Shri Rativantiji

The boy came home the way he always did, easy and unhurried, carrying nothing in his hands and, he must have thought, nothing in his mouth heavier than the usual evening's portion of katha. He found Rativantiji waiting for it the way she waited every single day, because she had made herself a nima, an unbroken daily vow, of sitting for the Bhagavata's telling. On the days her own body could carry her there she went herself; on this one day it could not, so the boy who always walked at her side had gone alone and come home to repeat to her, as he had done a hundred evenings before, what he had heard. Neither of them knew, as he began to speak, that he was about to become, without meaning to, the last voice Rativantiji would ever hear.

What little the old commentators tell us of her, they tell in a single breath: she was a baiji, a woman of standing and respect, who loved Krishna with vatsalya, the bhava of a parent for a child. This was not a devotional figure of speech she recited and then set aside. She held Bhagavan in her heart exactly as a mother holds a son, worried for his hunger, delighted by his mischief, wounded by his hurts as though the wound were in her own body. Vatsalya is one of the oldest and most cherished postures in Krishna bhakti, modeled first by Yashoda herself, who fed and scolded and feared for and adored the child who was, unknown to her, the ground of the universe. Devotees after her, most famously within the Pushtimarg founded by Vallabhacharya but by no means only there, have tried ever since to stand where Yashoda stood, loving the Lord not upward as a distant sovereign but inward and downward as a mother loves what she has borne. Rativantiji belongs to that company. It is hard, reading her name, not to notice that rati, in the old grammar bhakti borrowed from the poets, names the settled affection that ripens, under enough heat of longing, into bhava itself. A woman named for that ripening love, dying at the exact moment her rati ripened past bearing, has, whatever else is uncertain about her, the shape of a story the tradition wanted told.

The katha the boy carried home that evening was the one Vraja calls ukhal-bandhan, the binding to the grinding mortar, the story that gave Krishna one of his own names, Damodara: he who wears a rope, dama, at his waist, udara. Mother Yashoda, it is told, had sent her attendants away one day and sat down herself to churn curd into butter. The child on her hip grew hungry and reached for her; she lifted him to nurse him, and in that very moment the milk left cooking on the fire began to boil over. She set him down to save it, an ordinary mother's ordinary choice, and in the small eternity of her back being turned, the boy she had set aside decided he had been wronged. He broke the curd pot. He carried the fresh butter out to the monkeys of the yard and fed it to them by the fistful. When Yashoda came back to find her pots overturned, her butter gone, and her son standing in the wreckage with his fingers still white, she picked up a switch and went after him in real, weary, unglamorous anger, finally catching him and deciding that this time she would tie him to the household mortar until he learned to sit still.

And here the story does something only the Bhagavata dares to do with its own God: it makes Yashoda's rope too short. She takes a length of cord and finds it two fingers shy of closing around his waist. She knots on more, and it is still short. She knots on more again, and still it will not close, and she goes on fetching cord from every corner of the house until every rope she owns is joined end to end, and still those same two fingers of air remain, because the child she is tying is the maker of every rope and every finger's breadth there has ever been, and no cord spun by human hands can close around what has no edge. Only when Krishna himself, moved not by the rope but by the sight of his mother's exhausted love, chooses to let himself be caught, does the last knot finally close. Bhakti's oldest tellers have always read this as the real teaching hiding inside the mischief: the Infinite cannot be caught by cleverness or by a longer rope, but a mother's plain, tired love catches him every time, without her even managing to catch him on her own.

This was the story laid before Rativantiji that evening, told, one imagines, the plain unhurried way children repeat what they have just heard, the boy probably thinking he was handing her nothing heavier than the day's usual measure of katha. He told her that the most tender of children, softer and more delicate than any child she had ever held, had been bound with rope by his own mother's hands. He may even have told it with the relish the story is meant to carry, arriving at last at Yashoda's furious, loving, thoroughly human triumph over her unbindable son. But Rativantiji did not hear a triumph. She heard that her son had been tied and made to cry. The commentators say she became at once vyakul, frantic, wholly undone, and began to writhe where she sat, unable to put the picture down: the ropes at that small waist, the tears, the fright of a child who cannot understand why his mother's hands, of all hands, have turned into this. A heart that loved with real, unmetaphored vatsalya could not reach for the theology that would have steadied a calmer listener, the reminder that this was lila, sport, play, that the Infinite Person only appears to suffer and never truly does. She could only reach for what a mother reaches for, which is her child's pain taken wholly as her own, and hers, it seems, was more than the body could go on carrying.

She did not recover. She gave up her breath there, offering her very prana to the Lord the text calls Bhaktavatsala, he who loves his devotees the way a parent loves a child, so that in her last instant the two vatsalyas met and closed on each other: her mother-love poured out toward him, and his answering love folding back around her.

Bhaktavatsala is one of the oldest and most cherished of Krishna's epithets, older even than any single story built to illustrate it. It names the conviction, running through nearly the whole of Vaishnava thought, that the Lord who needs nothing and lacks nothing has made himself helplessly fond of the people who love him, in the same undignified way a parent is helplessly fond of a child who has done nothing to earn it. He is praised in the Bhagavata as more moved by love than by wealth, more won by devotion than by ritual correctness, more likely to run toward a devotee in trouble than to wait composed on his throne for that devotee to arrive properly. Rativantiji's story catches this idea from an unusual angle. Most stories of Bhaktavatsala show him rescuing a devotee from danger. Hers shows him receiving one instead: the woman who had spent however long mothering him in the privacy of her own heart is, at the very end, mothered back, gathered into the same vatsalya she had spent her love pouring out toward him.

Priyadas, and after him Rupkala, do not tell this as a caution against feeling too much. They set it down in the flattest, most matter-of-fact Braj they can manage, and then simply name what has happened: bhava. In the grammar of feeling that bhakti reshaped for its own purposes, bhava is what an emotion becomes when it stops being a thought a person is having and turns instead into something that has the person, visible in trembling, in tears, in the breaking of the voice, and, in its furthest reach, in the very dissolving of the frame that housed it. A tradition built on that grammar has no real interest in praising composure over abandon. A devotee who keeps her wits about her while hearing of the Lord's trouble, holding the correct doctrine steady in her mind the whole while, is not obviously the greater soul, in this accounting, next to one who cannot keep her wits at all because she can no longer tell her own heart from his. The commentators end Rativantiji's story with three shouts of jai, victory, and not one note of pity. They call her, in that same closing line, Shri Bhakti Maharaniji, the sovereign queen of devotion. Whatever else the story is, it was clearly not written down as a warning.

It should be said plainly, because honesty about her demands it: almost nothing else survives. No birthplace is given, no family, no teacher, no lineage, nothing beyond her place among the devotees Nabhadas judged worth naming when he compiled the Bhaktamal around 1585. No chronicle outside this text and the commentaries layered onto it over the following centuries appears to mention her; independent searching turns up no temple built to her, no line of disciples, no second verse anywhere that scholarship connects to her name. This is not unusual for the Bhaktamal, which was never meant as a biographical register. Nabhadas often gives a devotee a single scene, one flash of bhava, and lets that flash stand for an entire life, trusting the quality of the moment to say more than a list of dates ever could. Alongside kings, renunciants, and famous poet-saints, he made room for people the wider world would otherwise never have recorded, an entire life compressed into the space of one evening's total feeling. Rativantiji is remembered by exactly that: not by what she founded or reformed or argued, but by the fact that on one particular evening, ordinary love grew so concentrated that it stopped behaving like love usually behaves, and someone thought that worth setting down.

And perhaps that is enough. No reader needs to know where Rativantiji was born to understand what she is doing in this book. She shows anyone who has ever loved a child, or wished they had, or grieved one, that the road to Krishna does not require philosophy to walk it before it requires the heart. Nothing in the surviving line about her calls her learned or well versed; it calls her only faithful to a simple daily habit of listening, and willing to let herself feel what she heard past the point where feeling is safe. That is harder than it sounds, and closer to reach than most of what the great teachers ask of us: sit for the story every day, and do not merely follow it, feel it. If a reader closes this account tonight still turning over the picture of two ropes falling short and a third finally closing because a mother's tiredness became, at last, more than even God could refuse, that reader has understood Rativantiji about as well as she could have asked to be understood. Shri Bhakti Maharaniji ki jai, jai, jai.