Of Love and Betrayal: Kamala Das's “Letter from Radha”

      

Image courtesy:nickyskye.blogspot.com

Kamala Das’s short story “Letter from Radha” from the collection of stories Sandal Trees is a prose poem on the Radha--Krishna love.Unlike the Bhakti poets who celebrate the Radha--Krishna love of the Vrindavan days as an ideal love beyond the norms of traditional courtship and are silent about Krishna’s later desecration of that love, Das, in her story, prefers to interrogate Krishna’s change of heart after he left Vrindavan. She demythifies and demystifies the Radha--Krishna love and shows it to be what it really was—a love that ended abruptly in betrayal and abandonment, a love that left Radha broken-hearted. Das's story shows how cruel a man can be even to the woman he loves.  Krishna,when he becomes a king , man-like, deserts Radha, and she, woman-like, lives like one dead  pining for her beloved for in true love there is no such thing as “getting over it.” Even if a wound heals, the scar will remain.

 Krishna was a God who gave permission for joy and abandonment and hence was a God congenial to Das’s sensibility. Forced into an arranged marriage with a much older and incompatible man, Das found all her romantic illusions shattered at the tender age of fifteen itself. Failing in her attempt to find an ideal mate in the physical world she continues her search in the mythical world. But even here Kamala meets with disillusionment. Krishna of Vrindavan is every woman’s dream lover, yet he is also a betrayer of love. The romantic in Das is pained at Krishna’s desertion of Radha when he became king. In her autobiography My Story, she confesses how obsessed she was with Krishna, the lover : “I was looking for one who went to Mathura and forgot to return to his Radha. I was seeking the cruelty that lies in the depth of a man’s heart” (180)

Conjugal love that is presented in our myths and puranaas is devoid of that strange thrill  of romantic longing. In them, there is hardly any description of erotic love between husband and wife. The wife is exhorted to respect the husband as God in human form. What is demanded from her is passivity, chastity and obedience. Such an unequal relationship is hardly conducive for sexual or emotional fulfillment in a woman. But the Radha--Krishna love, especially as depicted in Jayadeva’s Gitagovindam, is one of wild sexual abandonment, full of playfulness and joy, of sportive quarrels and sweet reconciliations in which Radha too, at times, takes the initiative. Freed from all moral conventions and hierarchical dictates of male supremacy within marriage, Radha (who is older than Krishna), in her snatches of stolen spells with Krishna could be true to her inner-self, to her womanhood. This is a love after Das’s own heart, a love that is pure yet  passionate, metaphysical yet physical.

After Krishna left  for Madhura to kill Kamsa and become king, Puranas  do not give any importance to Radha. Kamala Das in “Letter from Radha” takes up the strands of Radha’s life from the point that the male narrators of the puranas had let them fall.  In the story, Das follows the epistolary style of narration. The whole story is a letter from Radha to Krishna, the king of Mathura. It is a letter soaked with the intensity of her love for him and the heart-wrenching pain of parting that she experiences, a pain which is worse than death. Radha’s love for the youthful Krishna had been so profound that she had flouted all patriarchal prohibitions and societal disapproval to keep her nocturnal trysts with him on the banks of the river Jamuna. Radha recalls their last clandestine tryst. She writes to Krishna that after her return as one dead,  she had to submit to her husband’s embraces-- “As he embraced me I froze. I was quite dead. My Krishna, the moment I bade farewell and left you, I had become a moving corpse”(80). In the poem “Maggots” also Das expresses the agony of Radha who had to oblige her husband on the night that Krishna bid farewell to her        
                                                   At sunset on the river bank, Krishna
                                                   Loved her for the last time and left...

  That night in her husband’s arms, Radha felt

  So dead that he asked, what is wrong,

  Do you mind my kisses, love? And she said,

  No, not at all, but thought, What is

  it to the corpse if the maggots nip?

    

Exploding the myth of pativratadharma of utter fidelity to the husband Radha writes to Krishna: “In my husband’s embrace I turned a whore again. A true whore is one who surrenders herself to another for food and clothes. You whom I love more than anything else, in your embrace I have always been pure and chaste. It was not for a mere physical touch that I came to you” (80-81). Radha tells Krishna that he had been her joy and pain. Now only the pain remains. But as long as her pain remains, Radha feels that Krishna will be her man: “Even when you make love to your lovely queens in prosperous Mathura a hundred miles away you are mine in a mysterious way” (83).

 The jilted Radha is now the centre of curious attention on the banks of the Yamuna. Women point her out as the king’s discarded lover. Once she overheard an arrogant young woman ask, “Why can’t she die?” (84). Radha concludes her letter saying, “True I could have died. You will never come in search of me to the river side in the village. I will never see you again. Yet your Radha lives because human life happens to be long” (84). 

In this story Kamala Das compares the paradaisal past of the Vrindavan trysts  with Radha’s wretched zombie-like existence of the present. What disillusions Das is that every woman’s search for the ideal lover even in the mythical world is doomed to failure. Betrayal is in the blood of every male, even if he is an incarnation of God.

                                      Works Cited
Das, Kamala. "Letter from Radha" The Sandal Trees and Other Stories.Trans. V.C Harris and                            Mohammed Ummer. Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1995

----.   My Story. New Delhi:Sterling, 1988

----. "Maggots" The Decendants. Kolkotta: Writers Workshop, 1967

    

 

    Bhadra S.