and poetic tradition which selected the
‘anthropocentric’ pastoral aspect, and, on the other, the temple religion and royal-
The early Āḻvārs c. sixth century CE were from the northern-most part of
the Tamil region bordering on ‘northern’ cultural sphere and away from Madurai
where the Tamil classical poetry was anthologized and theorized. According to
Hardy (1983:283ff.), they conceptualized Māyōṉ as the absolute god, but not the
impersonal Brahman (284). 183 Māl is the absolute transcendental god who
Krishna’s māyam or māyai — the term used here in its older meaning: miracle,
single term that describes the modality of how the Āḻvārs experience Māyōṉ”
him from the devotees’ ‘sight’, leading to a ‘longing to see’ him (285). Krishna’s
literature, eroticism is quite subdued, though not to the extent it is in the Tirumāl
hymns of the Paripāṭal. The erotic element is emphasized by the later Āḻvārs
(287).
The early Āḻvār’s religion was temple-oriented, and it was similar to the
humility, loyalty, devotedness, and servitude on the part of the devotees toward
lord Krishna. This attitude was expressed by adorning and beautifying Krishna’s
image and then ritually enjoying his sensous beauty (Hardy 1983:288-290). All
3.2.2 above). In conjunction with the external bhakti of temple religion, the early
Āḻvārs engaged in internal bhakti toward Māyōṉ residing in their heart (291).
This involved, like in the bhakti-yoga of the BhG, the harnessing of one’s senses
and redirecting them toward Krishna who abides in one’s soul as antaryāmī
postulated the ultimate identity of Māyōṉ in the temple image and in one’s heart.
Therefore, in Hardy’s words, pūjā here is the physical enactment of the process
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of internal yoga, or yoga is an internal realization of pūjā, but with an emotional
298). The early Āḻvārs integrated the folk (Vraj-related) and temple religion but
left out the tradition of poetic landscapes of love, most likely becaue they were
less familiar with that tradition due to their location away from Madurai where it
had developed.
Nammāḻvār (c. seventh century CE) brought about the full integration of the
The cāṉṟōṉ ideal aims at the full realization of all human faculties, while
Kṛṣṇa demands service and surrender; the bhakta worshipping in the
temple takes in through his senses beauty, and yet he is aware that
Māyōṉ transcends all representation; as the antaryāmī Kṛṣṇa abides in
the very centre of human personality, but frequently the emotions seem to
indicate that ‘he is not there’; Māyōṉ’s landscape is that of the jasmine in
which the girl longs for the return of her lover, and at the same time the
whole cosmos is pervaded by Māyōṉ. The genius of Nammāḻvār succeeds
in creating a dialectical synthesis of all these contradictions, paradoxes,
and tensions, which are as much part and parcel of the Tamil tradition
itself as they are brought about by the meeting of two totally different
cultural traditions (North and South).
Nammāḻvār and the later Āḻvārs, however, excluded certain Krishna myths that
originated in the folk traditions — the excluded materials were those that were
absent from the HV version of Krishna’s story. This leads Hardy (459-460) to
speculate whether this constituted the rejection of folk myths which the Sanskrit
‘authority’ (the HV) itself had excluded, or whether it was due to the sophisticated
Tamil literatis’ social distance from folk culture and dislike of ‘vulgar love’.
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Moreover, Hardy sees no influence of the ViP on the Āḻvārs as their treatment of
the gopī episodes are markedly different. However, though the BhP is considered
the expression in Sanskrit of the Tamil Āḻvār bhakti ideal, its sole literary source
was the ViP as we noted earlier (fn.178 above). Moreover, the BhP “even adopts
“The heart feels him to be present when it most keenly feels his absence. . . .
The absence of God, then, is the presence of God”184 — and thus either dualistic
authors of the BhP, which are indicated principally by the BhP’s self-
seeks to establish its authority by aligning itself with prestigious texts, such as the
RV, particularly its Puruṣa Sūkta, and the BhG, and it also aims to reinterpret, re-
184 Ramanathan 1994 (5). According to her, the ‘absence/presence’ of god is the axis on which
the mystical world revolves. In the life of passionate devotion such as one advocated by the BhP,
at least for women and common folk, separation is valued over union because separation from
god’s presence intensifies the longing and, thus, his presence. I discuss this further in the next
section.
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present, and replace its predecessors. The BhG is referenced in almost every
book of the BhP, and Krishna’s teaching of Uddhava in BhP 11.7-29 seems to be
modeled upon his teaching of Arjuna in the BhG. 185 In fact, of the three main
texts that present Kṛṣṇacarita, the BhP is the only one which represents Krishna
33) or yogic meditation (11.14.32-11.15.36), the former being more potent than
the latter. Matchett (123-124) emphasizes that despite his didactic character,
Krishna’s teaching is through his actions, and therefore the account of his life and
deeds presented in Book 10 is the heart the BhP. In her words (125),
185For its connections to the BhG, see BhP 1.10.25; 2.8.17; 3.28.8; 6.1.53; 6.2.4; 6.9.26; 7.15.31;
8.6.1; 9.24.56; 10.81.4; 12.7.14. Matchett speculates about the possibility that the teaching of
Uddhava once consisted, like the BhG, of eighteen chapters. Like the BhG, the BhP teaching
deals with the themes of yoga of action, knowledge, and devotion in 11.20, and also with
Sāṃkhya principles in 11.22. Its chief theme, like the BhG, is bhakti. See Matchett 2001 (Chapter
Six n.7 and n.8). The BhP’s didactic character is also apparent in the various discussions it
incorporates, such as the ones about Krishna’s treatment of his friends and enemies (7.1.1-32),
and about his behavior with the cowherd women (10.33.27-37), etc.
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In the BhP, the human Krishna “is not given a celestial counterpart [like Vishnu]
who might be regarded as controlling his actions from outside” (126). Broadly,
the account of his birth (as a four-armed baby like Vishnu), the death of Pūtanā,
the kicking over of a heavy cart, and the uprooting of two trees even as a baby
are similar to the ViP’s version (127-128). However, the interpretations of the
events now emphasize his liberating power and his subjection to his servants
(bhṛtyavaśyatā, 10.9.19).
Again, the episodes of the defeats of the serpent Kāliya and Indra (by
sheltering the cowherd community under Mount Govardhan and protecting them
from Indra’s wrath) are largely the same as in the HV and the ViP, except that
here Indra takes refuge in Krishna and becomes his bhakta (10.27.15-16) before
proclaiming him Govinda (10.27.23). His deeds in Mathurā follow the familiar
outline, but only in the BhP does Krishna get invested with the sacred thread and
is taught the Vedas and Upaniṣads beside the use of weapons (10.45.26-33). In
the Dvārakā section of his story, there is an emphasis on bhakti (many old and
new figures are presented as his bhaktas), and episodes from the MBh are
included but in a way that now makes Krishna, not the Pāṇḍavas, the focus
(Matchett 132).
cosmic child’ who is naughty, including what later becomes the dominant image
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of this aspect: Krishna as a butter thief (10.8.29-31). New episodes are also
added of Krishna’s youth, such as his stealing the gopīs’ clothes while they bathe
(10.22), his creation of multiple forms of himself so that he could dance with
every girl in the rāsa-dance (10.33). However, his erotic acts are given a new
meaning in the BhP. Krishna enjoys himself as described in the earlier texts, but
now the emphasis is on his yogic power, and he is described as ‘the master of
[all] yoga masters’ (kṛṣṇo yogeśvareśvaraḥ, 10.22.8). Even when he issues his
famous invitation to the cowherd girls to join him for ‘sport’ in the jasmine-scented
Matchett (2001:137) comments that the BhP “is at pains to make clear that he is
not driven by lust in his relations with the gopīs, but is acting in a controlled
manner out of disinterested compassion towards them.” Thus, having lured them
toward him with a mind-stealing song (10.29.3), Krishna receives the gopīs
coldly, asking them to return to the village and to tend to their husbands, children,
women, however, beseech him with arguments laced with metaphysical and
physical propositions: since Krishna is the true self (ātman) of all beings and thus
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also of their husbands, their first, and higher, duty is to him (10.29.32); besides,
since he lit the fire of passion in their hearts with his smiles, glances, and
else it will consume them (10.29.34-35). They are impassioned to the point of
Krishna responds with amusement and pity. Though he had just lectured
He grants them pleasure even when, as ‘the master of the masters of yoga’, his
pleasure to others while not needing others to experience pleasure himself. The
same dynamic persists during the rāsa-dance episode (10.33), where the women
are smitten with desire (kāmārditāḥ) and greatly aroused (10.33.17-19, 11-14) by
186Note the act of ‘scratching them with fingernails’ in the manner of the Kāmasūtra, mentioned
by Hardy with reference to the HV’s Southern recension and quoted earlier (§ 3.3).
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Krishna, in other words, is conceptualized as a self-contained character,
contrast, the gopīs, some of whom are married, are portrayed as governed by
intense and transgressive desire, which drives them mad when separated from
takes place with regard to his relationship with his wife Rukmiṇī. In the HV, they
wish to marry each other due to their mutual desire (kāma). When Krishna first
sees Rukmiṇī, her beauty acts as an oblation to the flame of the fire of hiskāma;
BhP Krishna admits, once, to an inability to sleep at night for thinking of her
(10.53.2). His admission comes only after a more detailed expression of desire
from Rukmiṇī, who sends Krishna a long passionate plea for her abduction as
the burden of desire and suffering onto women, while Krishna becomes more
cool, calm and yogically collected” (2002:50 n.18). Matchett finds further parallels
in Krishna’s relations with Rukmiṇī in that there is “the same didactic streak which
Living as the king and queen of Dvārakā, one day Krishna sought to break
Rukmiṇī’s pride (BhP 10.60.21). Referring to himself with the royal ‘we’, he
questions her choice of husband, and says that she should instead choose a
Hearing Krishna describe himself like this, Rukmiṇī thinks that he wants to
abandon her and she dissolves into tears. Krishna then takes her in his arms and
Yet the point remains that the BhP’s picture of Krishna as a man of the
world is set within the frame of yogic detachment (vairāgya, 12.13.11). Going
back to Coleman’s question earlier regarding the reasons for BhP’s differing
portrayals of Krishna and the gopīs, her answer (2002:39, 44-45) suggests that
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soteriologies. In the paradigm, women such as the gopīs are creatures of desire
return home to their husbands and children to fulfill their strīdharma. Their
separation from Krishna is final and they are left endlessly yearning for an
unattainable man/god, and this is given the status of highest form of bhakti. Their
in social bondage — a situation that suits men who need women to fulfill their
own male desires and duties of marriage, sex, and procreation. In the BhP men
toward the state of desirelessness and exclusive devotion to Krishna, the final
goal of which is liberation/union with him. 187 Therefore, their role-model is yogic
Krishna, “the ideal for men to emulate as they strive to be freed from their own
(2002:45). She believes the BhP’s author was integrating two different strands of
187Thus, in terms of kāma and dharma, men and women have distinct paradigms: “the tension
between opposing perspectives on the role of desire in human life has been resolved in the [BhP]
by shifting the burden of desire onto women and then nominally exalting them for being
dharmically desirous of men and children” (Coleman 2002:46).
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thought that exalted two different goals: liberation and worldly action. Krishna is
well as lord of dharma who leads a householder’s life as an ideal husband and
father, and an ideal warrior who shows Brahmins due respect. In short, Krishna is
the perfect Man. She sums up Krishna image in the text (45):
n.21, n.22). She does not enquire into possible real-world causes of “high-caste
male fantasy” or the male anxieties that are represented in the text’s gender
dynamics. 188 Ali’s (2004; § 3.2.2 above) analysis of courtly literature and political
life in early medieval India presents a framework that takes into account such
(the lord/king), the gopīs (his courtiers), and the dynamics of their devotional
188Coleman’s 2002 article distills her larger dissertation on the topic dated 2001 which involved a
cross-textual study of Krishna’s relationship with the gopīs and his wives as presented in the HV,
the ViP, the BhP, and a Sanskrit commentary on the episodes. Except for a brief look of the
treatment of female renunciants in Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu traditions in the dissertation (225-
237) — which, in Hardy’s (1983) terms, constitute a unitary normative ideological complex — both
2001 and 2002 publications by Coleman are limited in this regard.
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(courtly) relationship. Kulke and Rothermund’s idea of ‘royalisation of gods’ is
applicable here: this is a case of the superimposition of the royal upon the divine
(see § 3.2.2 above and § 4.2 below). Indeed, I view the BhP’s representation of
the BhP appear to have reworked the HV’s story using the conceptual categories
familiar to its courtly audience. Consider, for instance, the following. According to
Matchett (2001:146), the BhP Book 10 “bears little or no relation to the realities of
pastoral life as portrayed in the Harivaṃśa. Kṛṣṇa’s life among the cowherds
Nanda, is presented like a king, who sends for expert Brahmins to conduct his
son’s birth ceremonies (10.5.1-2), then gifts the Brahmins 200,000 cows along
with jewels and gold cloth (10.5.3), and employs various bards and musicians
(10.5.5). Called ‘the lord of Vraj’ (vrajeśvara, 10.8.42), Nanda, and Krishna’s
waiting.
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With regard to the notion of the BhP’s Krishnacarita as a courtly drama, I
It is no wonder that more than any other text, the BhP Book 10 lends itself to the
literature: its dominant concerns are courtly, that is, procedural (the nature of
distracts), and ethical (the issue of desire). Just as codes of courtly style and
protocol were socializing mechanisms for ruling classes of medieval society, the
practitioners into bhakti communities that followed its protocol. Its ideas shaped
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the conception of a proper bhakta. All of this followed from the profoundly
instance, the gopīs’ desire for Krishna is so strong that they beg him to let them
be his slaves. Krishna tests their attachment by disappearing from the scene of
their moonlit trysts, and he tests Rukmiṇī’s loyalty by suggesting that she be with
another man. In both episodes, the women proclaim absolute devotion to him
people’s inner dispositions and emotions were conveyed through looks, smiles,
gestures and words. The BhP’s protocol of bhakti is indeed conceived in affective
Note the evocative use of the poetic tropes in the BhP, such as fragrant jasmine,
autumn night, moon light, banks of the river Yamunā, in creating an expectant,
seductive mood.
By the time of the BhP’s composition, Sanskrit and Tamil poetics had
teaching people how to feel, the BhP emerged as an instruction manual on how
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to engage in proper bhakti. But more than that, I contend, it sought to teach
people (albeit differently to men and women) how to lead a full life — it presents
Krishna as a role model for leading a life in this world while remaining detached
at one’s core. The principle first laid down in the BhG is vividly brought to life and
explicated in the BhP’s narrative. This makes the BhP an eminently suitable
relations with multiple women, in the manner reminiscent of the Kāmasūtra (the
scratching with fingernails, for instance, in 10.29.46). There are two ways in
which the descriptions of Krishna’s love-games with the gopīs and Rukmiṇī can
and Kāmasūtra, which share terminology such that “many of the specific
‘lovesickness’, etc.) form frequent themes in love poetry” (Ali 2004:212). Second
romance set out in the Nāṭyaśāstra (NS 24.14-16, 22; 24.33, 37). 189 These
included variously, for a woman, the delightful imitation of her beloved’s speech,
gestures and qualities (Cf. BhP 10.30.2-3; 30.14-44); the standing, sitting and
walking postures and the actions of hands, eyebrows and eyes when seeing or
along with the eyebrows, eyes and lips (Cf. BhP 10.32.15; 10.60.29-30); and the
beauty that arose from a slight disregard in the arrangement of garlands, clothes,
ornaments and unguents (Cf. BhP 10.33.8, 11-12, 16, 18; 10.34.24). For men,
relevant concepts were the straightforward movement of the eyes (Cf. BhP
10.29.38); smiling when speaking (Cf. BhP 10.60.9); romantic gestures, and
expressions which were unaffected and born of tenderness (Cf. BhP 10.33.17,
In his love-games as detailed in the BhP, the princely Krishna of Vraj gives
inner mental state. I argue that the representation of Krishna as a detached, self-
orthodoxy than very worldly advice to worldly men on how to lead their life. Book
effectively. He also shows that self-restraint and detachment does not preclude
sensual and worldly pleasures: unlike in the HV, he is detached; yet, unlike in the
ViP, he does more than just dance with the gopīs, he has sex. Just as in court
literature erotic poetry was the canvas on which these issues were engaged, in
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the BhP the love play of Krishna-gopīs and Krishna-Rukmiṇī becomes the
court(ship) drama that takes issue with ‘desire’, not out of concern for some
(kāma) and its resultant attachment (anurāga, āsakti) had the potential to
destabilize the proper order of the self and affect an individual’s capacity to act in
the world, thus harming one’s social-political life. As Ali notes (2004:235), erotic
love was the preferred topic of courtly poetry “not because of any innate cultural
at court preferred to ‘think’ about wider social relationships through the world of
life at court. Success at courtship was directly linked to success at court. Though
desire onto women was more likely the function of a projection of the anxieties of
The prescriptive and aesthetic literature of the court was aimed at kings
and courtiers who sought to acquire relative autonomy within the context of
service at court for obvious reasons. I believe that these were the same men
who formed the audience for the aesthetic-didactic text of the BhP. Its author(s)
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employed the northern and southern Indian codes of politics and devotion in
were able to address the concerns of a wider, politically powerful audience and
thereby secure for their text an enduring place in Hindu social-religious history.
They created a new conceptual variant of god: he was at once majestic, yogic,
and erotic. 190 Krishna of the BhP is a complete Man and the supreme God. This
variant shares some aspects with the Krishna of the MBh/BhG: they are both
aristocratic-yogic teachers, who have devoted friends and followers. Despite this,
only one has an emphatically erotic aspect and a decidedly playful youth, while
the other features as a central player in a Great War. Keeping in mind that
Krishna of the MBh replicates as ‘brahmanic warrior Krishna’, and the Krishna of
the BhP replicates as ‘ludic Vraj Krishna’. These are the features that render the
two variants cognitively salient, that is, these features distinguish the variants
The BhP variant was new to the extent that southern conceptions of Krishna’s
story — which highlighted a highly personal and sensual bhakti and emphasized
190This representation of Krishna had something to appeal to all social classes: vaiśya-śūdra
(erotic/pastoral), kṣatriya (majestic/royal), and brāhmaṇa (yogic/brahmanic).
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supreme God. At the same time, the authors of the BhP incorporated these
cognitively process the new concepts and terms features more readily and also
entrenched because the authors of the BhP successfully combined the various
political and literary, religious and erotic – and made the variant universally
accessible.
3.5 Summary
began with the addition of a pastoral aspect to the ‘warrior Krishna’ in the
supplement of the MBh, the HV; it ended with the royalization of Krishna in the
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1. Formation of a new polity: Gupta Empire in the North, Tamil Renaissance
kingdoms in the South.
2. Reorganization of knowledge: the Dharmaśātras, Sanskrit poetics, Caṅkam
anthologies, Tamil poetics, Āḻvār songs.
3. Shift in language use and literary genres: Prakrit ➜ Sanskrit, Tamil ➜ Sanskrit,
and Epics ➜ Purāṇas.
4. Shifts in religious practices: Vedic sacrifice ➜ external bhakti at the temple ➜
internal bhakti in the heart.
5. Shift in the conceptualization of divinity: in the North, transcendent ➜
immanent god, and in the South, immanent ➜ transcendent god, etc.
Krishna and the devotion toward him in the first millennium CE, and found a
conclusion in the BhP. In the BhP Krishna is represented in the image of the
presented as the self-disciplined king of the early medieval court literature who
leads a full life. By combining northern and southern elements in their version of
Krishna’s story, the author(s) of the BhP articulated a discourse on how to live
the most fulfilling social-religious life. They were motivated by a desire to promote
their vision of a good life across India and to achieve for it the prestige of
literary, political, and devotional traditions at the time and thus had cognitive
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salience. Their interpretation of Krishna’s story and their representation of him
northern and southern concepts of divinity, heroism, passion, and devotion. The
new conceptualization of Krishna — from old tribal pastoral deity to new ‘ludic-
brahmanic warrior of the MBh. This older variant of Krishna, which was the
norm, was the main competition in absence of more serious competition from
other religious traditions. 191 The new Krishna and the practices associated with
him then became the new norm. Here I add the suggestion that the concept of
the concept of ‘warrior Krishna’ functions as the norm, or at least as the preferred
discuss this further in the next chapter. In any case, through the BhP’s Book 10
Recall that by the time of the BhP’s composition/redaction, Buddhism was in decline in the
191
South and Jainism had adapted itself to the dominant Puranic tradition. Shaivism became
dominant with the Cola take-over of the Pandya kingdom after the BhP’s composition/redaction.
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variant of pastoral Krishna by simultaneously emphasizing his yogic and erotic
aspects, thus making him the most attractive god who was also prestigious (§
above):
The authors of the BhP were successful because, in choosing the common
‘Communicate in such a way that you are socially successful, at the lowest
authors set him apart from other competitors of people’s devotional attention. In
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the BhP’s Book 10, the authors also followed the maxim: ‘Communicate in such a
way that you are noticed’ — an erotic theology guaranteed it. At the same time,
for reasons of accommodation and social identity, the authors recombined the
new elements (pastoral god, erotic theology) with the old (yogic god, courtly
like the people around you’. By virtue of doing all the above, they succeeded.
In the next chapter I assess the relative popularity of the two most dominant
variants in Krishnaite traditions: the Krishna of the MBh (BhG) and the Krishna of
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4. Enduring images of Krishna in love and war
At the close of the first millennium CE, Hindus were in possession of two defining
texts of Krishna-centered traditions: the MBh (BhG) and the BhP (Book 10). By
then, Krishna’s story was ‘complete’ and Krishna’s image was also fully formed.
knowledge of his story more or less complete. 192 The simple question now is
communicative environments similar to those that existed when these texts were
composed.
Toward the conclusion of the previous chapter (§ 3.5) I suggested that the
and the environments in which they were produced and reproduced. Early on (§
1.3.1) I also suggested that the arts favor narratives over philosophy. The latter is
192 In this chapter all dates belong to CE, and from this point on I use modern spelling of
individuals and place names, some of which are in Hindi. Other terms and names of texts are
without diacritics unless they occur within quoted materials.
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more likely to be reproduced in ideological or intellectual discourse, like
commentaries on the BhG or the BhP. Joining the two propositions, one would
choose narrative elements over philosophical ones. And within the narrative
elements, if there is a choice between two variants, the artists would more likely
reproduce the ludic aspect rather than the yogic. Also, going back to the
underlying theoretical idea in this dissertation, one should expect the artist to
environment (making for easier cognitive processing), that are favored by their
patrons (leading to the artists’s social success), and that have the some prestige
value (more likely to be acceptable to the wider public). Again, these are matters
these predictions, based on conclusions drawn from the previous two chapters, I
take a brief look at two examples, one from the world of arts during Islamic rule
and the other from that of nationalist writings under British rule.
In this section I discuss a few Brajbhasha poems and Rajput paintings produced
under the patronage of royal courts, and included in the published catalog
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divided into those produced in Rajasthani kingdoms and those in the Hill states of
present-day Punjab and Himachal Pradesh. For this discussion I include seven
paintings below, three of which come from the Pushti Marga-affiliated Rajasthani
kingdoms of Mewar and Kota, and the other four come from the Hill State of
Kangra. 193 Admittedly this is a small sample, and the conclusions may have to be
theological influence was not marked (like Orcha c. 1560-1620); threre were
Hindu kingdoms directly affiliated with a Krishna tradition (like Mewar and Kota c.
1670-1820); and there were Hindu kingdoms not directly affiliated with a Krishna
tradition and were under Islamic rule before independence (like Kangra c. 1775-
1825). I am focusing on only these periods because the examples of poems and
paintings I include fall roughly between these time periods, so far as their
The period between c. 1560 and 1710 was dominated by the Mughals,
and within that time, the period c. 1560-1660 (reigns of Emperors Akbar,
193
According to Pal (2004:9), paintings from Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Himachel Pradesh,
Uttaranchal, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan are all grouped under the heading of ‘Rajput’.
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Jahangir, and Shah Jahan) was especially favorable to artists. The Mughals
through processes of political and/or artistic acculturation. That is, Mughal tastes
influenced the selection and production of Rajput art by virtue of courtly relations
and through the agency of ‘bilingual’ artists trained in the Mughal ateliers but later
employed in regional Rajput workshops. Pal (2004) writes that most artists were
professional and were attached to royal courts; their Rajput patrons had a
penchant for mythological and rhetorical themes (10). In Pal’s words, “The Rajput
tradition and patronage of paintings owes much to the Muslim Mughals both
aesthetically and stylistically, though the Rajputs and Mughals differed in tastes
and interests” (9). The Mughals favored more ‘naturalist’ and ‘secular’ themes,
Mughal influence Rajput artists too began selecting more secular subjects to
paint. Welch writes, “By the first quarter of the seventeenth century even religious
pictures from Mewar, the proudest of Rajput kingdoms and the last to yield to
gives way to restrained imperial etiquette.” However, that may also have been
partly due to the growing influence of the Vallabha tradition of Pushti Marga in
Rajasthan and and its affiliation with Mewar kingdom c. 1670. Elsewhere, distant
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the historical influence of Mughals and Afghans, there were more frequent
god to match the preferences in the Mughal art by these court paintings and in
the poems on which these were often based. In Pal’s words, regardless of
whether they derived their subjects from religious myths or court life, “poetry is
To the extent that these poems and paintings are produced under the
secure patronage of Hindu royal courts, they should have images of Krishna like
those in BhP’s Book 10, emphasizing his beauty and his playfulness but also his
majesty, if not his discipline. This is precisely what they do in the courts directly
affilitated with the Pushti Marga community of Vallabha. It was Vallabha (c.
1479-1531) who introduced the BhP as a canonical text into the group of
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Snatak (1997:159) holds the prevailing courtly culture during the Mughal period responsible for
the increasing presence of “erotic love, pleasure, pomp and worldly pageantry” among kings and
chieftains, and through them, in the domains of literature and art. Neeraj believes that the growing
tradition of ‘secular’ love poetry — from Vidyapati (c. 1380-1460) onwards in which Krishna and
Radha appear as the prototypical hero and heroine — was responsible for the gradual ‘erosion of
doubt or hesitancy in representing one’s beloved god in erotic word-pictures’ different in tenor
than those in devotional poetry (1976:78ff.). The increasing frequency of Krishna’s ‘charming-
loving’ aspect in ‘secular’ poetry then led to more frequent selection of ‘Vraj Krishna’ as the
subject of later Rajput paintings.
Cf. Mukhia’s (2004) for a book-length study of the Mughal court culture, its institutional
structure of power, authority and governance, its ideas of the requisite qualities of a ‘true’ king,
etiquette codes (deriving primarily from Iranian Sasanid prototype), the imperial family’s life and
deviations from social norms (Cf. Doniger 2009:539-541). Mukhia’s study is along similar lines as
Ali’s (2004) inquiry into the courtly culture of early medieval India, except that the former does not
include an analysis of courtly literature on erotic-aesthetic theory or practice.
234
authoritative Hindu scriptures, conferring upon it the status of the final decisive
text for Vaishnava, or rather Krishnaite traditions, and gave it a normative value
(Christof 2001). Thus, Vallabha’s interpretation of the BhP was normative for the
Pushti Marga and also for the patrons and artists associated with it. In his
as ‘one who delights in himself’ (atmarama) — which defines the aesthetics and
emphasis on a disciplined life: the devotees are enjoined to fulfill all their social
and to enter into a permanently bound relationship with Krishna (Cf. Saha
in theory, which is also evident in the nature of Krishna’s images popular within
Pushtimargi devotionalism, like Tamil bhakti, positioned itself against the ‘yogic’
privileged within yogic traditions, a central feature of bhakti, both in its Tamil and
235
‘enjoyment’ in all its sensual immediacy, aesthetic hypertrophy, and transient
exuberance.” Here, Peabody is not taking into account the BhP’s own
personal preferences and those of their patrons, artists largely ignored the yogic
representation, even when they drew their subjects directly from the BhP’s
version of Krishna’s story. They did however pay attention to his majesty and
valor besides beauty and love. Of course, if one part of the story shows god to be
attainable by something shared by all humans – desire – then the larger narrative
cowherd women of Vraj to their audience, poets and artists extracted the stories
of love games out of the larger frame for their audience. Even if we assume both
human desire are cognitively salient for nearly everybody, if not for all. And even
195
Perhaps this is more a reflection of the gap between theory and practice, for Peabody’s study
is primarily based on the historical records of c. 1720-1840 of the Kota kingdom, the second most
important Pushtimargi royal house after Mewar.
236
if a didactic philosophy of self-control and its rewards were cognitively accessible
but the former wins the box-office if for no other reason than that they are easy to
beauty and love are more frequently selected for visual representations than the
The selection of beauty and love over yogic aspect becomes more
apparent in Shiva-related paintings in light of the fact that in the Hindu pantheon
of gods Shiva is the paradigmatic ascetic just as Krishna is the prototypical lover.
forming ‘Shaiva Themes’ and 30 as ‘The World of Krishna’. Within the Shaiva
section, Shiva has all of three paintings devoted to him [4-6]. 196 One of these
three has him as a fully-clothed, rather beautiful hunter standing among a crowd
of people [6]. We see the torso of two ascetics in the picture, but neither one of
those two is Shiva. In the other two paintings [4, 5], Shiva is paired with his wife,
Parvati. Within the larger Hindu tradition, though Shiva is primarily a yogi and the
represented in a way very similar to Vraj Krishna (Figures 4 [5] and 3 [47]) below.
196 The numbers in square brackets throughout this section refer to the painting number in the
Painted Poems (2004).
197To be fair I must also count Shiva’s appearance in two other paintings [55, 56] in the section
on ‘Musical Modes’ (ragamala) in the Catalog; but again, in both he is pictured with Parvati, now
237
In the early-modern (c. 1500-1850) Brajbhasha poems and Rajput
paintings, artists with royal patronage evoke themes from Vraj Krishna’s love-
games that are meaningful to their aristocratic patrons and connosieurs at court.
For instance, in the Painted Poems (2004), out of the 30 belonging to ‘The World
of Krishna’, 16 are directly based on narratives from the BhP, and others are
based on poetic themes that had roots in the BhP or the HV versions of Krishna’s
story. There are separate sections ‘Vaishanva Themes’ [14-17] and ‘Themes
from the Epics’ [18-24], within which there is only one illustration related to the
MBh/BhG: that of ‘The Cosmic Form of Krishna’ [24]. In ‘The World of Krishna’,
his childhood acts are depicted in six paintings [25-30], and include the
overturning of the cart, the killing of Putana, the killing of another demon, stealing
butter, dancing on the serpent Kaliya, and lifting of Mount Govardhana (all
discussed in § 3.3 and 3.4 above). The other 24 paintings include scenes of
Krishna’s youth with the gopis, particularly his favourite gopi, Radha, 198 and his
adult life in Dvaraka including his marriage with Rukmini [38-40]. There are only
sitting in a palace being entertained by music. Thus, in the four out of five paintings where Shiva
appears as an embodied god, he is enjoying conjugal life. According to Panthey, the most
popular type of Shiva representation in the Punjab Hill paintings is the representation of Shiva
with members of his family (1987:60). Interestingly, while Shiva is presented as a householder,
valor is attributed to the goddess and majesty to Shiva’s son, Ganesh.
198 Radha is not named in the BhP, she comes to prominence in the later centuries, but Krishnaite
traditions trace her presence back to the BhP’s gopi episodes or earlier (Cf. Hardy 1983:52, 58,
104-112).
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two paintings in which he is identifiably the king of Dvaraka [31-32]. The
family, and lived during the reigns of Mughal Emperors Akbar (r. 1556-1605) and
connections with the Mughal court through Birbal or Maheshdas Dubey, and Raja
composed Brajbhasha poetry with heroic and devotional themes. His greatest
contributions to Hindi literature have been in the form of two works on poetics
for Poets’ (1601). 199 Figure 1 below is based on two verses from the former,
which deals with the description and analysis of types of ‘heroes’ and ‘heroines’,
their emotions, and their expression. With these “foundational poetics treatises”
in the new genre of Hindi literary tradition (riti), Keshavdas also marked a major
cultural shift from Sanskrit to Brajbhasha (Busch 2004:48). Calling the riti
199 For more information on the life and works of Keshavdas in general and Rasikapriya in
particular, see Bahadur 1972, Desai 1984, and Mudgal 1999. Rasikapriya was written primarily
for other poets and connoisseurs, scholars, rich merchants, and for kings and queens. The large
number of manuscripts of and critical commentaries on the text in India’s research libraries attest
to its wide-spread use and study in northern India in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
through the early twentieth century (Desai 40-41).
239
phenomenon “a set of vernacular intellectual practices,” Busch remarks upon its
mixing the older Sanskrit ideas with newer vernacular ones — “innovation
aesthetic and intellectual cachet for Brajbhasha (53). He did this through texts
like Rasikapriya which, among all his works, “in particular is steeped in a bhakti
generic hero and heroine with Krishna and Radha, as we see in his two verses
This painting derives its name from the Sanskrit word godhuli for the
twilight hour when cows return home stirring up dust, hence, the ‘hour of
cowdust’. This time of day is suggestive of separation, eager waiting, and then
joyous meeting of lovers. There is also an inherent romance in the soft light of
dusk. The painting originates in Kangra, Himachal Pradesh. This and the other
Kangra paintings I discuss below all belong to the most prosperous period in the
kingdom’s history when it was ruled by Sansar Chand (r. 1775-1823). 200
200C. Singh (1982:12). See also Chaitanya 1984 for more historical background of the Kangra
School of painting. See also Beach’s (1992) volume on Mughal and Rajput painting for the larger
historical context of the various schools and their mutual influences.
240
In the poetic heart of this painting, Keshavdas reproduced old concepts in
473): First, that Nammalvar and then the BhP (10.31) developed the ‘mythical’
theme of Krishna’s return home in the evening from herding the cows ending the
separation from which the gopis have been suffering during the day. Second, that
essence the ideology found both in the HV and in most of the Āḻvārs.”
Figure 1: The Hour of Cowdust, Kangra, c. 1800-1825, Collection of Konrad and Eva Seitz
241
Here are the two accompanying Brajbhasha verses at the back of the painting: 201
Now the signs of confusion, where, due to love, words & ornaments are contrary:
Wrapped the garland around her waist, hung the tinkling waist-belt on her breast,
Toe-rings on her fingers she put, bracelets on her feet; blouse and veil forgot.
With kohl colored her lovely cheeks, with rouge made her eyes bright,
He comes singing softly playing the flute, making friends dance as peacocks.
O friend, get up! Drink your fill with eyes, for he cools the fire in cuckoos’ hearts.
Figure 2 below, also called ‘The Hour of Cowdust’, is based on a different poem,
by one Kashiram (c. 1715). This painting does not form a part of the Painted
Poems collection. About the poet Kashiram, I found only one mention. In
lived c. 1715; patron – Nijamat Khan, a provincial governor (subedar) under the
Parashuram dialog, Kavitta Kasiram (about Nijamat Khan’s valor and influence,
etc.).
201 See Appendix A for the original in Brajbhasha. This translation is mine.
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The painting:
Figure 2: The Hour of Cowdust, c. 1795-1800. Collection of Gursharan and Elvira Sidhu, IP-030
202 See Appendix B for the original in Brajbhasha. This translation is mine.
243
The meeting of eyes or a locked gaze is a recurrent motif in early-modern poems
and paintings as they were in classical literature and the BhP. The theme’s
classical poetry, desire begins with pleasure taken by the eyes, followed by a
fixation of the mind on the object of desire and the arising of a resolution for
union with the beloved. Ali (2004:244-245) comments that “Love in nearly all the
palace dramas [in classical Sanskrit lierature] begins with the king and the
heroine seeing one another (usually in the garden) and falling in love
immediately, after which they begin to suffer in love until they are united at the
plays’ conclusion.”203
even the yogic Shiva did not escape. The similarities in the next two paintings are
remarkable even though they are focused on two gods with very different stories
practices of artists and others within any given context, as it was here in the
203 The poetic theme of arising of desire with a vision of beauty continued in vernacular and early
Sufi romances in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in which the flash-point of desire is the
beholding of the heroine’s (God’s) beauty by the hero, then there is separation, suffering, and
ultimately union. For more on Sufi romances, see Behl (2003), and Behl and Weightman (2000).
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Figure 3: The Captive Krishna, Kangra, c. 1775-1800, Collection of Ramesh and Urmil Kapoor
The word-picture of a captive Krishna is drawn by the poet in the guise of the
observe Shiva’s condition through the eyes of his wife Parvati’s female
Sattasaī (Cf. fn.175 above). The situation in the painting is that Shiva is so
absorbed with his wife’s face that he is unaware that the snake wrapped around
his wrist is drinking up the water with which Shiva should be performing the
evening rituals, and Parvati’s female companions find this situation amusing. The
painting is not entirely faithful to its accompanying verse which should have
204 See Appendix C for the original in Brajbhasha. This translation is mine. Commenting on the
poem’s background, V. C. Ohri writes in the Painted Poems (2004:180) that the poet, Bhagwan,
is not known from any published work, and that “The language, content and style of the metrical
composition suggest that he flourished in the period of the Ritikal Hindi poetry (1700-1850).”
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Parvati pouring the water into Shiva’s cupped hands. But it has nevertheless
captured the main theme of rapt adoration by a supposedly detached god of his
beautiful consort. A captured gaze is again at the heart of divine love games.
poetry — l view the depiction of Krishna’s Vraj love games in the BhP as a
palace drama — was the medium through which people at court thought through
the complexities of social relationships. In that context, “Seeing was arguably the
most developed sense in courtly circles, and the act of looking and viewing was
imbued with heavily coded meaning” (Ali 133). Those meanings shaped the
concept of darshan which came into temple Hinduism from royal courts. There is
activities. In them all, the elements of ‘play’ and ‘participation’ through ‘seeing’
were very important. These elements are well-represented in the following three
paintings from the Pushtimargi kingdoms of Mewar and Kota. All three essentially
depict an event like a scene from the royal court. All three capture a mood of
holding court under the mountain, and his courtiers are gazing at him
worshipfully. Other gods, like Brahma and Shiva, are also watching. The
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catalog’s description of the painting points to its significance and popularity
“because the image of Sri Nathji at [Pushti Marga’s center] Nathadvara is the
248
In the next painting, from Mewar [75] where the Pushti Marga’s principal
after being worshipped he is enjoying the celebration of Holi, the festival of color:
The catalog’s description of the painting places it in the “ancient Indian tradition
a single picture (Painted Poems 2004:160). The catalog focuses on the activities
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of Maharana Sangam Singh of Mewar. In my estimation, the real focus of the
painting is Krishna as the royal-god, who is being entertained in the manner fit for
a king by his frolicking Rajput devotees in a courtyard rather than by the gopis on
the banks of the Yamuna. This is their way of having a ‘visual intercourse’ with
Hindus “do not merely want to see the deity, but to be seen by him or her so that
the deity’s powerful and unwavering gaze may enter into them.” He translates
Krishna, the devotees can hopes to attract his gaze upon themselves and
with royalty is brought to its logical conclusion. The relevant elements of the
painting below that link it to the one above include the presence on the lower
terrace of red powder used in the Holi festival (Painted Poems 2004:146); also,
205 Cf. Lutgendorf’s (2008:46) connection between the Hindu concept of darshan with the Indo-
Islamic nazar (look, glance), where he writes that nazar “is applied to the eye contact of lovers,
especially the first sight that arouses passion, and also to the benign gaze of Ṣūfī masters, which
watches over and protects their disciples.”
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Figure 7: Dancing at Court, Kota, c. 1775
Norton Simon Museum, Gift of Vineet and Floretta Kapoor
Noticeably, in the last three paintings (Figures 5-7) above from the two Pushti
graced by his gaze. Unlike the previous four paintings (Figures 1-4) in which
Krishna (even as Shiva) was shown to be actively ‘courting’ like a human, in the
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three royal paintings his transcendent aspect is affirmed and the burden of desire
his relationship with his courtier-devotees is closer to the BhP version. The
majesty, beauty, and play, for the festivities and entertainment enacted in front of
him constitute his play much as the love games were in the BhP — it is all for his
clearly identified as being from Mewar [15, 20, 61, 75] and Kota [30, 67, 68, 69],
eight in all, not one includes a direct representation of Krishna’s love games. To
the extent that the catalog offers only one small sample of data, my conclusions
are tentative, but if it is in any way a representative sample of images from Pushti
relationship of the devotee to Krishna taught and practiced by Vallabha and his
followers in the Pushti Marga is that of ‘parental love’. Redington believes that
despite the “most famous and popular” images of Krishna as Shri Nathji and as
demonstrates that the mood of ‘passionate love’ is considered the highest. That
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may well be the case. But should I believe the structure of a commentary or my
lying eyes? The only images of Krishna in this one catalog from the royal houses
of Kota and Mewar are of his childhood or of a royal-god being worshipped. The
(here, artists) reproduce most readily the form that has gained wide currency, is
cognitive economy applies even the case of Pushti Marga’s Krishna images.
Kota and Mewar. They need not have restricted themselves to only the themes
that celebrate Krishna’s childhood deeds or his majesty. Perhaps the artists
passionate love for Krishna but combined with a disciplined life. Unlike the
authors of the BhP whose social-rhetorical goals included achieving the status of
scripture for their text at the national stage (why else write in Sanskrit?), no such
constraint is present for the Rajput painters, whose primary goal is to please their
patrons. As mentioned earlier, the paintings were for individuals or small groups
of connoisseurs who would ‘handle’ them, and not for mass consumption. Thus,
206 Redington’s is a curious argument especially in contrast to Hawley’s that I cited in § 1.3.1.
While Hawley questions the influence of the BhG in the two millennia since its composition in
absence of sculptural evidence from pre-1500 period, Redington questions the clear evidence of
popularity of frequently reproduced images in one tradition on the strength of a text’s structure.
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Krishnaite bhakti ideology, the artists selected the concept of Vraj Krishna sans
its erotic or its yogic dimensions. At the same time, their representation of the
adult majestic Krishna is closer to the BhP version (lilavatara) rather than the
In the other four paintings, the emphasis is on the erotic aspect; in them
even the majestic aspect is missing, nevermind the yogic. These paintings (all
from non-Pushtimargi Kangra) — which had been under political and cultural
influence of the Mughals and other Islamic rulers prior to the period covered —
environment that had been shaped by Islamic influence that favored secular
themes, the artist favored the most human aspect of Krishna for representation.
In any case, whether the selection was in a more religious or a more secular
environment, all these kingdoms in the plains and the hills were largely Hindu,
with little direct interference from the Mughals in their religious affairs. The
207See, for instance, A. Ali (2006:173-208) for a general discussion of the religious world under
the Emperors Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb, and also for particular instances of
the various ways in which they all demonstrated a sensitivity to Hindu concerns and supported
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secure social-communicative environments, the artists most frequently selected
examine below the representational selections made by Indians during the British
rule.
The last three paintings in the previous section could be seen as evidence of the
embodied god ‘enjoying’ all that is in front of his eyes. Image worship at the heart
Bengal. He was horrified by its celebratory nature in which “the crowd out of
doors sing, dance, and make a horrid discord with barbarous instruments of
music, connecting with the whole every kind of indecency . . . After eating and
Hindu religious communities or individuals. See also Mukhia’s (2004:Chapter 1) discussion of the
general reticence in religious matters on the part of the Mughals.
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approaching Krishna as his beloved; Ward then projected this view of Indian
(1772-1833), too, had a deeply negative view of “deities like the Kṛṣṇa of the
I begin with Krishna as the most adored of the incarnations, the number of
whose devotees is exceedingly great. His worship is made to consist in
the institution of his image or picture, accompanied by one or more
females, and in the contemplation of his history and behaviour, such as
the perpetration of murder upon a female of the name Putana; his
compelling of a great number of married and unmarried women to stand
before him denuded; his debauching them and several others, to the
mortal affliction of their husbands and relations; his annoying them, by
violation of the laws of cleanliness and other facts of the same nature. The
grossness of his worship does not find a limit here. His devotees very
often personify (in the same manner as European actors upon a stage do)
him and his female companions, dancing with indecent gestures, and
singing songs relative to his love and debaucheries.
He wrote A Defence of Hindu Theism “to prove to my European friends that the
superstitious practices which deform the Hindoo religion, have nothing to do with
the pure spirit of its dictates.”209 Salmond (61) writes that “Rammohun
208 Cf. William Jones’s words: “I am in love with the Gopia, charmed with Crishen, and an
enthusiastick admirer of Ram” (Cannon 1970:652).
209 See Robertson 1999:70ff. Roy was also motivated to return Hinduism to its ‘true’ aniconic
origins, that is, to its Vedic, or rather, its Vedantic past, but only as a preliminary to reforming
Hinduism and modernizing it in areas of education, child marriage, and widow burning. He was
born into a Brahmin family, was multilingual in Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Latin, Greek, and
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represented a new class of Indians in Bengal (the bhadralok) who were
Those interactions may have been with people like the British men and
women whose journals and memoirs have been studied by Dyson (2002).
Dyson’s data, written between 1765 and 1856, has five references to Krishna,
out of which four are about his relationship with Radha and the ‘gopias’, in a
context of songs and music. There are observations like that of “the graceful
Crishna with his attendant nymphs moving in mystic union with the Seasons”
says that Krishna is a name “so connected with many obscene and monstrous
follies” that he does not want to hear it, and that “of all idolatories,” the religion of
the Hindoos is “the worst” (Bishop Reginald Heber, Letters Written in India, 1828,
in Dyson 230). 210 Dyson’s own analysis leads her to conclude (2002:107) that
English. He was also reported to have read Islamic theology, Western religious and political
philosophy including Aristotelian logic and rhetoric besides Vedantic philosophy of Shankara. He
believed in the revelation in the three Vedantic sources of scriptural authority (prasthantraya): the
Upanishads, the Vedantasutras, and the Gita (Robertson xxiv).
210 Western critics of ‘idolatory’ connected it to ‘licentiousness’, and saw in the Judeo-Christian
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expressed in the arts, a great deal of the expression of popular culture in
India came to be regarded with aversion.
Indian ideal. The response was based on the finding of the newest project of
organizing knowledge, this time led by the British but — as studies like Dodson’s
(2007) show — with full participation of Brahmins who were Sanskrit scholars
(pandits). In the 1760s, the British with Indian assistance began entextualizing
the Hindu Dharmashastras, the Vedas, and other works. In 1786, William Jones
pointed out the affinities between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, Sanscrit being “more
perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined
to the idea of common Aryan origins of the Europeans and the Indians (Müller
1878, 1892). This allowed Indians to question the British distinctions between
values of honor, chivalry, and conquest, all concepts which fit into the prevalent
discourse of power, the first systematic Indian nationalist ideology, and selected
for its symbol the martial Krishna of the MBh and the BhG. Bankim’s Krishna was
embodied perfection as well as a transcendent god, and he was better than the
Buddha or Jesus, whose sole occupation was the preaching of religion and
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therefore lacked the qualities to lead people in the project of ‘national
The true fulfillment of human life consists of the fullest and most
consistent development of all human faculties. He whose life shows this
full and consistent development is the ideal man. We cannot see it in
Christ; we can in Sri Krishna. If the Roman Emperor had appointed Jesus
to govern the Jews, would he have succeeded? No, because the requisite
faculties were not developed in him. . . . Again, suppose the Jews had
risen in revolt against Roman oppression and elected Jesus to lead them
in their war of independence, what would Jesus have done? He had
neither the strength nor the desire for battle. He would have said, ‘Render
unto Caesar what is due to Caesar’, and walked away. Krishna too had
little taste for war. But war was often justified in religion. In cases of just
war, Krishna would agree to engage in it. When he engaged in war, he
was invincible. . . . Krishna is the true ideal for man. The Hindu ideal is
superior to the Christian ideal. . . .
Krishna himself was householder, diplomat, warrior, law-giver, saint
and preacher; as such, he represents a complete human ideal for all these
kinds of people. . . . We cannot appreciate the comprehensiveness of the
Hindu ideal by reducing it to the imperfect standards of the Buddhist or
Christian ideals of mercy and renunciation. (Trans. Chatterjee 1986:70)
For Bankim, the MBh was a historical text, Krishna a historical figure who was an
ideal for modern man, once stripped of the ‘Puranic’ folk beliefs that got attached
Like Rammohan Roy, Bankimchandra was born into a Brahmin family and
was at least ‘bilingual’ in Bengali and English as well as Indian and European
literatures. Of the latter, he was widely read particularly in “19th century sociology
and political economy, and was greatly influenced, according to his own
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Bankim’s fusion of love of god with love of country in his poem Bande Mataram
(Hail to the Mother) that brought him national fame as it became the emblematic
The next important individual in the nationalist struggle was the ‘Father of
multilingual in Marathi, Sanskrit, and English, and, by his account, in “the Eastern
invoked Krishna of the BhG to promote the idea of killing one’s enemies for
Prophet Mohammad and Jesus Christ, and concluded that it was Krishna’s
“grand and eternal promise” in the BhG — that whenever there is a decay of
dharma he would come down on Earth to restore it — that set him apart from the
other religious figures. Tilak also wrote a lengthy and influential commentary on
the ‘secret’ of the BhG called Gita Rahasya (1911). He viewed the BhG as a
‘treatise on ethics’, and his emphasis was on right action as “mere singing the
praises of God would not lead them to God if they fail to remove the poverty of
millions,” and therefore “he had no love for the Bhakti cult or for the cessation of
was driven by his concern for freedom or ‘self-rule’ (swaraj), which, according to
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him, could only be won from the British by a diligent performance of duty in the
and in Vaishnava, Jain, and Christian teachings. Like Tilak, he too wrote a
translation of the BhG. Unlike, Bankimchandra, Gandhi states his belief in the
non-historicity of both the MBh and the BhG in his Introduction to the text, called
“Krishna of the Gita is perfection and right knowledge personified; but the picture
is imaginary. That does not mean that Krishna, the adored of his people, never
aftergrowth” (2000:17).
a loving relationship between the devotee and god (BhG 12.2-7), Gandhi affirms
211 Cf. this story from the Times of India Online (September 11, 2007), headlined ‘HC rules Gita is
dharma shastra’: Justice S N Srivastava of Allahabad High Court has come out with the order that
"it is the duty of every citizen of India under Article 51-A of the Constitution - irrespective of caste,
creed or religion - to follow the dharma propounded by the Bhagvad Gita". Giving this ruling on a
writ petition by S R Mukherjee, Justice Srivastava said the Gita was a "dharma shastra" of India.
It said it is the duty of the state to recognise the Gita as ‘rashtriya dharma shastra’. "The Gita
inspired our national struggle for freedom and all walks of life," he said. Elaborating further, the
court said that as India has a recognised National Flag and National Anthem, Bhagvad Gita, too,
may be considered as national (or rashtriya) dharma shastra .
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the idea’s usefulness, and comments: “Neither Christians nor Muslims, nor
certainly Hindus, have risen above the worship of the Personal God. Even a
person who aspires to cultivate devotion exclusively for the Unmanifest worships
some visible symbol. . . . We should not mind if, because we worship the
Personal God, we are called idolaters and criticized for being so” (2000:177-178).
Perhaps influenced by his Pushtimargi roots, Gandhi accepted a role for bhakti in
life, and he used the idea of bhakti in his nationalist agenda of forging a national
unity of different religious communities. In this context, he also favored the idea
of the perfect polity in the form of ‘Kingdom of God on Earth’ (Ramarajya). Rama,
not Krishna, became his ideal, for “Rama gave to all kings of the world an object
lesson in noble conduct. By his strict monogamy he showed that a life of perfect
promoted Hindi language and literature, and Hindu religion. Like Gandhi, he was
Hindi, Urdu, Brajbhasha, Bengali, and “had some English education” thus coming
into contact with newer institutions and ideas (Dalmia 1997:117). Harishchandra
who had something to say about Krishna, I find an interesting division: those
Indians who had no background in a specific bhakti community like the Pushti
Marga, they were highly critical of Krishna of the BhP; the others in contrast were
same time, all those who were in the thick of the resistance to British rule, they
invariably preferred Krishna of the BhG over Krishna of the BhP. These men
were all multilingual and familiar with a wide variety of eastern and western
aniconism, and ethical action from within Hinduism in order to not only match
those within the competing ideology but then to assert Hinduism’s superiority to
212Cf. Lütt’s (1995:147) opinion that the bhakti valued by Harishchandra was in the form of an
‘inward, sublime, affectionate devotion to God’, not in the form of the gopis’ ras-lila with Krishna of
the BhP.
263
These processes of conceptual selection have echoes of the earlier ones
during the Vedic times, in that (1) these selections were made in an environment
where Hindu interests were suffering at the hands of a state power which favored
another religion; (2) there were missionaries of this other religion who were highly
critical of Hindu gods and religious practices; (3) the Hindu response began
groundwork for new constructions of identity for the individual and the
the concept least likely to be misunderstood and most likely to lead them to
achieve their social-rhetorical goals; (5) the selection was in accordance with the
power, which interfered in the religious affairs of the Hindus; (6) selection of one
concept in a particular historical and communicative context did not destroy the
other(s), which continue to thrive to date; and (6) the nationalist rhetoric built
The main question that has driven this study is whether what happened to the
264
conceptualization is something we might encounter in any situation of cultural
contact.
(the cognitive aspect) and in human society (the social aspect). This model
innovated (the act of altered replication) and propagated (the act of differential
do with the nature of the innovating practitioner and the nature of the
propagation. Initially, concepts often spread, i.e. are propagated, through the
or groups strive for social prestige and, it turns out, that this drives innovation.
concept is activated in the mind of practitioners. It turns out that humans are
more likely to adopt an innovative variant of a concept the more often they hear it
265
time of the British. For present purposes, I have identified four periods that in the
history of the Indian subcontinent have been important: the Vedic period, the
early medieval period, the pre-modern period, and, finally, the colonial period.
motivated to achieve a better social status within their class. They also
reformulated the Vedic religion and the idea of a transcendent god who was also
different traditions into Vedic Brahmanism. They were able to do so because they
selected from within his story aspects that had a corresponding feature in the
story of the Buddha. They presented their version of a prestigious god using
another form. The sourthern Tamil practitioners selected from the northern
sources an aspect of Krishna more familiar to them, and one which filled a niche:
266
a pastoral god who was immanent and also transcendent, and one with whom
who made the selection and the identification were ‘bilingual’. Like their Vedic
counterparts they too were motivated to achieve a higher social status for
themselves and for their ideas which they had entextualized in the BhP. The
communicative strategies they used involved cognitive and social value. That is,
they conceptualized Krishna in a way that made his ludic aspect enticing and
By the end of the first millennium, Krishna’s story was ‘complete’. His
various aspects had converged in two dominant aspects of one god who now
variants: warrior-philosopher Krishna of the MBh and the Vraj Krishna of the BhP.
At this point, I proposed the hypothesis that one given variant is emphasized in a
environment, the Krishna of the MBh would be evoked. In order to test this
poems and Rajput paintings of the early-modern period. During this period,
267
under the Mughal rule, the arts flourished as did Hindu religious communities.
The supportive environment allowed the Krishna of the BhP to ‘play’. There is a
relative absence of images of Krishna of the MBh in the data I studied. For the
leaders under the colonial rule. In this conflictive environment, they selected the
Krishna of the MBh/BhG as the role model for Indian resistance to British rule.
On the one hand, the concept of ‘the Krishna of the MBh/BhG’ was
also found in a time of conflict. On the other, the formalization of the concept of
‘the Krishna of the BhP’ happened in a time and place of relative ideological
calm, and the selection of this aspect of Krishna also happened during a time of
To return to the initial question that has driven this investigation: Was the
The findings of this study are preliminary and could be made more
how these relate to those of Krishna, as well the concepts of the goddess and
how they fit into the general picture of innovation and selection of Hindu gods.
268
Although that is a project for future research, the model in which such a study
269
Appendix A
अथिव�महावलछनदोहा ॥
वचनवभषन�ेमतैजांहांहोिहिवपरीत ॥ किव� ॥
क�टके तटहारलपे�टिलय�कल�ककनीलैउरस�उरमाई ॥
करनूपरस�पगपौिचिवनाअंिगयासुिधअंचलक�िवसराई ॥
करअंजनरं जतचा�कपोलकरीजुतजावकन�निनकाई ॥
सुिनआवत�ी�जभूषणभूिषतह�उ�ठदेषधाई ॥
अथकृ �कोलिलतहाव ॥
किव� ॥ चपलापटु मोरकरीटु लसैमधुवाधनुसोिभवढावतह� ॥
मृदग
ु ावतआवतवैनुवजावतिम�मयूरनचावतह� ॥
उ�ठदेिषभटू भ�रलोचनचा�किच�कोतापवुझावतह� ॥
घनस्यांमघनैघनवेषस�केसवय�वनतैवृजआवतह� ॥
इतीरसकि�याजथा ॥
270
Appendix B
॥ किव� ॥
देखादेखीभईतैसकु चसभछू टगईिमटीकु लकांनकै सोघूंघटकोक�रवौ ॥
लगीटकटक�जविमटीधकधक�गतथक�मतछक�ऐसौनेहकौउघरवौ ॥
िच�कै सेकाढेदोऊठाढेरहेकांसीरांमनेकन�वाहलाखलोकनकोलिखवौ ॥
वंसीकोवजैवौनटनागरकोभूिलगयौनाग�रकोभूिलगयोगाग�रकोभ�रवौ ॥१॥
Kavitta:
Dekhā dekhī bhaī tai sakuca sabha chūṭa gaī,
miṭī kulaṅkāna kaiso ghūṅghaṭa ko karivau.
Lagī ṭakaṭakī java miṭī dhaka dhakī gata thakī
mata chakī aiso neha kau ugharavau.
Citra kai se kāḍhe dou ṭhāḍhe rahe Kāṅsīrāma
neka na pravāha lākha lokana ko lakhivau.
Vaṅsī ko vajaivau Naṭanāgara ko bhūli gayau,
Nāgari ko bhūli gayo ghāgari ko bharivau.
271
Appendix C
किव�
आगे�नं धरतडगपाछे�न
ं परतपगरहोसनमुखहीयेसोिचतलग्योह ॥
बंिसयोिबसारपटपीतनासम्भारकरगहे�ुमडारजुगजामनीसीजग्यो
कहतभगवान�भुकोटसुखके िनधानतेरेरंगतेरे�न�पतेरे�ेमपग्योह
इनठगठगीठोरठोरि�जनारसवभलेमेरीठगनीत�ि�लोक�ठगठग्य�ह ॥
Kavitta:
āge huṅ na dharta ḍaga pāchenuṅ na parata paga
raho sanmukha hī yeso cita lagyo heṅ
baṅsi yo bisāra paṭapīta nā sambhāra
kara gahe druma ḍāra juga jāma nīsī jagyo heṅ
kahata Bhagvāna prabhu koṭa sukha ke nidhāna
tere raṅga tere aina rupa tere prema pagyo heṅ
in ṭhaga ṭhagī ṭhora ṭhora Brijnāra sava bhale
merī Ṭhagnī teṅ Trilokī ṭhag ṭhagyo heṅ
272
Abbreviations
AS Arthaśāstra
Atharvans Kāṇva-Āṅgirasa-Bhārgava Vedic Brahmins
AV Atharva Veda
BhG Bhagavad Gītā
BhP Bhāgavata Purāṇa
BMAC Bactria Margiana Archaeological Complex
ChU Chāndogya Upaniṣad
DP Divya Prabandham
HV Harivaṃśa
IA Indo-Aryan
IE Indo-European
IIr Indo-Iranian
IVC Indus Valley Civilization (= Harappan Culture)
MBh Mahābhārata
MIA Middle Indo-Aryan
NS Nāṭyaśāstra
OED Oxford English Dictionary
OIA Old Indo-Aryan (= Vedic Sanskrit)
PS Puruṣa Sūkta
RV Ṛg Veda
SAP Sintashta-Arkhaim-Petrovka archeological complex
SB Śatpatha Brāhmaṇa
SED Sanskrit English Dictionary (Monier-Williams)
SU Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad
SV Sāma Veda
ViP Viṣṇu Purāṇa
YV Yajur Veda
273
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CURRICULUM VITAE
EDUCATION
2010 Ph.D. Religious Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA
Dissertation: Social Lives of Religious Symbols: An Evolutionary Approach to
Explaining Religious Change
Minors: India Studies and Cultural Studies
Focus: Religious Hisotriography; History of Religions in South Asia,
especially of Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, and Jainism; Religion in
Literary and Visual Arts; Rhetorical Theories of Cultural Production.
2000 M.A. Religious Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA
Thesis: Caste and Gender in the Bhagavata Purāṇa
1996 M. Phil. English Language and Literature, DAVV University, Indore, India
Thesis: Major Themes in the Shorter Fiction of Katherine Anne Porter
LANGUAGES
Fluent in: English, Hindi-Urdu, and Malvi (Rajasthani)
Research in: Classical Sanskrit, Medieval Hindi (Brajbhasha, Avadhi)
Basic knowledge of: Spanish
RESEARCH
Publications
Peer-Reviewed Journal
2002. Embodied Morality and Spiritual Destiny in the Bhagavata Purāṇa.
International Journal of Hindu Studies 6.2 (August): 111-45.
Reviewed Edited Volume
2005. Being a Witness: Cross-examining the notion of Self in Śaṅkara’s
Upadeśasāhasrī, Īśvarakṛṣṇa’s Sāṃkhyakārikā, and Patañjali’s Yogasūtra.
In Essays on the Theory and Practice of Yoga: In Honor of Gerald James
Larson, edited by Knut Axel Jacobsen, 75-97. Leiden: Brill.
Translation Projects
Published
2004 ‘The Hour of Cowdust’, translation of a hand-written inscription of an eight-
line poem in Brajbhasha from Keshavdas’s Rasikapriya (c. 16th century).
In Painted Poems: Rajput Paintings from the Ramesh and Urmil Kapoor
Collection, edited by Pratapaditya Pal, 181. Pasadena, CA, and
Ahmedabad, India: Norton Simon Museum, and Mapin Publishing.
Unpublished
2005 Seventy-four medieval hand-written inscriptions in Sanskrit and
Brajbhasha on Rajput paintings in the Collection of the Honolulu Academy
of Arts, Honolulu, HI.
Invited Talk
2004 Devotional Colors on Poetic Canvas, at ‘Indian Painting ― A Symposium’,
held in conjunction with the exhibition Painted Poems: Rajput Paintings
from the Ramesh and Urmil Kapoor Collection, at the Norton Simon
Museum, Pasadena, CA, April 3
Conference Papers
2
2006 Religious Rhetoric in Visual Arts, Conference Theme: Material Religion:
The Intersection between Religion and Material Culture, Annual
Conference on the Study of Religions in India (CSRI), Loyola University,
Chicago, June 8
2002 Re-Casting Identities: Dalits, Hinduism, and Christianity, Panel: Issues
in Dalit Studies, 31st Annual Conference on South Asia, Madison, WI,
October 13
2002 Contesting Memories: Missionaries there and then in the Context of here
and now, Panel: Political Posturing and Ritual Adaptations: The Church’s
way of Survival in a Pluralistic Society in India, International Conference
on Christianity and Native Cultures, Notre Dame, IN, September 21
2001 Ethical Issues and Subversive Humor in Modern Malvi Folk Literature,
Panel: Literature and Politics, 30th Annual Conference on South Asia,
Madison, WI, October 21
2001 Old Morality, New Lessons: Is it the Language, Literary Genre, or
Something Else?, Panel: Arts/Literature/Religion, Annual Midwest
American Academy of Religion Conference, Chicago, IL, March 31
2000 The Politics of Collective Memory vs. Selective Memory in South Asia,
Panel: Memory, Tradition and Politics in South and East Asia, 29th Annual
Mid-Atlantic Region Association of Asian Studies Conference, October 28
2000 Religious Nationalism and Historiography in South Asia: (Part I) Pakistan,
Panel: Nationalism, Religion, and History, 29th Annual Conference on
South Asia, Madison, WI, October 15
2000 Indic Social Theorizing and Religiosity of Hindu Women Devotees, Panel:
Issues in South Asian Society: Religion and History, 49th Annual Midwest
Conference on Asian Affairs, Bloomington, IN, October 7
2000 Embodied Morality and Spiritual Destiny: Women in a Devotional Hindu
Text, Panel: Religion and Sacred Texts, Annual Midwest American
Academy of Religion Conference, Chicago, IL, March 18
Research Assistance
3
1997-1998 Research Assistant to Dr. Gerald J. Larson, Director, India Studies,
and Professor of Philosophy and Religion, Indiana University,
Bloomington
(Assisted Dr. Larson in the fist steps – digitizing, organizing, proof-reading the
contributions – toward preparing an encyclopedic volume of Yoga Philosophy.)
TEACHING
4
2008 Associate Instructor of R250 Introduction to Buddhism, Department of
Religious Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, January-May
2004 Instructor of I202/I509 Second Year Hindi II, India Studies, Indiana
University, Bloomington, January-May
2003 Instructor of I201/I508 Second Year Hindi I, India Studies, Indiana
University, Bloomington, September-December
2003 Associate Instructor of R250 Introduction to Buddhism, Department of
Religious Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, January-May
2002 Graduate Assistant of I300 Passage to India: Emperors, Gurus, and
Gods, India Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, September-
December
2002 Graduate Assistant of R368/P328/I546 Philosophies of India, Departments
of Religious Studies, Philosophy, and India Studies, Indiana University,
Bloomington, January-May
2002 Associate Instructor of R202 Religion, Ethics, and the Environment,
Department of Religious Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington,
January-May (Two independent lectures on Hinduism and Ecology)
2001 Associate Instructor of R152 Religions of the West, Department of
Religious Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, August-December
2001 Associate Instructor of E103 The Bible and its Interpreters, Department of
Religious Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, January-May
(An independent lecture on Islamic Interpretations of the Bible)
2000 Associate Instructor of E103 Nonviolence and the Struggle for Freedom,
Department of Religious Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, August-
December
1999- Associate Instructor of Hindi, India Studies, Indiana University,
2000 Bloomington
PRESENTATION / PARTICIPATION
5
2005 Presenter of two programs on “Religion and Culture in Contemporary
India” to Freshmen (Grade IX) students of World Geography, Lansville
High School, IN, through interactive video conferencing outreach project
‘International Studies for Indiana Schools (ISIS)’ of Indiana University’s
International Programs, May 10
2005 Presenter and respondent for Hinduism on the panel ‘Understanding
Diversity’ in S100 (Social Work) course, Indiana University, Bloomington,
February 17
2004 Presenter of the program “Learn about India” during the ‘International
Education Week 2004’, sponsored by the U.S. Departments of Education
and State, to Grade VII students, Tell City Junior High School, IN, through
ISIS outreach project of Indiana University’s International Programs,
November 18
2003 Panelist addressing “India’s multi-linguistic, multi-religious, multi-cultural
heritage” at Indiana University’s Global Education Workshop 2003 on
‘Diversity in the World’, July 11
2003 Respondent for video in the ‘Great Decisions’ series of the U. S. Foreign
Policy Association and discussion on ‘India Today: A Rising Democracy’,
at the Meadowood Retirement Community Center, Bloomington,
February 12
2002 Panelist representing India at Indiana University’s Mini University session
on ‘Changing World Boundaries — Global Update’, June 17
2002 Host nation consultant for India in the Overseas Student Teaching Project
Spring Workshop, Indiana University School of Education, April 13
2001 Guest Lecturer on “Monotheism in Hinduism” in the course ‘Koranic
Studies’, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Indiana
University, December 1
2001 Host nation consultant for India in the Overseas Student Teaching Project
Spring Workshop, Indiana University School of Education, April 7
6
2001 Guest Speaker on Hinduism at the Eastgate Christian Church: Disciples of
Christ, Indianapolis, March 18
2001 Respondent for India at the Indianapolis Children’s Museum ‘Bridges to
the World: Youth Trade Fair’ with ISIS outreach project of Indiana
University’s International Programs, March 2
2001 Presenter of “The Life and Culture of India” with ISIS Distance Learning
Programs on ‘Global Cultures’ to Grade III students, Deer Run Elementary
School, Indianapolis, February 23
2001 Presenter of ‘India’, with ISIS Distance Learning Programs on ‘World
Cultures’ to Grade VII students, Lebanon Middle School, IN, February 16
2000 Joint Speaker on ‘Ideas for Teaching about South Asia’, in Teaching about
Asia: A Workshop for K-12 Teachers, Annual Midwest Conference on
Asian Affairs, October 6
2000 Presenter of “The Daily Culture of India” to the Grades I-V students,
Lanesville Elementary School Summer Camp ‘Crossing the Continents: A
Classroom without Walls’, with ISIS Distance Learning Program, June 6
2000 Guest Speaker on Hinduism at the First Christian Church: Disciples of
Christ, Bloomington, June 4 and 25
2000 Presenter of ‘The Daily Culture of India’ to Grade II students of the Central
Elementary School, Indianapolis, with ISIS Distance Learning Program,
April 19
2000 Host nation consultant for India in the Overseas Student Teaching Project
Spring Workshop, Indiana University School of Education, April 8
2000 Joint-speaker on Hinduism in Bloomington Chamber of Commerce Panel
on ‘Faith Communities’, March 21
2000 Speaker on Hinduism in ‘Panel on Religion’ at Bloomington North High
School, February 25
1998 Respondent for video “Preferred Sex, Desired Numbers” and discussion
on ‘Regional Population Issues: India (and Africa)’, International Studies
Institute Summer Workshop, Indiana University–Bloomington, July 16
7
Committee Work
2002- Member of the Baccalaureate Committee of the Indiana University Board
2003 of Trustees (University Ceremonies)
RESIDENCY ABROAD
India: as citizen 1969-1982, 1984-1996
Nigeria: 1982-1984
USA: as permanent resident 1996-1998, 1999-2009
Spain: 1998-1999
USA: as citizen 2009-present