Lord Krishna and St. Valentine’s Day

Love has been a ubiquitous factor since ages that has guided almost every amusing and loathsome event of the past and continues to haunt us even in present. Love as such, can have a protean of manifestations; be it the one between members of same family or of the peers of same ideologies or between an animate and an inanimate. However, I’ve chosen to talk -undeniably about the one between the lovers. Many empires had fallen and yet so many emperors had risen; many inventions were resulted as serendipity and still so many were ruined; many politicians hailed and yet others impeached; many people exalted and yet others doomed. Love. The single most alibi.

But what really amuses me is the day we -recently - have learned to celebrate as the lover’s day: St. Valentine’s Day of course!

As I travel back in time to the epoch where the human incarnations of Hindu Gods were rampant, the lives and times of Lord Krishna and his incessant longing for love gets me snooping. And to think of someone of his potency in today’s context would sound nothing less than an imbecile.

He had sixteen thousand wives making each day a Valentine’s Day. And may be perhaps owing to this awakening, the ardent followers of Krishna consciousness (ISKCON- Int’l society for Krishna consciousness) don’t prefer to drift from the belief that everyday is to love and to be loved…

Even as I swing between the extremes of cultural embracing and medieval faiths, I try making people believe the divineness of love with Lord Krishna and St. Valentine in my thoughts with no prejudice for either!

To try to illustrate every romanticism he practiced will invariably get invincible for me nor can I get St. Valentine alive in the few sentences that are to follow. So let me make some allusion of the stories I’ve been hearing since childhood, which can somehow convince us of his romantic notoriety and the paradoxical exaltation of the latter.

Krishna was vivaciously nasty with Gopinis (Gopinis: cowherd girls; milkmaids; village girls; or better known as Lord Krishna’s girlfriends.) In the first month of winter, the girls of Nanda’s village performed a certain vow to the goddess Katyayani (Durga). They ate rice cooked with clarified butter; they bathed in the water of the Kalindi (Yamuna) river at sunrise; they made an image of the goddess out of sand and worshipped it with fragrant perfumes and garlands, with offerings and incense and lamps, and with bouquets of flowers, fresh sprigs of leaves, fruits, and rice. And they prayed:
"Goddess Katyayani, great mistress of yoga, empress of great deluding magic, make the son of the cowherd Nanda my husband. I bow to you ."

Saying this prayer, the girls would worship her, and having set their hearts on Krsna (Krishna), the girls performed this vow for a month; they worshipped Bhadrakali (Durga) so that the son of Nanda (Krsna) would be their husband. Arising at dawn, calling one another by name, they would join hands and go to bathe in the Kalindi every day, singing loudly about Krsna as they went. One day, when they had gone to the river and taken off their clothes on the bank as usual, they were playing joyfully in the water, singing about Krsna. The lord Krsna, lord of all masters of yoga, came there with his friends of the same age in order to grant them the object of their rites. He took their clothes and quickly climbed a Nipa tree, and laughing with the laughing boys he told what the joke was:
"Girls, let each one of you come here and take her own clothes as she wishes. I promise you, this is no jest, for you have been exhausted by your vows. I have never before told an untruth, and these boys know this. Slender-waisted ones, come one by one or all together and take your clothes."

When the cowherd girls saw what his game was, they were overwhelmed with love, but they looked at one another in shame, and they smiled, but they did not come out. Flustered and embarrassed by Govinda’s (Krsna’s) words and by his jest, they sank down up to their necks in the icy water, and, shivering, they said to him,
"You should not have played such a wicked trick. We know you as our beloved, son of the cowherd Nanda, the pride of the village. Give us our clothes, for we are trembling. O darkly handsome one, we are your slaves and will do as you command, but you know dharma: give us our clothes or we will tell your father, the chieftain."

The lord said to them, "If you are my slaves and will do as I command, then come here and take back your clothes, O brightly smiling ones."

Then all the girls, shivering and smarting with cold, came out of the water, covering their crotches with their hands. The lord was pleased and gratified by their chaste actions, and he looked at them and placed their clothes on his shoulder and smiled and said,
’Since you swam in the water without clothes while you were under a vow, this was an insult to the divinity (to Varuna, god of the waters). Therefore you must fold your hands and place them on your heads and bow low in expiation of your sin, and then you may take your clothes.’

When the village girls heard what the infallible one said, they thought that bathing naked had been a violation of their vows, and they bowed down to Krsna, the very embodiment of all their rituals, who had thus fulfilled their desires and wiped out their disgrace and sin. Then the lord, the son of Devaki, gave their clothes to them, for he felt pity when he saw them bowed down in this way and he was satisfied with them. Though they were greatly deceived and robbed of their modesty, though they were mocked and treated like toys and stripped of their clothes, yet they held no grudge against him, for they were happy to be together with their beloved. Rejoicing in the closeness of their lover, they put on their clothes; their bashful glances, in the thrall of their hearts, did not move from him. Knowing that the girls had taken a vow because they desired to touch his feet, the lord with a rope around his waist said to the girls,
’Good ladies, I know that your desire is to worship me. I rejoice in this vow, which deserves to be fulfilled. The desire of those whose hearts have been placed in me does not give rise to further desire, just as seed corn that has been boiled or fried does not give rise to seed. You have achieved your aim. Now, girls, go back to the village and you will enjoy your nights with me, for it was for this that you fine ladies undertook your vow and worship.’

When the girls heard this from Krsna, they had obtained what they desired; and, meditating upon his lotus feet, they forced themselves to go away from him to the village.

[Yadus (Yadavas): the descendants of Lord Krishna (also descendants of King Yayati’s son Yadu, who was Krishna’s ancestor). Krishna belonged to the Yadava clan, a race of kings. Cow-herd-raja Nanda was Krishna’s foster-father.]

Krsna became a householder (head of a household) in Dvaraka and married many wives, and had many sons and grandsons. In the race of the Yadus, no one was poor; everyone had many children, lived a long life, and respected Brahmins. But they were so numerous that one could not count them even in a hundred years. The terrible demons that had been slain in the battle of the gods and demons were born among men, and so at the command of Vishnu the gods became incarnate in the race of Yadus to repress the demons. When Krsna had killed the demons, and thus relieved the burden of the earth, he thought,

’The earth is still overburdened by the unbearably burdensome race of the Yadus. No one else can overcome them, since they are under my protection.’

Deluded by Krsna’s power of delusion, and cursed by the Brahmins, they were all destroyed, and when his entire family had been destroyed, Krsna said, ’The burden has been removed."

Krishna married and had sex with 16,000 wives in Dvaraka, and with so many descendants from so many wives, the earth as a result had become severely overpopulated. Krishna then had no choice but to annihilate his own family for weighing down the earth. Interminable love and its cataclysm, all but nothing other than his penchant for this particular feeling !

Had the Hindus been the followers of his footsteps, no one would however contradict with me, that their everyday would have been a Valentine’s day (which however is restricted since of the monogamy which is advocated all over the Granthas!). However, handling 16,000 wives all at a time can lead to nothing less than destruction of the manhood itself !

Perhaps the Christians of ancient Rome were better off than we were. Since they had no burden of the perpetual celebration of love for three hundred and sixty-five days a year instead a single day to summarize everything; the conception of which took centuries to shape in the form as we see it today.

Through the ages, many cultures have paused to celebrate love and romance. We may owe our observance of Valentine’s Day to the Roman celebration of Lupercalia, a festival of eroticism that honored Juno Februata, the goddess of "feverish" (febris) love. Annually, on the ides of February, love notes or "billets" would be drawn to partner men and women for feasting and sexual game playing. Early Christians, clearly a dour bunch, frowned on these lascivious goings-on. In an attempt to curb the erotic festivities, the Christian clergy encouraged celebrants to substitute the names of saints. Then, for the next twelve months, participants were to emulate the ideals represented by the particular saint they’d chosen. Not too surprisingly, this prudish version of Lupercalia proved unpopular, and died a quick death. But the early Christians were anything but quitters, so it was on to Plan B: modulate the overtly sexual nature of Lupercalia by turning this "feast of the flesh" into a "ritual for romance!" This time, the Church selected a single saint to do battle the pagan goddess Juno -- St. Valentine (Valentinus). And since Valentinus had been martyred on February 14, the Church could also preempt the annual February 15 celebration of Lupercalia. The only fly in the ointment was Valentinus himself. He was a chaste man, unschooled in the art of love. To make the chaste Saint more appealing to lovers, the Church may have "embellished" his life story a little bit.

Since it happened so long ago, records no longer exist. But if it didn’t happen this way, it certainly makes for a better story. According to one legend, Valentinus ignored a decree from Emperor Claudius II that forbade all marriages and betrothals. Caught in the act, Valentinus was imprisoned and sentenced to death for secretly conducting several wedding ceremonies. While imprisoned, the future Saint cured a girl (the jailer’s daughter) of her blindness. The poor girl fell madly in love with Valentinus, but could not save him. On the eve of his execution, Valentinus managed to slip a parting message to the girl. The note, of course, was signed "From your Valentine."

Despite the efforts of the Church, Valentine’s Day continued to echo Lupercalia in at least one respect - men and women, married or single would draw lots to select a "valentine." Once paired, the couples exchanged gifts and sometimes love tokens as well. The custom of lottery drawings to select Valentines persisted well into the eighteenth century. Gradually, however, a shift took place. No longer did both parties exchange gifts; instead, gift giving became solely the responsibility of the man!

This new twist helped to finally bring an end to the random drawing of names, since many men were unhappy about giving gifts (sometimes very costly) to women who were not of their choosing. And now those individuals were free to select their own Valentine, the celebration took on a new and much more serious meaning for couples!

The whole irony of the two cultures gets two poles apart since Krishna’s romanticism culminates in annihilation of the whole clan whereas St.Valentine’s death breeds a whole new clan of romantics!

As we cling on to our ancient belief of Bhagwad Gita and continue adopting the foster culture, we are left with no option than to emulate Krishna’s spirit on a single day of February the 14th!

(..Perhaps we the modern rats of the perennial rat race are too busy…)
But love is all in the air.