When Krishna Dressed as a Gopi

Krishna dressed as a gopi to end Radha's maan, her loving sulk after she heard he had spent time with another gopi. Nothing he tried worked, so on a sakhi's advice he came to her disguised as a new cowherd girl and sang for her, and her own embrace gave him away. It is one of the tender stories of Radha Krishna, and it comes down to us through the Braj devotional tradition rather than through the Bhagavata Purana.

Why did Krishna dress as a gopi?

He did it to be forgiven.

Radha was in maan, a jealous, loving anger, and she would not look at him or speak to him. Krishna tried the usual gestures and got nowhere. So he gave up his own form and came to her as someone she would welcome, a new gopi she had never met.

The disguise is the whole point of the story. Krishna, whom the gopis chase, could not get near the one person he wanted, so the Lord of the Raas made himself into an ordinary cowherd girl to sit at Radha's side.

What is Radha's maan, and how did it begin?

Maan is a loving quarrel. In the poetics of Braj it is a recognized mood of deep love, the sulk of someone who feels wronged precisely because they love you. It is not cold anger. It is closeness turned inside out.

Radha's maan began with a message. As the story is told in Braj, her pet parrot brought news that Krishna was late to meet her because he had been with a rival gopi named Chandravali. Radha heard it, and she withdrew.

Krishna came and found her unreachable. He put his head at her feet. He fanned her, held up a mirror, pleaded. She would not soften. He asked her sakhis for help, and they went back and forth between the two until they were worn out.

Then, in the popular telling, the sakhi Vishakha gave him the idea that worked. She dressed him as a gopi, named him Shyama Gopi, and brought him to Radha as a new friend who sang beautifully. Radha, pleased, asked the newcomer to sing. Krishna sang of love until Radha was so moved that she embraced the stranger, and in that touch she knew him. Her maan dissolved into the meeting she had been holding out for all along.

Vishakha and Lalita are two of Radha's ashta-sakhis, the eight principal companions who arrange and protect her meetings with Krishna. In this story they are the ones who make the reunion possible.

Which scripture tells this story?

This one comes from the Gaudiya and Braj tradition, carried in devotional literature and in the living lila rather than in a Puranic verse. Most retellings leave that unsaid.

The Bhagavata Purana, the great scriptural source for Krishna's life, holds Radha within the Raas without speaking her name. In 10.30 one favored gopi slips away with Krishna, and the tradition knows her as Radha. The maan-lila and the gopi disguise are carried by Braj instead.

Radha's maan enters famous literature with Jayadeva's Gita Govinda in the 12th century, a Sanskrit poem built around the love and the lovers' quarrel of Radha and Krishna. The specific story of Krishna disguising himself as a gopi to end that maan comes later still, from Gaudiya and Braj devotional literature and the living lila tradition of Barsana.

That later date leaves the story no less true to the people who tell it. It makes it a different kind of source, and one worth naming plainly.

Is this the story where Krishna steals the gopis' clothes?

No, and this is the most common mix-up. There are three different Braj stories with a gopi at the center, and they get folded into one.

Only the first is our story. In the second it is the gopis who lose their clothes, not Krishna who wears theirs. In the third it is Shiva, not Krishna, who becomes a gopi. Krishna wearing a gopi's dress to win back Radha is its own tender episode, and it belongs to the maan-lila.

Where did this happen? Maan Mandir in Barsana

Braj remembers the place.

Radha's maan is set on a hill at Barsana, her village, marked today by Maan Mandir, also called Maan Garh. Pilgrims are shown it as the spot where Radha withdrew in maan and Krishna came to soften her. Opposite it stands Morkuti, where another version of the pastime has Krishna dance before her in the form of a peacock rather than a gopi. The peacock is never far from Krishna, which is also why he wears a peacock feather.

The two tellings, gopi and peacock, are not a contradiction to sort out. They are the way Braj holds a memory, in more than one shape at once.

What the story means

Under the costume, the story is about how far love will go to be reunited.

Radha's maan is not a flaw. It is the measure of how completely she loves, so completely that a rumor of Chandravali can wound her. And Krishna's disguise is not a trick. It is the Lord setting down everything that makes him Krishna, the flute, the crown, the form the whole world adores, just to sit close to her again.

In Gaudiya devotion Radha is the soul's love for God, and Krishna is God's answer to it. Read that way, the disguise says something plain. The divine will take any form, even a borrowed one, to reach the heart that is turned away.

For more of these pastimes, see the birth of Radharani and the rest of the Stories of Radha and Krishna.