When He Dances Elsewhere

Jayadeva composed the Gīta Govinda in twelfth-century Bengal, in a Sanskritic world that also looked east to Puri and the cult of Jagannātha. The poem is twelve sargas of song, aṣṭapadīs meant to be sung, not merely read, in which Krishna, called Govinda, and Rādhā love, separate, accuse, and return. It is Vaishnava bhakti in a court metre. It is also a poem in which hips, night, and the flute are not metaphors waiting to be excused.

Viraha, love in separation, is the engine. Krishna stays among the other gopīs. Rādhā waits, then refuses, then burns. A friend goes between them like a camera. The forest is a set that keeps changing light. If this were only a romance, the delay would be cruelty dressed as plot. In the poem’s own terms the delay is the devotion: God tasted as absence, absence tasted as God.

Do not file it as Hindu Hallmark. The jealousy is real in the song. The erotic is not a veil over a Sunday lesson. Bhakti here is a practice of wanting that does not agree to be only polite. Kāma and viraha occupy the same stanza without asking which of them is the guest.

Edwin Arnold, in 1875, made a Victorian English that still has a right to be sampled because it is public domain, and a duty to be distrusted because it is Victorian: “The sky is clouded; and the wood resembles / The sky, thick-arched with black Tamála boughs.” The cloud, again. The wood as weather. Arnold called it an Indian Song of Songs, which is a comparison and a colonial habit. The comparison has a point. The habit does not get the last word.

Later painting, Kangra, the temple hangings, the modern calendar, would freeze particular gestures until they seemed inevitable. The poem is more restless than its stills. Rādhā is not a mascot of patience. She is a speaker of want, and the want is allowed to be angry. When he returns, the return is not proof that waiting is a woman’s job. It is a religious drama that has not yet been made safe.