[In the following essay, Blackwell contrasts the use of the Krishna motif in four poems by the Indian poets Kamala Das and Sarojini Naidu.]

Traditional imagery in modern poetry in English

Let us consider four poems, two each by two Indian poets writing in English. The older of the two is Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949), who is the author of three volumes of poetry: The Golden Threshold (1905), The Bird of Time (1912) and The Broken Wing (1915-1916). This first poem is taken from the second volume:

“SONG OF RADHA THE MILKMAID”

I carried my curds to the Mathura fair …
How softly the heifers were lowing …
I wanted to cry, “Who will buy, who will buy
These curds that are white as the clouds in the sky
When the breezes of Shrawan are blowing?”
But my heart was so full of your beauty, Beloved,
They laughed as I cried without knowing:
                                                  Govinda! Govinda!
                                                  Govinda! Govinda! …
How softly the river was flowing!
I carried my pots to the Mathura tide …
How gaily the rowers were rowing! …
My comrades called, “Ho! let us dance, let us sing
And wear saffron garments to welcome the spring,
And pluck the new buds that are blowing.”
But my heart was so full of your music, Beloved,
They mocked me when I cried without knowing:
                                                  Govinda! Govinda!
                                                  Govinda! Govinda! …
How gaily the river was flowing!
I carried my gifts to the Mathura shrine …
How brightly the torches were glowing!
I folded my hands at the altar to pray
“O shining ones guard us by night and by day”—
And loudly the conch shells were blowing.
But my heart was so lost in your worship, Beloved,
They were wroth when I cried without knowing:
                                                  Govinda! Govinda!
                                                  Govinda! Govinda!
How brightly the river was flowing.

The following poem is taken from the last volume:

“THE FLUTE-PLAYER OF BRINDABAN”

Why didst thou play thy matchless flute
                    Neath the Kadamba tree,
And wound my idly dreaming heart
                    With poignant melody,
So where thou goest I must go,
                    My flute-player, with thee?
Still must I like a homeless bird
                    Wander, forsaking all;
The earthly loves and worldly lures
                    That held my life in thrall,
And follow, follow, answering
                    Thy magical flute-call.
To Indra's golden-flowering groves
                    Where streams immortal flow,
Or to sad Yama's silent Courts
                    Engulfed in lampless woe,
Where'er thy subtle flute I hear
                    Beloved I must go!

The second poetess is Kamala Das (b. 1934), generally acknowledged as one of the foremost contemporary poets writing in India. These poems are taken from collection The Descendants (1967):

“THE MAGGOTS”

At sunset, on the river bank, Krishna
Loved her for the last time and left …
That night in her husband's arms, Radha felt
So dead that he asked, What is wrong,
Do you mind my kisses, love? and she said,
No, not at all, but thought, What is
It to the corpse if the maggots nip?

“RADHA”

The long waiting
Had made their bond so chaste, and all the doubting
And the reasoning
So that in his first true embrace, she was girl
And virgin crying
Everything in me
Is melting, even the hardness at the core
O Krishna, I am melting, melting, melting
Nothing remains but
You. …

A favorite motif of the medieval bhakti or devotional poets of India, as well as of the later Himalayan schools of bhakti miniatures, was the abhisārikā—a woman going to meet her lover, braving the elements, blackness of night, and dangers of the forest—including snakes and various categories of ghosts and goblins. She is, of course, Radha, or at least a gopi, and the lover she is risking life and social acceptance to seek, is Krishna. And it is all metaphorical of the soul's (Radha) quest for God (Krishna). Very often the poet identified himself with the heroine in the conventional signature line at the end of the poem. Even when not, however, as in Vidyapati, she was usually the sympathetic focus.

Sarojini Naidu and Kamala Das, two twentieth-century Indian poets, have employed this approach in two poems each, with startlingly different attitudes and results. They are about fifty years apart and reflect the difference between two generations of poets, the first of which wrote in a manner which one observer, Prabhakar Machwe, has labeled as “the traditional mystico-romantic idealistic,” and the second as the “angry young.”¹

The members of the first came to prominence during the freedom struggle, in which they participated. Naidu is almost a paradigm for this generation. She abandoned poetry for political action shortly after meeting Gandhi, succeeded him as president of the Congress party in 1925, was imprisoned in 1942, and became governor of India's largest state, Uttar Pradesh, in 1947. Her biography, fittingly, has been classified by the Library of Congress call number system with books on history and not with her literary works.²

Those of the second generation express dissatisfaction and disenchantment, even disillusionment, with the hopes and ideals that the first nurtured them upon. This has not resulted in a call for action, but rather in, as Machwe puts it, “the quiet acceptance of the fatalistic misery of the silent majority.” Das could well be the paradigm. While her poetry is often frankly personal, she does not lead a life in public as did Naidu, and little is known about her private life other than some intriguing rumors and speculation based upon references—oblique and direct—in her poetry as to her sexual interests and needs (in one, “Composition,” she tells us, “Reader, / you may say, / now here is girl with vast / sexual hungers, / a bitch after my own heart. / But, / I am not yours for the asking.”). One critic, Subhas Chandra Saha, has suggested that her poetry reflects a “transmuting [of] loneliness into sex-obsession.”³

With the “sex-obsession” there is a concomitant concern with death—both existentially and in terms of use of metaphorical image. Naidu, too, treats of death, and links it with love (especially in the long series of twenty-four poems entitled “The Temple” and subtitled “A Pilgrimage of Love” found in The Broken Wing); but Naidu's love is not explicitly sexual, and Das's sex is sensual but not devotional. Naidu recognizes suffering and death, but accepts them as a part of life, which is primarily joyous, and as such is celebrated in her poetry, or as she labeled much of it, songs. Das is tormented by, if not obsessed with, death and existential pain, does not find life joyous and does not celebrate it—nor does she really find sex joyous, though she does find it necessary and valuable as sensuous experience. Naidu's love or devotion is fulfilling. Das's sex is at best only temporarily so—and then not really fulfilling so much as enriching; it is the ultimate, and perhaps only worthwhile, form of human contact—and it remains primarily if not entirely human, not ascending to the divine as does Naidu's love, and only transitory, not permanent.

Specifically in regard to the Krishna poems—or perhaps more properly, the Radha poems—Naidu's are nice little songs, pleasant through their rhythm and sound, and flowing. Those of Das, though much shorter, seem heavier; they are not at all “nice,” but intense and arresting, making maximum use of imagery. Curiously, while Naidu's is related in the first person, and Das's in the third, the latter's seem more personal. This is in spite of—or perhaps even because of—the religious and devotional nature of Naidu's and the literary and psycho-sexual nature of Das's poems.

The poets also reflect the century-old antagonism within Krishna-bhakti. Whether the Radha-Krishna relationship is purely spiritual or metaphorical, or whether it is as well physical, does one simply adore Krishna, or does she seek union with him? Do Jayadeva's Krishna and Radha indeed enjoy sexual congress in his Gita Govinda, as the Kangra miniatures clearly express, or is such an interpretation a misunderstanding of the nature of the religious metaphor, as the contemporary Hare Krsna people of A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada maintain?

Das's Krishna and Radha are lovers; the understanding of the metaphor or motif of Krishna and Radha as being lovers seems to be taken for granted by her. On the other hand, there is no suggestion of sexual union as an object of desire on the part of Naidu's Radha or “I.” Her poems are not necessarily anti-sexual it is simply that sex is not a matter of concern in them; it is a non-sexual devotion that is expressed. While in Das's, the sex implies a deep and intense relationship, it is not devotional. Though both her poems, especially “Radha,” might imply a union deeper than the physical one expressed, I feel her concern to be literary and existential, not religious; I think she is using a religious concept for a literary motif and metaphor. The “melting, melting, melting” in “Radha,” one critic, Devindra Kohli, has suggested “is the allegorical embrace of the temporal and the eternal, and her sense of dissolution”;⁴ yet it seems to me reminiscent of a poem of Vidyapati's wherein Radha relates,

O friend, I cannot tell you
Whether he was near or far, real or a dream.
Like a vine of lightning,
As I chained the dark one,
I felt a river flooding in my heart.
Like a shining moon,
I devoured that liquid face.
I felt stars shooting around me.
The sky fell with my dress,
Leaving my ravished breasts.
I was rocking like the earth.
In my storming breath
I could hear my ankle-bells,
Sounding like bees.
Drowned in the last waters of dissolution,
I knew that this was not the end.

Then the signature line:

Says Vidyāpati:
How can I possibly believe such nonsense?(5)

W. G. Archer, in a note to the poem, found the line “I was rocking like the earth” comparable to a passage in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, “where a lover asks ‘Did the earth move?’ and the girl replies ‘Yes. It moved.’”

Further, while Krishna bhaktas or devotees were later to ascribe religious implications to Vidyapati's poems, Archer states that there is “no evidence” that Vidyapati was “a special devotee of Krishna,” nor even “a practising member of the Vaishnava cult. Indeed all his later writings,” Archer explains, “ignore Rādhā and Krishna and it is rather on Siva and Durga that he lavishes attention.”⁶ It would seem that like Kamala Das six centuries later, he found the Radha-Krishna relationship a good literary focus through which to express the intensity of the human sexual relationship.

But whether there are some sort of religious implications or not, Das's Radha is not a devotee, but a very human lover.

In context with “the burden of darkness” (as Kohli phrased it) in her other poetry, these two poems may be revealing of the almost paranoid concern Das expresses toward death. Naidu only makes one oblique reference to death, toward the end of “The Flute-Player of Brindaban,” and that is more in regard to contrasting heaven (“Indra's golden-flowering groves”) to hell (“sad Yama's silent Courts”)—the implication is that her devotion is so complete that she would follow him anywhere, and that even the shadowy underworld would be preferable to separation. In contrast, Das's “The Maggots” uses seven references to finality: sunset, last time, left, night, dead, corpse, maggots.

In summation, the four poems reflect the two differing approaches to Krishna—devotee or lover—as well as the polarization in twentieth century Indian poetry. Is death a matter of Indra's paradise and “Yama's silent Courts,” or of merely a corpse, nipped by maggots? Does worship and adoration of Krishna eternally fill the devotee's heart with his beauty and his music, or does he merely make love to one for a last time and leave? I suppose it would depend upon whether or not one hears the call of his flute.

Notes

1. Prabhakar Machwe, “Prominent Women Writers in Indian Literature after Independence,” Journal of South Asian Literature, XII, Nos. 3-4 (Spring-Summer 1977), 146.

2. Padmini Sengupta, Sarojini Naidu: A Biography (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1966); the call number is DS 481 N25 S4. The call number of the volume of her collected poetry, The Sceptred Flute: Songs of India (Allahabad: Kitabistan, 1969; first printed 1943) is PR 6027 A53 S4 1969.

3. Subhas Chandra Saha, Modern Indo-Anglian Love Poetry (Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1968), p. 24.

4. Devindra Kohli, Virgin Whiteness: The Poetry of Kamala Das (Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1968), p. 24.

5. Love Songs of Vidyāpati, trans. Deben Bhattacharya, ed. with intro., noted and comments, W. G. Archer (New York: Grove Press, 1969), p. 44.

6. Ibid., p. 35. Of course, Archer's opinion is not beyond dispute; e.g., Edward C. Dimock, Jr., refers to Vidyapati as a Vaisnava in his article “Doctrine and Practice among the Vaisnavas of Bengal,” in Krishna: Myths, Rites, and Attitudes, ed. Milton Singer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 43.