Śrī Gīta-govinda, Sarga II — Akleśa-Keśava: Keśava Free from Distress

sādhāraṇa-praṇaye harau — literally “Hari whose love has become common,” or shared. The expression is painful from Rādhā’s point of view: what she regarded as an exclusive relationship appears to have become something Kṛṣṇa distributes among many women.

nija-utkarṣa is Rādhā’s consciousness of her own exceptional position — “I alone am his supreme beloved.” It is not ordinary vanity. The dramatic wound arises because what she believed to be an intimate truth appears contradicted by what she sees. Īrṣyā, jealousy or amorous intolerance toward a rival, is in classical Sanskrit poetics one of the powerful transitory emotions that intensify śṛṅgāra-rasa.

Madhuvrata means literally “one vowed to honey” — a poetic word for the bee. The bee-filled bower is not neutral scenery: Jayadeva’s natural world continually participates in erotic emotion, and the humming bees, flowering creepers and secluded grove intensify precisely what Rādhā is trying to escape.

Rādhā Remembers Kṛṣṇa in the Rāsa

Rādhā has fled from Kṛṣṇa, but mentally she cannot leave him. Her first song to the sakhī is therefore not principally an accusation: it becomes an involuntary portrait of Kṛṣṇa’s beauty. The refrain returns after every stanza, and the painful contradiction of the whole canto is already contained in its second line, smarati mano mama — “my mind remembers.” She has physically abandoned the scene; her consciousness remains fixed upon him.

This stanza, like the seven that follow, contains no verb of its own: it is a chain of accusative epithets all qualifying harim, “Hari,” in the refrain. Every stanza must therefore be read as continuing “my mind remembers Hari … him whose flute …” — the whole song is one sentence stretched over eight verses.

Adhara-sudhā, the nectar of his lip, is what makes the flute mukharita — literally “given a mouth,” made to speak. The instrument has no voice of its own; it sounds only because his lips touch it.

Jayadeva constructs Kṛṣṇa almost as a living monsoon sky: his dark body is the rain cloud, his peacock feathers supply the shimmering colour, and their iridescence evokes Indra’s bow, the rainbow. The comparison carries darkness, colour, fertility and irresistible beauty at once.

Rādhā is describing precisely what hurts her — Kṛṣṇa kissing other women — and even her complaint turns into aesthetic praise. The bandhujīva is a brilliant red flower; the comparison emphasises the redness and tenderness of his lips.

Pulaka is horripilation, the hair standing erect under intense emotion — part of the classical vocabulary of involuntary bodily transformations produced by overwhelming feeling. Even Kṛṣṇa’s body therefore reveals his excitement.

The first line again transforms Kṛṣṇa’s body into a cosmic landscape: the pale sandal mark against his dark complexion resembles — and surpasses — the moon moving through clouds. The second line is deliberately physical. Jayadeva does not separate devotional beauty from erotic embodiment; the union of the two is characteristic of the Gīta-govinda.

Here Jayadeva suddenly enlarges the scale. The lover of the Vraja maidens is simultaneously the supreme Hari revered by munis, humans, devas and asuras. This is one of the poem’s characteristic techniques: it never quite allows the reader to reduce Kṛṣṇa to an ordinary pastoral lover, and the cosmic and intimate identities coexist without strain.

Anaṅga, “the bodiless one,” is Kāma, the god of love, and the expression taraṅgad-anaṅga-dṛśā is especially beautiful: desire seems to rise in waves within Kṛṣṇa’s glance. At the same time Hari destroys kali-kaluṣa, the impurity of the Kali age. Erotic memory and salvific divinity occupy the same stanza without contradiction.

Jayadeva’s signature stanza. Having let Rādhā catalogue the beauty of the man who has wounded her, he turns the whole song outward: what began as a jealous complaint is offered as hari-caraṇa-smaraṇa, remembrance of Hari’s feet.

This is one of the psychological keys to the Gīta-govinda. Rādhā knows the evidence against Kṛṣṇa; she has seen it herself. Nevertheless guṇa-grāmaṁ gaṇayati, her mind counts his virtues; doṣaṁ vimuñcati dūrataḥ, it casts his faults far away; and punar api… kāmaṁ karoti, it desires him again.

The final question — karomi kim, “what can I do?” — expresses the helplessness of love. Rādhā cannot reason herself out of attachment.

Rādhā Remembers Their Secret Union

The movement now becomes far more intimate. Rādhā no longer describes Kṛṣṇa among the other gopīs; she recalls their own first secret encounter and asks her friend to bring them together again. With this refrain the sakhī assumes one of her central functions in the poem — she becomes the mediator between Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa.

The Kāvyamālā and Nirṇaya Sāgara editions set this song in mālava-gauḍa rāga, where the Gauḍīya edition and Miller give simply mālava.

A significant variant occurs here. rati-rabhasa-rasena, “with the rasa of impetuous love,” is read in several editions, while others have rati-rabhasa-bhareṇa, “with the fullness of impetuous love.” Both give essentially the same dramatic sense, but the variant is worth acknowledging rather than silently normalising.

Cāṭu means pleasing, flattering or coaxing speech — the language by which a lover wins the confidence of the beloved. The stanza carefully depicts the transition from lajjā, modest hesitation, toward mutual intimacy.

Jayadeva repeatedly describes involuntary bodily signs — closed eyes, perspiration, horripilation, trembling. In Sanskrit aesthetic theory such manifestations give visible form to an inward emotion that has exceeded deliberate control.

Manasija, “mind-born,” is another name for Kāma, so manasija-tantra is the science or system of Love. The point is not technical expertise: Kṛṣṇa’s absorption in Rādhā exceeds calculation and prescribed technique. Love itself overwhelms the rules of love.

Jayadeva makes sound part of the scene — flute, bees, cuckoo calls, anklets, girdle. The Gīta-govinda was created for musical performance, and even its erotic scenes are frequently constructed acoustically.

The divine name Madhusūdana, “slayer of Madhu,” appears at the climax of an intensely intimate recollection. Jayadeva continually places divine epithets — Keśi-mathana, Madhusūdana, Hari — inside erotic contexts. The effect is deliberate: the pastoral lover and the supreme deity are not two separate figures.

The signature stanza of the sixth song. Jayadeva names the speaker as the utkaṇṭhita gopa-vadhū, the cowherd woman filled with longing — the classical heroine who waits for a lover who has not come.

This is one of the decisive moments of the canto. Rādhā sees Kṛṣṇa surrounded by rivals, and yet she rejoices — because his reaction reveals that she is not simply one woman among many. The dropped flute, the perspiration, the embarrassed smile and the rapid sidelong glance all imply that her arrival changes him completely.

The Sanskrit conclusion is wonderfully simple: paśyāmi hṛṣyāmi ca, “I see him — and I rejoice.” The entire preceding conflict is compressed into four words. Some manuscripts read vilajjitam, “ashamed,” where others read vilakṣitam, “disconcerted, caught in an awkward state.” Both suit the scene.

The transformation is complete. In the first canto the spring landscape was an uddīpana, a stimulant awakening erotic love; now the same landscape intensifies vipralambha, love-in-separation. The aśoka, the breeze, the mango blossom and the bee are objectively beautiful, and Rādhā’s emotional condition simply reverses their effect. Nature has not changed. Rādhā has.

A fuller textual tradition preserves this additional benedictory stanza at the close of the canto, and it brings the title into explicit focus: haratu vaḥ kleśaṁ navaḥ keśavaḥ, “may the ever-fresh Keśava remove your suffering.”

The stanza circulates with several variant readings, particularly in its second and third quarters — among them gamitākāṅkṣaḥ against dayitā kāścit, mugdha-manoharaḥ against mugdha-manoharam, and differing descriptions of the gopīs’ arms, hands and breasts. Its concluding line, however, is constant.

The benedictory stanza that closes the canto, haratu vaḥ kleśaṁ navaḥ keśavaḥ, explains the name Akleśa-Keśava from three directions at once — Keśava who is beyond suffering, Keśava who removes suffering, and Keśava whose true inner desire is beginning to turn away from the multitude of gopīs toward Rādhā alone.