Immortal Beloved: Krishna and Rādhā Exchanging Clothes (ca. 1700–1900)

“In the dual form I fantasize”, writes Roland Barthes in a section of A Lover’s Discourse entitled “Union”. “I want there to be a point without an elsewhere.” Barthes’ words echo a commentary by the Sanskritist Eric M. Gurevitch on the opening lines of the great Indian author Kālidāsa’s fifth-century epic Raghuvaṃśa, which he translates as follows: “As signifier and signified are entangled / when the meaning of a word is understood, / so too are Pārvatī and Shiva, / the parents of the world.” For the sake of an idiomatic rendering, Gurevitch points out, the English necessarily obscures Kālidāsa’s intriguing play with the names of the two gods: “They are not (as I initially translated above) ‘Pārvatī and Shiva,’ they are ParvatiShiva (pārvatīparameśvarau), a single word conjugated in the dual. Pārvatī lacks here case termination, and the entire word takes on . . . the gender of the final component”.

Indian literature and art abound with attempts to bridge the distance between two bodies and thereby create Barthes’ “point without an elsewhere”, whether that is a worshiper piously desiring union with the divine or a god lusting after his consort. Sometimes, as in another Kālidāsa masterwork, Meghadūta, the distance to be traversed is the vastness of a subcontinent; sometimes it is the simple yet unbearable fact that lover and beloved are not one.

Such a dynamic plays out dramatically in depictions of the relationship between Krishna (Kṛṣṇa) and Rādhā, the “gopī” (or cowherd) for whom he falls. Perhaps the tenderest manifestation of this can be seen in a genre of images that show the pair dressed in each other’s clothes. Some artists portray the two merely gazing at each other — whether sweetly or in amusement at the game they’ve concocted — while others have the pair switch roles. Rādhā serenades her beloved or leads him confidently as they walk; he places his crown upon her head and lets her fix his hair.

In poetry and in miniature painting, artistic imaginings of Rādhā and Krishna go beyond rendering mere pleasure at proximity and invoke instead a desire to erase all difference. The lovers cover themselves with lotus petals so that one can barely distinguish god from gopī. They intertwine as though fused, one hand of each positioned on Krishna’s flute, one leg of each striking a bold dance pose. They gaze at a mirror as if their features could melt together on the reflective pool of its surface and become one; in the most extreme of all, they are figured as two halves of one body, an image type known as ardhanārī, which is more often reserved for Shiva (Śiva) and Pārvatī.

But the garment swapping (and especially the role reversal that attends it) underscores a vision of love that rejects complementarianism in favor of a radical empathy — love means first and foremost a desire for absolute understanding, the overthrow of imposed difference instead of acquiescence to it. If Rama and Sita exemplify the constancy and faithfulness of ideal matrimony, Krishna and Rādhā represent something more anarchic: passion that no bounds of social propriety can contain. Most sources do not identify Rādhā as Krishna’s wife; she is his lover, illicit, lowborn, and ultimately unfit to number among his host of divine consorts. (Rādhā herself is a married woman; when her husband chances upon the pair together, Krishna dons a feminine guise once more — this time as the fearsome goddess Kālī, at whose feet Rādhā hastily pretends to supplicate.)

Whatever amatory magnetism draws the two inexorably together, in other words, there are still-greater forces that rip them apart. Perhaps as numerous as paintings of the pair in bliss are scenes of Rādhā’s dejection: Krishna has gone off to join his wives, or he is flirting with other gopīs, or in some other way, large or small, he has broken her heart. In her wrath, Rādhā’s and Krishna’s roles are reversed once more: it is Krishna, chastened and meek, who must suffer banishment at a mortal’s hands, who must rely on go-betweens to plead his case, who must genuflect and caress his lover’s feet in penitence. One knows already that reconciliation is foreordained, as is repeat offense; the cycle is fated to recur, has recurred already many times over. They will reunite, they will be rent asunder, because how could it be otherwise? “Even when we are perfectly close to each other”, writes Gurevitch, “a yearning, longing, desire, to separate, recombine, be together in different ways continues to exist.”