Krishna

Krishna's earliest firm attestation is not literary and not Hindu in any form we would recognise, and it is much earlier than most people assume.

The Heliodorus pillar at Besnagar in central India, erected around 110 BCE, is a stone column set up by a Greek ambassador named Heliodorus, son of Dion, from the court of the Indo-Greek king Antialcidas, sent to a local ruler. Its inscription calls it a Garuda pillar of Vasudeva, the god of gods, and describes Heliodorus as a Bhagavata, a devotee. A Greek diplomat had therefore adopted the worship of Vasudeva-Krishna by the second century BCE, and the devotional term was already in use. There is also earlier grammatical evidence: Panini, in perhaps the fourth century BCE, discusses forms derived from Vasudeva.

The literary sources are later and layered. The Mahabharata, in which Krishna is Arjuna's charioteer and the speaker of the Bhagavad Gita, reached something like its present form by the early centuries CE, and the Gita is generally treated as a somewhat later insertion into the epic. The Harivamsa, appended to the epic, and then the Bhagavata Purana of perhaps the ninth or tenth century, supply the childhood: the cowherd village, the butter theft, the flute, the gopis, Radha.

Radha herself is largely absent from the Bhagavata Purana. She becomes central through the twelfth-century Gita Govinda of Jayadeva and the Bengali devotional tradition after it. Much of what is now the emotional core of Krishna devotion is medieval.

The figure holds together two things that sit oddly beside one another, and different Hindu traditions weight them very differently.

The Gita Krishna is a teacher of duty. He tells Arjuna, paralysed at the sight of relatives in the opposing army, to fight, and the argument he gives is not that killing is fine but that the self is not killed, that action performed without attachment to its fruit does not bind, and that Arjuna's own duty as a warrior is not evaded by refusing it. He then reveals himself in a terrifying universal form, all-consuming time. This Krishna has been read by Shankara, Ramanuja and Madhva to opposite metaphysical conclusions, and in the twentieth century by Gandhi as an allegory of inner struggle and by others as a straightforward endorsement of righteous war.

The Vrindavan Krishna is a child stealing butter and a young man playing the flute while married women leave their houses at night to dance with him. The theological reading, developed at length in Gaudiya Vaishnavism, is that the gopis' abandonment of social propriety is the model of a love that gives up everything for God, and that the intensity of the metaphor is the point. The devotional literature is explicit that this is not licence.

Colonial-era European commentary found the second Krishna scandalous and said so, and a strand of nineteenth-century Hindu reform responded by emphasising the Gita and playing down Vrindavan. That argument shaped which Krishna got exported.

Krishna's place in Hindu theology turns on the idea of avatara, the descent of the divine into the world, and on a long argument about just how much of the divine he is.

The doctrinal charter is a couplet in the Bhagavad Gita (4:7-8): whenever righteousness declines and unrighteousness rises, the Lord says, he comes into being, age after age, to protect the good and restore dharma. On the standard Vaishnava scheme Krishna is one of the ten avatars (dashavatara) of Vishnu, alongside Rama and the rest. In this reading he is a supremely important form of a greater deity.

But an influential strand goes further. Gaudiya Vaishnavism, the tradition of Chaitanya in sixteenth-century Bengal, reads a line of the Bhagavata Purana, krishnas tu bhagavan svayam, "but Krishna is the Lord himself", to mean that Krishna is not an avatar of Vishnu at all but the original, complete Godhead (svayam bhagavan), of whom Vishnu is a partial expansion. The difference is not pedantic: it decides which name sits at the top of reality, and comparable claims are made for Krishna in other Vaishnava lineages.

This is why Krishna can appear in the tradition both as a figure within a pantheon and as its absolute centre, depending on who is speaking. It is the same doubleness that lets the great commentators read the Gita's "Lord" toward opposed conclusions about the relation between God, the self and the world, a divinity defined as much by descent into the world as by transcendence of it.

If the Gita gave Krishna to philosophy, the bhakti movement gave him to everyone else, and it is through devotion far more than doctrine that he is actually worshipped.

From the Tamil Alvar poets of the early medieval south to the great northern devotional poets, Mirabai, who sang of Krishna as her only husband, and Surdas, who dwelt on the child of Vrindavan, bhakti made a direct, emotional, often ecstatic love of Krishna the heart of the practice, open in principle across caste and gender in a way the older ritual order was not. The Gita Govinda of Jayadeva set the love of Krishna and Radha to music; Krishna devotion is sung at least as much as it is read.

The festivals carry it into ordinary life. Janmashtami marks his birth; Holi, the festival of colour, is bound up with his play; the rasa-lila is danced and dramatised; and at Puri in Odisha the temple of Jagannath, a form of Krishna, mounts the vast chariot procession from which the word "juggernaut" entered English.

In the twentieth century the devotion went global. In 1966 A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami founded the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, the Hare Krishna movement, in New York, carrying the Gaudiya worship of the Vrindavan Krishna and chanting the divine names in Western streets. The village cowherd whom colonial commentators had found an embarrassment thus became one of the most globally visible faces of Hinduism, and did so precisely through the devotional Krishna they had wanted to play down.