Akrura

The chariot had barely rolled to a stop at the edge of Vrindavan when its driver forgot entirely that he was a minister of a king's court, a seasoned elder of the Yadava clan, a man other men bowed to. Akrura leapt down before the wheels had finished turning, before a single word of greeting had passed between him and the cowherds who stood staring, and threw himself flat into the dust of the village lane. He had seen footprints there, small ones, marked with the signs of a flag and a barley-sheaf and a thunderbolt, the very prints the cowherd boys of Vrindavan walked past every day without a second glance, and at the sight of them the dignity of a lifetime simply left him. He rolled in that dust, rubbed it into his hair and his upper arms, pressed his face to the earth Krishna's feet had touched, and wept like a man who had been thirsty for years and had finally reached water. The cowherds who watched him, this well-dressed stranger from the city grovelling in their lane, must have wondered what madness had ridden into Vraja that morning. It was not madness. It was, as it turned out, the truest thing about him.

His name meant, literally, "not cruel," a gentle irony given the errand that had brought him there. Akrura was the son of Svaphalka and Gandini, a princess of Kashi, and belonged to the inner circle of the Vrishni house of the Yadavas, kin to Vasudeva and, through that kinship, uncle to Krishna and elder brother in spirit to Balarama. He was not a village bhakta or a wandering ascetic. He held rank, sat in councils, carried the business of kings on his shoulders. And yet for years, unseen by anyone at court, he had nursed a private devotion, a longing for the Lord he had only heard of in the old stories, a longing so quiet that even he had learned to distrust it. He was, in other words, exactly the kind of man devotion is not supposed to visit: a courtier, a diplomat, an instrument of other men's purposes. That he became instead one of the clearest mirrors of bhakti in the whole tradition is itself the teaching Nabhadas points toward when, writing of him in the Bhaktamal, the poet does something unusual: he defers. Akrura's fuller telling, Nabhadas says, will come later, in the company of the nine-limbed devotees of navadha bhakti, because Akrura belongs there before he belongs anywhere else. That is not an oversight in the text. It is a signpost.

The errand itself began in fear, and the fear belonged to Kansa. The tyrant of Mathura had imprisoned his own father Ugrasena to seize the throne, and had been told by an oracle that the eighth child of his sister Devaki would end his life. He had already murdered her children one by one, and still the eighth had escaped him, spirited away to Vrindavan and raised there as a cowherd's son, and word had begun reaching Mathura of a boy in Vraja who killed the demons Kansa sent against him as though they were toys. Terrified and unwilling to believe yet unable to disbelieve, Kansa devised a trap dressed as an honor: a great festival of arms, a Dhanuryajna, to which Krishna and Balarama would be cordially invited, and at which wrestlers named Chanura and Mushtika, and a maddened elephant named Kuvalayapida, would see to it that neither boy left Mathura alive. He needed a messenger the cowherds of Vrindavan would trust, someone whose face was known to Nanda and whose bearing was gentle enough to disarm suspicion. He sent for Akrura.

What Kansa never guessed was what that errand would do to the messenger himself. On the road to Vrindavan, Akrura's mind would not sit still. One moment he was sick with the thought of what he had been made an instrument of, driving two innocent boys toward a butcher's arena under the pretense of festival honors. The next moment a wilder feeling rose beneath the dread, one he could hardly name: he, of all people, a man tangled in a tyrant's business for years, was about to look upon the very Lord he had worshipped from a distance his whole life. He turned the thought over and could not make himself believe it. What penance had he ever kept, what charity had he ever given, what discipline had he ever practiced, he asked himself, that grace should choose today of all days to find a man like him. He very nearly talked himself out of his own joy. But joy, it turned out, was not waiting for his permission or his merit. It simply arrived, uninvited and undeserved, which is rather the point of it.

So he arrived at Vrindavan already undone, and after the dust and the tears, after Nanda had welcomed him with the hospitality due an old friend from the city, Krishna himself came forward, lifted the weeping minister up from the ground, and drew him into an embrace. Only then, sitting quietly with the two brothers away from the crowd, did Akrura tell them the truth he had come to deliver: the invitation to Mathura was a snare, the festival a pretext, the wrestlers and the elephant already primed to kill. He expected, perhaps, argument, or fear, or refusal. He received neither. Krishna and Balarama listened to the whole plot with an unhurried calm that unsettled Akrura more than panic would have, and simply said they would go, not because Kansa commanded it but because Vasudeva and Devaki still languished in chains and Ugrasena still sat displaced from his own throne, and those wrongs had waited long enough to be set right.

The departure the next morning was harder than the arrival had been. Word had spread through Vraja that Akrura had come to take the two boys away, and the gopis of the village, who loved Krishna the way one loves one's own breath, came undone in the lanes: garlands slipping from their necks, bangles sliding from wrists gone slack, hair coming loose from its braids. They turned on the visitor with a grief sharp enough to draw blood, asking how he could bear the name Akrura, "the ungentle one," they twisted it, when he was doing the cruelest thing imaginable, carrying off the one thing that made their lives bearable, without so much as a word of comfort for those he left grieving. Krishna's answer to them, as the wheels began to turn, was simple and became famous precisely because it was simple: he would return. The gopis ran after the chariot down the road until the dust of its passing swallowed it from sight, and something in Akrura, driving the reins in silence, understood for the first time the size of what he was carrying away.

The stranger vision came at midday, at a bend of the Yamuna where Akrura stopped the chariot to perform his customary rites of worship. Wading into the river to bathe, he looked into the water and the water gave back more than his own reflection: he saw Balarama in the form of Ananta Shesha, the cosmic serpent, and upon that serpent's coils he saw Krishna reclining as Vishnu himself, the ground of all worlds resting easily on the causal ocean. Every hymn Akrura had ever murmured in private worship rose up in him at once, and he poured it out there in the river, praising the Lord as the source from which the universe is spun and into which it is drawn back, weeping the way a man weeps who has spent his whole life believing something on faith and is suddenly, wordlessly, shown that it was true. When he climbed back into the chariot, shaken, and looked at the two boys sitting behind him as though he had never seen them before, Krishna only smiled, the ordinary, teasing smile of a nephew, as if to say: yes, and also just this, just family, be at ease. That stretch of riverbank is still called Akrura Ghat, and it still draws pilgrims who walk down to the Yamuna between Vrindavan and Mathura to remember the morning a courtier meant to deliver a death sentence instead delivered himself into wonder.

What followed in Mathura belongs more to Krishna's story than to Akrura's: Kansa's downfall in the wrestling arena, Ugrasena's restoration to his throne, Vasudeva and Devaki freed at last from their chains. Akrura fades into the background of those events, an elder among elders again, but he had already had his hour, and nothing after it could take that morning by the river away from him.

Years later, in Dwaraka, his name became tangled again in trouble, this time over a jewel. Satrajit, a Yadava chieftain, had been given by the sun-god Surya a gem called the Syamantaka, radiant and inexhaustibly wealth-giving, and when Satrajit's brother Prasena was killed while wearing it, suspicion for a time fell wrongly on Krishna himself, until Krishna recovered the jewel and Satrajit, ashamed, offered it back along with his daughter Satyabhama's hand in marriage. Krishna accepted the daughter and declined the gem. Not long after, a man named Shatadhanva murdered Satrajit for the jewel and fled Dwaraka, and in his flight he pressed the Syamantaka into Akrura's keeping. Some tellings suggest Akrura had been drawn into the ambitions swirling around Satyabhama's marriage; the devotional memory most closely tied to his name insists he had no hand in the murder itself, and that his only fault, once the gem was in his possession, was a very human fear: the fear of being found holding a dead man's treasure and disbelieved. Rather than risk that suspicion, he withdrew quietly from Dwaraka and lived for years in Kashi, performing sacrifices, saying nothing. It was noticed, eventually, that fortune itself seemed to have left the city with him; ill omens multiplied in his absence. When Krishna at last called him back, it was without accusation. In a full assembly of the Yadava elders, Akrura produced the jewel to clear his name and, by extension, the doubts that had shadowed others as well, and Krishna, offered the Syamantaka outright, chose not to take it, asking only that it remain in Dwaraka's keeping so its wealth could serve the city's sacrifices. It was, in its way, another vandana: a public bowing down to the truth, however late, and a restoration of trust that Krishna himself made sure was witnessed by everyone who had once whispered against his uncle.

One further mission belongs to the same long life, remembered in the Bhagavata's account of the years surrounding the great war of the Mahabharata: Krishna, wanting to know whether Dhritarashtra in Hastinapura had fallen wholly under his son Duryodhana's influence, sent Akrura to find out. In Hastinapura, tradition tells, Akrura was met by Kunti, Krishna's aunt and the Pandavas' mother, who asked through tears whether her nephew still remembered her and her sons in their hardship, a question Akrura carried back to Dwaraka along with his report. To Dhritarashtra himself he spoke plainly of the old king's partiality toward his own sons and his failure to see Yudhishthira installed as the rightful heir, and Dhritarashtra, by this account, admitted the truth of it even while professing his continued reverence for Krishna. Whether every detail of that embassy happened exactly as later tellers arranged it, the portrait that survives is consistent: a devotee trusted enough, by both his own conscience and by God, to say hard things plainly and carry grief faithfully between houses that could no longer speak to each other directly.

What makes Akrura's place in the Bhaktamal worth lingering over is precisely that Nabhadas chose to postpone him, to let his story wait for the chapter on the nine limbs of bhakti, because among those nine, vandana, the bowing down, the salutation offered with the whole body and no bargaining, belongs to Akrura the way remembrance belongs to Prahlada or friendship belongs to Arjuna or service belongs to Hanuman. He did not renounce the world to find God; he was a working man of affairs, entangled to the end of his life in the business of kings, sent on other people's errands, holding other people's secrets, even once holding another man's stolen inheritance through no real fault of his own. And still, when the moment came, he did not stop to ask whether a man like him was allowed to fall at the Lord's feet. He simply fell. That is the whole of vandana, and it is available, the story insists, to anyone reading it late at night who suspects they have not done enough, prayed enough, deserved enough, to be loved. Akrura did not think he deserved it either. He rolled in the dust anyway, and the dust, it turned out, had been waiting for him.