Radha

Radha is the beloved of Krishna among the gopis, the cowherd women of Vrindavan, and in the developed theology of Gaudiya Vaishnavism (the tradition of Chaitanya) she is far more than a consort. She is understood as Krishna's own hladini shakti, his pleasure-potency, the very power of bliss and love by which he delights, so that Radha and Krishna are one reality in two bodies, and Radha is in a sense the higher of the two, because she embodies the perfect devotion (bhakti) that Krishna, being God, cannot direct toward himself and so externalizes as her. To worship is to take Radha's side of that love. Her name is often placed before Krishna's, as Radha-Krishna.

Beyond the Vrindavan cycle, Radha is worshipped in her own right at dedicated shrines, most notably the Radha Rani temple at Barsana, her traditional birthplace, where the boisterous Lathmar Holi festival re-enacts, in play, the village women driving off Krishna and his companions with sticks, a ritual inversion that dramatizes Radha's primacy over her divine beloved in exactly the region tradition names as her home. Her birthday, Radha Ashtami, is kept in the Vaishnava calendar roughly a fortnight after Krishna's own Janmashtami, a calendrical pairing that mirrors the theological order in which Gaudiya tradition places her.

Radha's history is one of the clearest cases of a figure who entered the pantheon through literature rather than ancient scripture. She is absent from the Bhagavata Purana, the great text of Krishna devotion, and appears in datable literature considerably later, achieving her decisive form in Jayadeva's twelfth-century Sanskrit poem the Gita Govinda, a rapturous cycle on the love, separation and reunion of Radha and Krishna. The tradition makes her married to another man, and treats that very illicitness, love that disregards its own reputation and every worldly tie, as the measure of a devotion that holds nothing back, a parakiya (belonging-to-another) love read as the highest allegory of the soul's yearning for God.

Radha and Krishna are today worshipped as an inseparable pair across northern and eastern India. A far earlier trace of the pair appears in the Gaha Sattasai, a Prakrit anthology of erotic verse traditionally associated with the Satavahana king Hala and generally dated to the early centuries CE, where a Radha-like figure is named in passing among the poems' lovers, centuries before Jayadeva's Gita Govinda gave the relationship its full theological elaboration; the gap between this bare early mention and the developed twelfth century devotional figure is itself read by scholars as evidence of a long, largely undocumented intermediate stage in Radha's growth from a literary motif into a goddess.