Abstract:

Vedānta Deśika produced his monumental poetic biography of Kṛṣṇa in a time when Kṛṣṇa-centered devotionalism was expanding to become perhaps the dominant mode of bhakti across South Asia. Central to this phenomenon is the growing popularity of the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, and especially of its exploration of Kṛṣṇa’s erotic play with the gopīs in his youth. Troubled by the unrestrained and seemingly adharmic sexuality of Kṛṣṇa, Deśika used the literary techniques and narrative paradigms of the mahākāvya to assimilate but also domesticate this increasingly important Bhāgavata episode: Kṛṣṇa’s eroticism remains central but confined within more conventional marital norms and is thus made dharmically and theologically acceptable. Once he has resolved these dharmic problems, however, Deśika is happy to explore the soteriological, devotional, and paradoxical dimensions of erotic love with Kṛṣṇa.

Notes:

Funding Information: An earlier version of this paper was presented at “Vaishnavism as Fine Literature,” a workshop organized by Alexander Uskokov and held at Yale University in May 2022. We are grateful to the participants for their input and comments. We are also deeply indebted to the anonymous reviewers for their excellent suggestions, from which this paper benefited. Publisher Copyright: © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.