In a land teeming with myths and legends,
stories both sacred and secular, it is difficult to select one. The subject
here, therefore, is a complex of stories revolving around one figure called by
a myriad of names, with multiple facets, towering with an inscrutable smile
above the Hindu pantheon, the lovable Hindu God, Krishna.
The story itself is a familiar one with many echoes in
similar stories across the world. It is set down here with the caveat
that a most complicated story with many differing strands in many local
traditions cannot really be reduced to a few words; this is only a small
attempt.
Our story begins before the birth of the baby Krishna, at
the marriage of his future parents, Devaki and Vasudeva, being celebrated with
pomp and magnificence by Devaki's loving brother but an evil ruler Kansa, the
King of the Yadava Kingdom of Mathura. The festivities are rudely interrupted
by a divine voice which says that the vile acts of Kansa can no longer be
tolerated by mortals and the groaning earth shall be delivered by Devaki’s
eighth son. Kansa is enraged by this and imprisons the newly married couple,
systematically killing off all their offspring as they are born.
The eighth son arrives in due course, in the dead of
the night amidst thunder, torrential rain and lightning. The prison guards are
miraculously put to sleep and Vasudeva places the baby in a reed basket upon
his head to take him across the swollen river Yamuna to be reared in safety in
the household of a supportive chieftain of the Yadavs in Vrindavan. The waters
of the river part and Vasudeva walks across, exchanges the baby boy with the
new born baby girl of the chieftain, Nanda and his wife, Yashoda, and walks
back. The next day, Kansa tries to kill the baby girl only for her to slip out
of his grasp, take the form of a Goddess and inform him that the boy who will
kill him has already been born.
Kansa institutes a search and kill operation for all new
born babies but the baby Krishna surmounts all the demons sent by Kansa killing
them and surviving unscathed.
His boyhood is an idyll on the banks of the Yamuna in a
pastoral community of cowherds. His romances with the Gopis or milkmaids are
sung of even to this day. His consort Radha with whom his name is inextricably
linked, is one of these Gopis.
The young Krishna attains his destiny; goes with his foster
brother, Balarama, to Mathura, kills his evil uncle Kansa in unarmed combat and
restores the throne to his deposed grandfather.
His chief role, however, is as the divine preceptor and
guide in the epic battle for the control for the earth which is the subject
matter of one of the two main epic poems of India, the Mahabharata. The fight
is between the evil Kauravas and their dispossessed cousins, the Pandavas, who
are the rightful heirs of the Kingdom. In the battle field he delivers to his
friend- disciple, Arjuna, one of the Pandavas, the immortal precepts which have
been the bedrock of Sanatana Dharma or Hinduism for thousands of years, the
Bhagwat Geeta. This contains the essence of the wisdom of the Upanishads and is
one of the basic texts of Hinduism.
The battle is won by the Pandavas after the almost complete
annihilation of both the sides thanks largely to the tactics and strategy
advocated by Lord Krishna.
These are the bare bones, or even less, of the story
surrounding Lord Krishna but each facet of his life is the subject of countless
legends, all of them with different regional and community flavours.
If I were to attempt a functional analysis of this complex
of myths it would offer an insight into the development of the Indian
subcontinent in the second and first millennium BC from an agglomeration of
different tribes, communities and clans at different stages of material culture
into a cohesive cultural unit culminating into a political unit under the
Mauryan Kings in the 4th century BC. It would facilitate an understanding of
the assimilation of the tribes who disseminated the Vedic fire sacrifice or
yagya, religious, cultural and linguistic complex (Aryans simply as a name for
a linguistic group who called themselves by this appellation without any
connotations of race) with the other non Aryan groups. If the society was to
progress as a whole their mutual animosity had to be overcome and they had to
work as a unit.
The dark skinned hero of the Yadavas was assimilated into
the pantheon of Hindu gods; Krishna is a non-Vedic non-Aryan god who better
represented the combined ethos of the changing society. It was evolving into a
settled agrarian society from a pastoral and nomadic existence. Gory animal
sacrifices on a large scale were no longer acceptable or indeed possible as
cattle wealth no longer existed on a significant scale. One important story of
Lord Krishna’s childhood is precisely how he saves his followers from the wrath
of Indra, a terrible Vedic god who was henceforth no longer evoked or offered
his share at the sacred ceremonies.
A subsidiary cult grew up around his brother Balarama or
Sankarshana who was given the sacred weapon of the plough to propitiate
agriculturists and watch over them.
A variety of cults around local mother goddesses and nymphs
were also incorporated into this system mostly through the divine marriages of
these deities with an obliging Lord Krishna. One of the figures in the Bhagwat
Purana puts the number of his wives at 16000! This is a pointer to the scale of
the assimilation.
Lord Krishna was incorporated into the worship of another
non Vedic god who has since ruled the Hindu pantheon, Vishnu, albeit on a
subsidiary scale, by making him one of the incarnations of Vishnu. His brother
Balarama is an incarnation of the celestial serpent which upholds the earth and
on whose back Vishnu reclines floating in the primal waters, Shesha Naga.
The coalescing of the stories and worship of Aryan and
non-Aryan gods aided the assimilation of a large complex and variegated society
into a unit. A spectrum of religious beliefs and practices was knit into a
pattern. At one end is the highly sophisticated and abstract philosophy
of the unified godhead, Paramatma, and the individual Atman which forms the
subject matter of the Vedas, Upanishads and the Geeta. As we move slowly along
the spectrum we encounter the manifestations of the Godhead as the sacred
trinity of the creator , Brahma, the preserver, Vishnu and the destroyer, Shiva
with the flowering of millions of local traditions and rituals relating to the
worship and further manifestations of these primary deities. The mother
goddesses have been incorporated by the creation of divine family units with
their own offspring of minor gods and their own worship.
This particular evolution reached its apogee in the mid
first millennium of the Common Era and the basic structure set down by it is
still alive and vibrant in India, the over-arching big tradition and the multiple
little traditions live in harmony.
Sumedha Verma Ojha
Geneva 2008
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