ITP 41: Krishna with the Cowgirls, Anonymous

Date: 28-01-2001
Owning Institution: The British Museum, London,
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”      
Subject: Middle Ages & Earlier    Renaissance    

On the eve of the Indian spring festival of Vasanta Panchami, today’s picture comes from the British Museum’s “Manley Ragamala”: an album of paintings named after its last English owner but originally created in about 1610 by an anonymous artist attached to one of the courts of Rajput in Rajasthan. The literal meaning of Ragamala is “garland of melodies”, in reference to the fact that each image in albums of this kind was designed to relate to a specific sort of music, as well as to a distinct emotion and a particular time of year. The image reproduced here is the Vasanta Ragini, or “Vasanta festival melody”. It is not difficult to imagine the mood and the music which this highly animated depiction of Krishna dancing with the cowgirls of his legend was intended to conjure up: something life-affirming and even fairly riotous, to judge by the various instruments shown, which include the cowgirls’ own accompanying drums, cymbals, strings and tambourines, as well as Krishna’s own flute.

The blue-skinned deity has brought a vase full of flowers to his devoted lovers. Crowned with peacock feathers and garlanded with blossoms, he wears a splendid robe of bright yellow, which is Krishna’s traditional colour but also has a particular festive significance during Vasanta Panchami, when the fields are carpeted with yellow mustard flowers announcing the onset of spring. According to Richard Blurton, Assistant Keeper of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum, the vividness of Krishna’s robe is due to the artist’s use of high quality turmeric.

The subject matter of the painting is also quite spicy, although liable to require some explanation for those unversed in the cults and deities of Hinduism.The Hindu God is known according to his three functions: as Brahma, the creator; as Shiva, the destroyer; and as Vishnu, loving protector and preserver. Krishna, who is one of Vishnu’s ten incarnations, was in the early stages of his cult characterised primarily as a bold warrior-prince. But from the tenth century onwards another Krishna emerged: Krishna the Divine Lover, who charms all creation with his flute and makes ingenious and passionate love to a multitude of adoring gopis, or cowgirls, in the idyllic bowers of Vrndavana, a magical pastoral world perhaps not a million miles away from the Christian Garden of Eden.

The amorous Krishna’s favourite among the cowgirls is named Radha. Generations of great Indian poets excelled themselves in lyrical descriptions of the couple’s relationshop. Here is the Bengali fifteenth-century poet Vidyapati’s account of Krishna’s awakening feelings for Radha as she reaches womanhood (like most poetry, I suspect it suffers a bit in translation):

“Each day the breasts of Radha swelled.

Her hips grew more shapely, her waist more slender.

Love’s secrets stole upon her eyes.

Startled her childhood sought escape.

Her plum-like breasts grew large,

Harder and crisper, aching for love.

Krishna soon saw her as she bathed,

Her filmy dress still clinging to her breasts,

Her tangled tresses falling on her heart,

A golden image swathed in yak’s-tail plumes…”

This conveys the intensely sexual nature of the gopis’ relationship with Krishna; and a similar current of emotion runs through the Ragamala depiction of Krishna with the Cowgirls. The gopis are aflutter with excitement. One squirts Krishna festively with coloured paint from a pump, the spatter from which delicately flecks much of the lower left side of the picture, almost as if applied by aerosol. Others dextrously manage to play their instruments at the same time as reaching out their adoring hands towards the deity. Their large and liquid eyes are filled with yearning, while their doubtless crisp and plum-like breasts seem palpably to swell and heave, aching for love. All around them, nature itself seems in a state of arousal. The sacred river foams, flowers bloom, vegetation burgeons, while a preening peacock performs his own courtship ritual.

Radha, Krishna’s best beloved, is in fact absent from the scene. The artist has represented the moment when, at springtime, the charming but also highly promiscuous Krishna abandons her to pursue the rest of the cowgirls. His orgiastic embraces are described in the Gita Govinda, or Song of the Cow-Herd, a celebrated twelfth-century Sanskrit poem by Jayadeva:

“Sandal and garment of yellow and lotus garlands upon his body of blue,

In his dance the jewels of his ears in movement dangling over his smiling cheeks,

Krishna here disports himself with charming women given to love.

He embraces one woman, he kisses another, and fondles another beautiful one.

He looks at another one lovely with smiles, and starts in pursuit of another woman.

Krishna here disports himself with charming women given to love.”

It would be a mistake, however, to view the story of Krishna and the cowgirls as straightforward erotic romance. Rather like the ecstatic writings of Western saints and mystics such as St Francis of Assisi or St Teresa of Avila, which describe the body and love of Christ in similarly sexually charged terms, such manifestations of the cult of Krishna were not seen as lewd or lubricious. The keen and yearning love of the gopis was understood to express the profound yearning of the human soul for union with God. Word and image were used allusively, to heighten the emotional pitch of devotion.

Why was it that the figure of Krishna the Lover, ringmaster of romantic dalliance, became so immensely popular in northern India from the tenth century onwards? W.G. Archer, in his 1957 study The Loves of Krishna, points to a tightening of domestic morals, which led to the seclusion of women and the laying of even greater stress on wifely chastity. In the great flowering of Indian poetry about Krishna he sees “a substitute for wishes repressed in actual life.” Richard Blurton believes the same is true of love painting, too: “The Ragamala images are imbued with an intense emotion, which I think is the other face of the rigid, hierarchical, family-dominated, caste-dominated society in which they were produced. I think people found release through painting, and music, and religion, which enabled all their feelings to flood out.” Contemplating the beatific Krishna and his harem of sexy consorts, they could perhaps imagine themselves, too, enjoying a life apart from this life, by the side of the sacred river, in the groves of guiltless bliss.