A Goddess Who Entered Through Poetry

Radha's history is one of the clearest cases of a figure who entered the pantheon through literature rather than ancient scripture. She is absent from the Bhagavata Purana, the great text of Krishna devotion, and appears in datable literature considerably later, achieving her decisive form in Jayadeva's twelfth-century Sanskrit poem the Gita Govinda, a rapturous cycle on the love, separation and reunion of Radha and Krishna. The tradition makes her married to another man, and treats that very illicitness, love that disregards its own reputation and every worldly tie, as the measure of a devotion that holds nothing back, a parakiya (belonging-to-another) love read as the highest allegory of the soul's yearning for God.

Radha and Krishna are today worshipped as an inseparable pair across northern and eastern India. A far earlier trace of the pair appears in the Gaha Sattasai, a Prakrit anthology of erotic verse traditionally associated with the Satavahana king Hala and generally dated to the early centuries CE, where a Radha-like figure is named in passing among the poems' lovers, centuries before Jayadeva's Gita Govinda gave the relationship its full theological elaboration; the gap between this bare early mention and the developed twelfth century devotional figure is itself read by scholars as evidence of a long, largely undocumented intermediate stage in Radha's growth from a literary motif into a goddess.