Vidagdha-Mādhava and Lalita-Mādhava

Paurṇamāsī describes a girl. The girl has been seen at the well, walking back to her mother-in-law's house with a water-pot on her hip. The girl is Rādhā. Paurṇamāsī describes her with the precision of someone who has been waiting to describe her. The walk. The way the cloth catches at her ankle. The way she does not look up when the boys at the well are looking. Nāndīmukhī asks why the elder is describing this girl. Paurṇamāsī says that the dark boy of Nanda's household has begun to ask after her without knowing he is asking.

Krishna enters. He is alone. He is fifteen, perhaps, in the way the play counts age. He is not yet the Krishna of the rāsa. He is the Krishna who has heard, this morning, a few words spoken about a girl in a neighboring household and has not been able to put the words down. He stands at the edge of the stage and speaks the first verse of his pūrva-rāga. He does not know what is happening to him. He has seen many girls in his life. Why is this name walking around inside him?

His friend Madhumaṅgala, the Brahmin clown of the Vraja plays, joins him and tries to make light. Krishna is not in the mood. The clown's lines fall on stone. Madhumaṅgala notices, with the comic timing the form requires, that something is genuinely changed in his friend, and his banter softens into the tact of one who has just realized he is in the presence of something. The act closes with Krishna asking, half to Madhumaṅgala and half to the air, whether anyone might bring him a glimpse of the one he has not yet met.

The dramaturgical sandhi of this opening act is mukha, the face, the moment in which the seed of the action is planted. The seed here is doctrinal as well as dramatic. The play has stated, in its first act, that Krishna's love for Rādhā is not the love of an enjoyer for a possession but the love of one who has been struck before he knew what struck him. The pūrva-rāga is on his side first.

Vṛndā has been told by Paurṇamāsī to look in on the household of Jaṭilā, Rādhā's mother-in-law. She enters in the form of an elder neighbor and finds Rādhā distracted in the courtyard, her hands moving through the daily work without her attention behind them. Lalitā and Viśākhā, her closest companions, are present. They have been watching her for days. They know what they are watching even before she knows what they are watching.

Vṛndā takes Lalitā aside. The exchange between them is the spine of the act. Lalitā lays out, in the precise diagnostic vocabulary of the rasa-treatises, every sign she has observed. The sleeplessness. The half-eaten food. The twice-tied braid. The way Rādhā's eyes turn toward the cow-pen of Nanda's household and find some pretext to keep turning back. Vṛndā confirms what Lalitā suspects. The girl is in pūrva-rāga for Krishna, and the boy is in pūrva-rāga for the girl, and the village they live in is the only village in the cosmos that does not yet know.

The arrangement is then plotted with the unhurried patience of the form. A walk to the Yamunā at the eighth muhūrta of the day. A bend in the path where the two parties will appear to meet by chance. A flute-tune that will reach the bend exactly as Rādhā passes. The companions assigned. The exit-path prepared in case Jaṭilā suspects. Each detail is given. The audience is watching not the meeting itself yet but the loving labor of those whose joy will be in having brought it about.

The sandhi of these acts is pratimukha, the counter-face, the junction where the seed planted in Act I begins to push its first shoot above the soil. The doctrinal point is that the lovers' meeting is not their private affair. Vraja itself, in the form of its grandmothers and its forest-deities and its closest girlhood friends, is in love with their love. The meeting belongs to a community before it belongs to the two of them.

Krishna and Rādhā are placed in the grove by the bank of the Yamunā at the appointed hour. The forest has been arranged by Vṛndā. The cuckoos have been instructed. The peacocks have been informed of the cue. Krishna enters first, leans against the bent root of a kadamba, takes the flute from his belt, and waits. Rādhā arrives by the planned path with Lalitā beside her, ostensibly going to gather flowers for the evening worship. She sees him. She freezes, then resumes her walking with a deliberate casualness that fools no one.

The exchange that follows is the play's first full scene of mutual presence. Krishna speaks. He is not the master of his own speech. He had prepared what he would say and now he forgets. He praises her in the indirect register the form requires, comparing her gait to a swan's and her glance to a doe's, but the comparisons are clumsy where his usual speech is fluent. Lalitā, watching, exchanges a look with Viśākhā that the audience catches. He, the speaker of the universe, is at a loss. Rādhā answers with a single line that is the first line in the play in which her voice is heard. The line, by itself, does not say much. By being the first, it says everything.

Madhumaṅgala intrudes from the edge of the grove with a clown's mistimed entrance. He has been told to keep watch and has, in the manner of the form, fallen asleep against a tree and woken up confused. His blundering arrival breaks the gravity of the moment without erasing it. The lovers laugh. The audience laughs. Lalitā uses the disturbance to gesture toward the next stage of the meeting, deeper in the grove, where the conversation can continue without interruption. The two move on. The clown stays behind, eating a sweet he has produced from his sleeve, satisfied that he has performed a service.

The sandhi of these acts is garbha, the womb, the moment in which the seed is now growing in earnest and the form of the future is hidden inside it. The doctrinal point is that the meeting in the grove is the cosmos at its most intimate. The Yamunā has narrowed to the bend by the kadamba. Goloka has narrowed to two voices speaking, badly, beautifully, for the first time.

The departure is not narrated. It is dramatized. Akrūra arrives. Nanda is hurried, proud, anxious. Yashoda is silent. The boys are gathered. The chariot is at the edge of the village. The play stages the moment Krishna goes to take leave of his companions, knowing what he is doing, knowing also that nothing in the language available to him will adequately mark what he is doing. He goes to the kunja. The sakhīs are already there. Rādhā is at the back of the group, half-hidden. She does not look up. He knows she will not look up. He has counted on her not looking up so that he can leave before what would happen happens.

He cannot leave. The play stages, with the painful patience of the form, the small physical refusals of the body. He turns to go. He turns back. He says one thing, then unsays it. Lalitā and Viśākhā cannot help him. They cannot help her. The audience is asked to sit inside the moment in which the cosmos is being torn along the seam that joins Vraja to itself. The chariot wheels begin to move offstage. Akrūra calls for him. He goes.

The middle acts of the Lalita-Mādhava are then given over to the vipralambha, the love-in-separation, that follows. Rādhā is silent for an entire act. She does not speak. The other characters speak around her. The audience is asked to register, by her silence, what the speeches of the Bhrāmara-Gītā in the Bhāgavata register by speech. The vipralambha is not a phase of the love. It is the love continued under conditions of impossibility. The love does not weaken when its object goes. It enters its more terrible form.

The dramaturgical sandhi of these middle acts is avamarśa, the deliberation, the moment in which the action seems to be closing in on impossibility and the form is testing whether anything can carry it forward. The doctrinal point is the one the entire Gauḍīya tradition will later make against the casual reading of the Bhāgavata. The departure is not a chapter that is closed when the next chapter opens. The departure is a permanent condition of the love, which must now find a way to live inside its own wound.

Krishna in Dvāraka is shown in court, surrounded by the queens. Satyabhāmā speaks. Rukmiṇī speaks. The dialogue, rendered into the courtly Sanskrit the form requires of a Dvāraka scene, unfolds in the manner of any classical play set among kings and queens. But the audience, attentive, begins to notice. The queens' phrases echo the gopis' phrases. Satyabhāmā's pride is Rādhā's pride in the timbre of her voice. Rukmiṇī's tenderness is Candrāvalī's tenderness in the rhythm of her sentences. Lalita-Mādhava is staging, slowly, an identity.

The recognition is then dramatized. Through the device of a sage's revelation, with Paurṇamāsī once more arranging the disclosure, the play discloses what it has been preparing the audience to hear. The queens of Dvāraka are not other women whom Krishna married after he left Vraja. They are the gopis themselves, drawn to him in their subtle bodies, given the appearances and offices of queens so that the surface story can hold them, but identical, beneath the appearance, with the cowherd women he loved in the grove. Satyabhāmā is Rādhā in royal form. Rukmiṇī is Candrāvalī. The eight principal queens are the eight principal sakhīs.

The stagecraft of the recognition is delicate. Rūpa does not have the queens shed their queen-forms and resume cowherd-cloth. He has them, in a vision granted to certain characters and through them to the audience, simultaneously be the queens of Dvāraka and the gopis of Vraja. The two locations are not erased into each other. They are held together. The Vraja meeting in the kunja, the play insists, is continuing eternally even now, and the Dvāraka court is one of its further outer expressions. Krishna has not left Vraja. He is in Vraja still. He is also here.

The sandhi of the closing acts is nirvahaṇa, the final junction, the resolution in which everything the play has planted is gathered and brought to its conclusion. The doctrinal point is the one for which the whole Lalita-Mādhava has been written. The vipralambha of the gopis is real and is also, at a deeper level, held inside an embrace that did not break. The pain of separation, the play declares with the authority that only dramatic form can give, has not been the last word. The last word is that the lovers' meeting has gone on without interruption in the place where meetings cannot end.

The eight-watch contemplation that the Govinda-līlāmṛta and the later vraja-rasika manuals codify draws much of its concrete imagery from these two plays. The arrangement of the kunja, the manner of the sakhīs' service, the choreography of the lovers' approach and parting, the timing of the flute, the role of the clown, the elderly Paurṇamāsī's silent presence in the corner of the scene: each of these is staged by Rūpa in the plays before being abstracted into the meditation manual. The reader who has lived through the plays brings to the smaraṇa a kunja already populated.

The figure of Paurṇamāsī, in particular, has shaped Gauḍīya contemplation in ways that exceed the plays themselves. She is the elder of the līlā who knows that the meeting must happen and who arranges, by her quiet word, the conditions under which it can happen. Later devotees identify her with the inner guru, the one who has been present in the heart all along, planting the recognitions that bring the soul to the kunja. Without Paurṇamāsī the meeting does not occur. Without the inner Paurṇamāsī the contemplation does not arrive.

The plays also fix, for the tradition, the rhythm by which prema is to be understood. Pūrva-rāga before meeting. The arrangement by friends. The meeting itself, grave at the center and comic at the edges. The departure that is unbearable. The vipralambha that will not end. The metaphysical recognition that the embrace was never broken. This sequence, articulated as drama by Rūpa, is the sequence the Gauḍīya sādhaka is invited to live through inwardly. The plays are the libretto. The contemplative life is the performance.

It bears repeating, finally, that these plays were not staged in public theatres in their own time and have rarely been staged since. They live as read texts. They are recited, paused on, returned to, the way scripture is recited. The form of the Sanskrit nāṭaka is here put to a use the form had not, in its long history, been put to before. It has been made into a vehicle of contemplation. The reader who reads the plays slowly is also the audience for whom the plays were always written. The auditorium is the heart that has been waiting to be filled.