The Ideology of the Hindu God Krishna
Through the centuries, behind all our success and failures, our strives and endeavors, our ambitions and goals, there plays the unseen hand of Krishna’s ideology, to which we, the people who inhabit the landmass called Indian Subcontinent, subscribe to irrespective of the relentless forays that science and logic has made into our lives, irrespective of how the shifting sands of time have led to a churning in our sense of religious and cultural identity. So deeply Krishna has impacted on us that it is difficult to comprehend an India unmoored by the metaphors, mythologies and by the ideology that owe its genesis to this blue skinned Man God.
Krishna is a towering personality, he influences our lives not just as the God that we like to seek succor in, but also as an ideologue. Krishna the philosopher and Krishna the divine are so intertwined that it should have been difficult to visualize them separately. Though blinded by our devotion to him we achieve quite easily the feat of obfuscating the philosopher and focusing our attention solely on the divine aspect. The essence of his philosophy may be contained in the Bhagavad-Gita, but the fact is Krishna, or rather the concept of Krishna, subsumes deep philosophical messages in its every aspect, from his birth in a prison, to his death after being struck by an accidental arrow.
But it is never too simplistic to decipher Krishna. Much of what he said or what he inspired by his life comes to us diluted, enmeshed in a miasma of mythologies that the successive generations of inheritors to his philosophy were tempted into contriving. It is difficult if not impossible to see him sans the miracles and prowess that the later generations have attributed to him, in a bid to make him more God like, but less than what he actually was. He is even more an unknowable entity to us than he was to those of his own era, when each group of individuals endeavored to judge him in their own way.
The Yogis considered him to be the absolute truth, the Gopis the highest object of love, the warriors as an ideal hero, Kamsa as an object of fear, Arjuna as a friend, and Sisupala as an object of hate. But to us he is only God, a supreme deity, capable of making miracles, and much of what he stood as a human we have ourselves chosen to obfuscate in our endeavor to have him as our divine protector. He is now trapped in an idol through which we venerate him, his message lost in the meaningless verses that we recite to appease him.
The story of Krishna’s birth when reduced to few sentences boils down to this- there is a prophecy that the eighth child born to the king Kamsa’s sister, Devaki, will slay him. Angered by the prophecy Kamsa locks Devaki and her husband Vasudeva in a stone prison. Thereafter, he mercilessly kills the first six sons of Devaki. Devaki’s seventh son miscarries but is mystically transferred to the womb of Queen Rohini in Vrindavana. The seventh son becomes Krishna’s older brother, Balarama. Soon thereafter, Devaki becomes pregnant with her eighth child.
And at the stroke of midnight Krishna is born, in a four-armed Vishnu form, dressed in silk and jewels, carrying the paraphernalia of: the conch, disc, club and lotus. The Lord advises Vasudeva to take him to Vrindavana and exchange him with a girl that had just been born there and after that he turns himself into a baby. The guards in Kamsa’s prison fall asleep, and all the iron shackles, chains and locks automatically open, making Vasudeva’s departure for Vrindavana a simple task. The waters of river Jamuna part to make way for Vasudeva and when he reaches the house of Nanda, all the cowherds are asleep. There he places his own son on Yasoda’s bed, picks up her newborn girl and returns to the prison of Kamsa.
A string of metaphors can be gleaned in all aspects of Krishna’s birth. In fact, we have to go beyond the surrealism of mythology to find a subtle but potent message subsumed within the story. The guards falling asleep, the locks of the prisons falling open on their own and the parting of Jamuna’s waters to make way for Vasudeva, all this has to be seen in context of Kamsa’s cruelty towards his sister’s children and towards rest of his populace. A cruel king will always give rise to a determined opposition that would seek to depose him at all cost. And in an era when the kings where given to flouting their Godly lineage it is only natural that the opposition groups should do the same.
It might as well have been human intervention that saves Krishna from Kamsa, rather than any divine one. But that is not an opinion popular belief will ever subscribe to. Krishna being the reincarnation of the Supreme God is expected to enact quite a few miracles on a regular basis and that is what he does at least as far as the mythology is concerned. The young Krishna’s battles with Putna, the demon Aghasura and many other feats are described with great gusto. And they make for delightful reading.
In the end Krishna survives all of Kansa’s conspiracies to kill him and he grows up to claim his manifest destiny as a king, as a philosopher and most importantly as the supreme God of the universe. This is the ultimate rags to riches story. A prisoner’s son and a cowherd, grows up to reach such supreme heights where he is not only the king of a prosperous kingdom, but is also considered as God by other powerful kings and a vast majority of the populace.
The Bhagavad-Gita forms the climax of Krishna’s achievements. It is true that to the secular mindset of today’s times there appear to be some contradictions in the scripture. Apart from this the Gita is also littered with statements that defy comprehension. But it is important to examine these contradictions and confusions in the context of the era in which Krishna said these words. In the final reasoning it is even possible that much of what today comes to us as the Gita may not even be Krishna’s words. There are scholars who claim that the Gita was written over a period of 500 years. Though even if that were true, we may still consider the grist of the Gita as that of Krishna’s own.
And what is the grist of Gita! Four themes emerging from the Gita have contributed the most in molding our society, as it exists today- Karma, Maya, Nirvana, and Yoga. Krishna portrays Karma as a law of universal causality that defines man’s place in the cosmos. A Karmyogi is someone who does his duty without worrying about the results. The eternal soul moves from body to body, in a process of infinite reincarnations, which are conditioned by the nature of a man’s Karma in the previous birth.
Maya in the Gita’s lexicon is the idea that the universe is unknowable or in other words the cosmos is too vast, too complicated for us to perceive through the limited scale of human senses. Nirvana is the state of absolute blessedness, which is characterized by freedom of a soul from the cycle of reincarnations. Such a freedom sublimates into the freedom from pain and care of the external world, as it is concomitant with the bliss of everlasting union with the supreme deity.
Yoga in the Gita lexicon is not only about physical fitness, rather it is also about integration between the spiritual needs of the soul and the material needs of the body. It is about bringing all the faculties of the psyche under the control of the self. Yoga as a word is also applied to any methodology that leads to union with God or Atman. The five principal types of yoga that have developed down the millennia are: Hatha, jnana, bhakti, karma and rajah.
Other than these four themes Gita also expostulates the nature of Krishna’s politics. It is no coincidence that Arjuna’s chariot is positioned between two opposing armies, wedded to vastly different ideologies, when Krishna comes forth with Gita. In fact, positioning of Arjuna’s chariot can in itself be taken as a metaphor for the universal nature of the teachings that come down to us in form of Gita. Krishna does not endeavor to bring about peace, rather he goads Arjuna to take up the bow and slay the unrighteous. So Ahimsa is not an Indian concept, it is more likely that Gandhi picked it up during his interactions with other non-Indian cultures and then foisted it on India.
As Gita constituted the climax of Krishna’s life, it cannot be understood in its entirety until the later has been unraveled from the web of mythologies and examined with a logical perspective. It is the mythologies that rob Krishna of his essence, and keep his true self away from his believers. What is needed is an unbiased historical research into Krishna, the man, about whom we know so little despite knowing so much about Krishna, the God. It is the thick veil of Godliness with which- in our hunger for miracles- we have draped Krishna that hinders us from truly knowing him.
The almost volatile ending to Krishna’s dynasty does come as a great anti-climax to his saga. His sons die through a curse from sage Gandhari and his own end comes when a hunter named Jara, mistaking him for a deer, shoots an arrow into his foot. Krishna dies at once and his spirit rises into heaven. Arjuna cremates Krishna and several of his principle queens die in the funeral pyre after him. Arjuna leaves for Hastinapura with the remaining wives, but on the way, forest dwellers attack and the women dive into the river and die to escape.
Is there a metaphor in the rapid demise of Krishna’s dynasty? A metaphor that says that even a God, who descends to earth and chooses to live as mortals do, must ultimately succumb to all the ills that can befall a mortal. Krishna did live like a God, but he was a mere mortal in the way he died. So how should we judge him, by his Godly life or by his human death? The decision though has already been taken; he is indeed the God for the people for this land. It is also worth taking into account that though Krishna’s dynasty met a rapid demise, his philosophy, or at least a figment of it did survive the ages.
