And yearning for Krishna’s love would
Make you pray, life after life, for a return to Brajdham
How devoid of compassion is the music of your flute
How cruel is your failure to understand the women of Braj!
Like the tears you have reduced me to
Could I but make you weep too!
Only then would you realize
The endless heartburn born of a guru’s neglect.*
23
SRI RADHA
RAMAKANTA RATH
17
Let’s be clear about this:
If all is an illusion
and you construct every illusion,
why then do you rush into my arms,
try to pull away my clothes,
and join your lips to mine?
If you imagine every object is
a mere container of yourself,
and if every person is a fulfilment
of some desire of yours,
then go sleep on a waterless ocean
for as many epochs as you please.
An unending tempest rages here
and every fragment of being is blown away
in the gale of indiscreet love.
I forget myself
when our bodies touch.
I therefore manoeuvre my body
to touch yours as often as I can.
You do not comprehend
why I would forget myself or why
I seek to preserve you like a treasure
in the soul that exists beyond
all forgetting.
I would like to forget
all my futile years before I knew you
and the compulsory living after you have left.
25
It was a bad day yesterday.
My husband dragged me by the hair
and knocked my head against the wall
several times, and insisted
I came out with the true account
of where I spent the previous night.
It pained for some time,
but when he began an inspection
of my body, I could not
hold my laughter.
God, I said to myself,
what an imbecile I have
for a husband!
He is looking for proof
of my infidelity
in the body
and in the daytime too!
32
Who would believe
we neither touched
nor spoke to each other
throughout last night?
You ceased to be
what I knew you to be.
You, I found, had no body
and yet you were
my tireless companion
who always became
something he never was.
He was some time
my bonded slave
and, some other time,
my destroyer.
You are a dagger
of the colour of the blue water-lily
that tears me but when
I recover and look,
the one who is bleeding
is you, not me.
Before I can cry
because you are wounded,
you stand before me, smile,
and confound me.
When I close my eyes
so that I do not see you
you move about in my heart
that suddenly acquires eyes.
When I close my ears
so that I do not hear you,
You change into an aspiration that inflicts
perpetual restlessness.
I did not touch you
in the night, for I feared
I would become the air
and the water
that you were.
I feared my destiny
of seeking you
in life after life
would end, and I feared
my mind would never know
something of what you were.
The way to living is through dying.
I cannot do without
this losing through gaining,
or this gaining
through losing.
36
I knew there would be a day
when you would stop speaking,
stop smiling,
stop recognizing us,
stop finding your way about
towns and villages
you had lived in for years,
stop remembering
our fearless transgressions of history.
Those were the days
when, though we did not speak a word,
we chattered endlessly
with the world, with peacocks,
and with heaps of sand.
We opened the night’s eyes
to hope
and to roads extinct long ago.
Those were the days
when, it seemed, the air
would be less heavy, and the road to death
less infested with terror
after a little rebellion,
a little reordering of the world,
a little spilling of blood.
Such days pass.
Look, I traverse my hollow days
like a sleepwalker
and, while sleeping, grope
for what I know I will never get.
Look, I paint my burnt future blue,
put sandalwood paste on it,
and sleep with it.
Look, I smile, I weep,
I am wild at its infidelity,
and I close my eyes
when its arms that do not exist
embrace me.
You, however, would stop speaking,
would consider all things including yourself
unreal, would create,
yet another evening,
would cast away all life history
into its darkness, would stifle all sound,
and would inhabit, all alone,
a territory that is neither death
nor life.
I have a different fate.
The day I die I will die
absolutely.
But till death comes, I do not have
a single free moment.
Even if you are an illusion,
it no longer matters.
I have come out of my house,
dressed for our night of love.
I have left my last breath so far behind
I can’t go back to it.
58
You are the fragrance of rocks,
the lamentation of each flower,
the unbearable heat of the moon,
the icy coolness of the blazing sun,
the language of my letters to myself,
the smile with which all despair is borne,
the millenniums of waiting without a wink of sleep,
the ultimate futility of all rebellion,
the exquisite idol made of aspirations,
the green yesterdays of deserts,
the monsoon in an apparel of leaves and flowers,
the illuminated pathway from the clay to the farthest planet,
the fantastic time that’s half-day and half-night,
the eternity of the sea’s brief silence,
the solace-filled conclusion of incomplete dreams,
the dishevelled moment of waking up with a start,
the reluctant star in the sky brightening at dawn,
the unspoken sentences at farewell,
the restless wind sentenced to solitary confinement,
the body of fog seated on a throne,
the reflection asleep on the river’s abysmal bed,
the undiscovered mine of the most precious jewels,
the outlines of lunacy engraved on space, and
the untold story of lightning.
You have, my dearest, always suffered
all my inadequacies with a smile.
I know I am not destined to bring you back once you’ve left.
All I can do hereafter, till the last day of my life,
is to collect the fragments of what you are
and try to piece them together.
60
Reports of your grievous injury
have reached us here.
You surely had
prior knowledge.
You hear the storm’s first breath
before it breaks,
you know each single flower
before it becomes a bud,
and you have foreknowledge
of the river’s murmur, of the shape
of every passing cloud.
You surely knew, before the sun rose today,
what the day would bring.
Like all other days and all other events,
this day and its events
were your own handiwork,
but you delude people into believing
it was all an accident.
I sometimes wish I had,
unknown to you, become
your accomplice. But a
moment later, I give up this
thought
and apologize to this body
for my years of neglect.
I beg it to give me
tears and pain
that do not occur in your scheme,
a second gift of youth
that will bewilder you,
and years will pass
before you recover your wits
and resume the frolic
of dying.
Those will be the years
when, while you looked at the blue river,
you will forget who you are;
when flowers will frighten you
with their mutiny of colour;
when you will forget that your will was the law
governing all objects in space;
when you will writhe in pain;
when, like a patient writhing in pain,
you will look at me;
and when your eyes will ask me
like the eyes of a patient writhing in pain,
to stay,
to hold you in my arms.
I wish I had wings
and reached you where your body
writhes like a thunder robbed of its voice,
or like a leaf imprisoned
in a whirlwind’s unending moment
of futile movement.
I would then install
everywhere in your body
a longing more ancient than your play
engrossing men, women, and
all universe.
I would fill your veins
with wayward blood,
and lead your body tenderly
to the riverbanks,
to nights of small mischiefs
and of joys larger than ourselves,
to knowledge wet with tears,
to my arms, breasts and thighs,
where the blue marks you made
shone with greater splendour
than the whole solar system
created by you.
You belong to none.
Everyone who comes to you
is extinguished in your ruthless game
of non-discrimination.
I wish I could give you
a true body, a body with ears
that heard the voice of all my years
of sorrow, envy and hope,
a body with hands
that wandered all over my body.
Perhaps then you would understand
the smallness of all your universe,
and the art of waiting for people
either far away or dead.
I would then instruct you
in weeping for days for ever past,
and in slipping away
from life’s drab days and nights.
All you have to do
is to first hold a warm hand,
its shadow thereafter,
and begin walking.
You will thus pass
this life,
and many others.
61
Reports of your passing away
have reached us here.
Don’t count me
among your widows,
or among those who carry your body
in procession.
Your body, mercifully,
is far, far away.
In the parting of my hair,
the vermilion mark
is brighter than ever.
Now stop joking,
become the bridegroom,
and come.
I wear
the bride’s heavy silk
and gold.
My bangles
tinkle and snub
all scandals.
You no longer are
anyone’s father, son, husband.
You are the pure naughtiness
of our last night together,
the voice,
that teases me,
and the touch that breaks
the virginity of my loneliness.
Just when I’d start crying,
you arrive and tickle
my lifeless longing
into unrestrained laughter.
When they deposit your body
on the pyre,
will be consumed by the flames.
They would return home
and, a few days later,
would fill your absence
with thoughts of you
and a thousand other things.
My joy today
is uncontrollable.
If you had not died for them,
you would not have become
entirely mine.
Since everyone believes you are dead,
my journeys to the riverbank
will now be without fear.
They will forget me,
or sleep like the dead
when I hold you in my arms,
when your hands traverse
my body,
when I renounce all power
to resist, or to speak, and when it is utterly impossible
for me to die,
or to live.
24
KANUPRIYA
DHARAMVIR BHARATI
TRANSLATED FROM THE HINDI BY ALOK BHALLA
Under the Mango Tree
You stood under this mango tree
and called to me.
Even now
when I come here
I find peace.
No,
I think of nothing
recall nothing at all.
Words: Meaningless
But, Kanu,
how will you explain to me
the meaning of all this?
Words, words, words . . .
For me, they are meaningless
If I don’t hear them
from your trembling lips when you sit by me,
your fingers entangled in my dry hair.
They are meaningless . . .
Words, words, words . . .
Karma, swadharma, judgement, obligation . . .
I’ve heard these words in every lane.
Arjuna may have found in them
something of value.
But, my love,
when I hear them
I understand nothing.
I stand on the wayside and
dream only of your lips
when they must have
uttered these words
for the first time . . .
I imagine myself
in place of Arjuna
And my heart fills with desire
And I don’t know which war it is
And whose side I am on
And what the problem is
And what the fight is about
but my heart is filled with desire
because I dearly love the way
you explain it to me . . .
and the warring armies are motionless
and history stands still
and you are explaining to me . . .
Karma, swadharma, judgement, obligation . . .
But by the time they reach me
their meaning has changed
and I only hear
Radha, Radha, Radha . . .
Words, words, words . . .
Your words are countless, Kanu—infinite
But they only have one sign, one meaning
me
me
me
only Me!
Then how will you explain
history to me
with those words?
* Bright as an Autumn Moon: Fifty Poems from the Sanskrit; translated from the Sanskrit by Andrew Schelling, Manoa, General Editor, Frank Stewart.
* Translated from the Tamil by Priya Sarukkai Chabria. Credit: The Autobiography of a Goddess, Zubaan, New Delhi, 2015, University of Chicago Press, 2016.
* In Praise of Krishna: Translation of Gita Govinda of Jayadeva, edited and translated from the Sanskrit by Durgadas Mukhopadhyay, BR Publishing Corporation, 1990.
* Translated from the Sanskrit by Lee Siegel: Gita Govinda: Love Songs of Radha and Krishna, by Jayadeva (Clay Sanskrit Library and New York University Press: New York, 2009).
* Translated from the Maithili by Deben Bhattacharya: Love Songs of Vidyapati, ed. W.G. Archer (Grove Press, 1970; 1st Indian edition, Motilal Banarsidass, 1987).
* Translated from the Gujarati by Pradip Khandwalla: Beyond the Beaten Track: Offbeat Poems from Gujarat (Gujarat Sahitya Parishad, 2008).
* Collected Works of Sri Aurobindo, pp. 86–87, https://bit.ly/2Jgxruk.
* Translated from the Braj Bhasha by John Stratton Hawley.
† Translation (from the Sanskrit) used by ISKCON; contributed by Shubha Vilas.
‡ Translated from the Hindi by Malashri Lal.
* Translated from the Tamil by H.S. Shiva Prakash.
† Translated from the Bengali by Lalit Kumar.
* Translated from the Bengali by Reba Som.
Notes
Introduction: The Dream of the Awakened by Namita Gokhale
1 Binodini, The Maharaja’s Household: A Daughter’s Memories of Her Father (New Delhi: Zubaan Books, 2015).
Chapter 2: In Search of the Historical Radha by Jawhar Sircar
1 Pierre Amiet et al., Arts Asiatiques, Tome XXVI, Parcourir Les Collections, 1973.
2 P. Banerjee, The Life of Krishna in Indian Art (New Delhi: National Museum, 1978), p. xvi.
3 Sumanta Banerjee, Appropriation of a Folk Heroine: Radha in Medieval Bengali Vaishnava Culture (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1993), p. 9.