Afflicted by hurt sentiment? There’s a cure for that: Sanskrit literature

Sans the Sacred

This week, you might have missed a bit of hullaballoo if you weren’t reading your Twitter feed carefully. A Bengaluru-based company got into trouble for selling a painting of Krishna in amorous dalliance with Radha, both au naturel. Once one person tweeted about it, hundreds took to raising objections with Amazon for allowing the listing, threatening to boycott it, targeting the organisation selling the painting, calling on everyone from the Bengaluru City Police to various public figures to take action against it.

Unfortunately for those whose sentiments were grievously injured, the painting being sold was not by a contemporary artist commissioned by the organisation. It is a reprint of a classical 18th century Pahari painting based on a verse from Jayadeva’s celebrated Gitagovinda, currently in the Philadelphia Museum of Art collection. Little do these self-proclaimed guardians of Indian culture know that this is a masterpiece of Indian art.

Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda, also popularly called the Ashtapadi, narrates Krishna’s erotic exploits with Radha, and is known for its unmatched lyrical beauty. One of its more scandalous verses (scandalous for those uninitiated into Sanskrit literature) is one where Krishna, to appease Radha, angry at his flirtations with other gopikas, asks her to place her foot on his head and forgive him. This is rather mundane for regular readers of Sanskrit poetry, where heroes routinely placate heroines by falling at their feet, Shiva included.

The 17th century Hindi work Bhaktamal narrates the legend behind Jayadeva’s verse. As Jayadeva was composing the Gitagovinda, he composed a verse in his mind where Krishna asks Radha to place her foot on his head, but was stricken by the thought that it was disrespectful to picturise Krishna as asking this of a mere human. So, he didn’t write it down, and went to the river to take a bath instead. When he got back, he saw to his surprise that the verse he had thought of had been written down with the rest of his composition. When he asked his wife who had written the new verse, she told him that he had written it himself. It turns out that Krishna himself visited, in the guise of Jayadeva, to write the verse Jayadeva was afraid to put down. Overjoyed at this divine sanction of his work, Jayadeva retained the verse in the Gitagovinda. The Bhaktamal seems to tell us then, if you have a problem with the Gitagovinda, take it up with Krishna himself!

However, for those displeased with Jayadeva nevertheless, and with painters inspired by his work, there are two ways out. One, you could write a scholarly tract like the illustrious Jagannatha Pandita, scholar and poet from the 17th century, explaining why Jayadeva’s poetry violates aesthetic standards. In Jagannatha’s words, “When writing about gods and their union in love, one should refrain from explicit detail. It brings no pleasure to readers and is as distasteful as describing one’s parents...Just because Jayadeva broke this unanimously accepted rule like a mad elephant doesn’t mean modern writers should follow suit...”

Two, you could be one of the commentators whose puritanism is matched by their erudition in Sanskrit. These commentators manage to use grammar to reinterpret erotic verses as a spiritual metaphor for the union of the human and the divine. But if you would rather be a modern crusader for Indian culture on Twitter, I’m sorry to inform you that there is more to Indian culture than goody-goody cliches like matrudevo bhava and dharmo rakshati rakshitah.

(The author is a scholar of Sanskrit based in Toronto who likes writing new things about very old things)