Love and Happiness: Krishna's Ras Leela is Not an Orgy

By Raji Narasimhan

The ras leela - the frenzied and uninhibited dance of the gopi s with Krishna - never becomes an orgy. Why? The obvious answer would be that Krishna is divinity; he is immaculate. But the reasons are more philosophical than theological.

The dance symbolises the soul's unceasing struggle to break clear of the constraints of the body, to make contact with the supra-reality it sees out there. This intensely private struggle is an abstraction, but so compulsively felt by the soul straining within the body as to become an obsession. The indulgence of any obsession is a behind-the-scene, secret activity, for it has undertones of guilt.

The secret element is strongly conveyed in the Rajput and Pahari miniature paintings. The setting is a forest, and to this charmed space the gopi s come, in stealth, for their tryst with Krishna. For they are married women, with household responsibilities, which they abandon as they rush out at the call of the bansuri . Accountable to husbands and elders for every moment of their lives, they have to make amends for the milk boiled over, curd left half-churned...

A more metaphysical interpretation is evident in the psycho-cosmic drama of the ras leela . In its struggle to reach out to the supra-reality the soul is pressed for time for the Supra-being is highly unpredictable; It can vanish any moment, and there is no knowing when It will re-appear. The soul, thus, has to close in on the Supra-being while it can, and enter into communion with It.

The soul's desperation, in essence, is the same as that of the gopi s. But profound differences come about from the spatial positioning of the two entreaties. The gopis operate on solid earth, however dream-like their woodland setting. Krishna 's is a real presence, touchable and graspable, for all his divine intangibility. He can of course vanish, just as the formless Supra-being can.

But the gopis can, and do, lament for his presence, just as for a deeply loved mortal being. This externalisation, and the defusing of the spiritual tension of bhakti implicit in it, is not available to the soul, trapped and isolated within the body, attempting spiritual union. Both its agony and ecstasy are severely private experiences, initiated and resolved in realms beyond geography.

The quality of fission inherent in all spiritual pursuit, in all bhakti -driven behaviour, provides the aesthetic basis of ras leela as iconography, as well as the conceptual spur for formulating it in terms of philosophy.

The rapt look of abandon on the faces of the gopi s is, thus, a by-play of the involuntary and forceful outflow of the spiritual magma within. But why does this rapture have to be expressed through the figures of women? Obviously, for heightened communication. The whole struggle of the soul's reaching out to the One, is a story of longing and yearning, leading to a state of total surrender. It is a story of love, and has a built-in bias towards erotic bhava s - the shringara rasa .

The surrender into which the eroticism of the ras leela climaxes is a wordless state. It is an inclusive, containing state, associated more with the feminine anatomy and personality than with the male. The feminine ambience of the ras leela , in the way it is visualised and conceptualised, is a natural outcome of our collective metaphorical reflexes. The metaphor is roused by a metaphysical axiom. Its expression, whether as a concept or as a visual image, can never transgress the limits of decency. It has a natural immunity.

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See also: Love and Happiness, Life and Beyond, Death and Dying, Body Mind and Soul)