Romantic love holds an unusually important place in the Hindu imagination. It is the prime focus of courtly poetry, and complex narratives about romantic love date as far back as ca. 300 BCE. Before the colonial era, Hindu culture was not subject to strict demarcations between secular and sacred—conceptualizations of romantic love flowed freely through fluid boundaries between popular ideals and the religious imagination. The culture provided extensive theological space for employing the imagery, metaphors, and ideals of romantic love.
In theistic Hinduism, romantic love is employed to explain the relationship between God, represented usually as Vishnu, Krishna, or Shiva; and His divine power, characterized as Goddess through whom the cosmos is created—and who is one with Him but distinct in function and iconography. Romantic love is also applied to the relationship between God and the faithful worshipper in devotional forms of Hinduism, both as an allegory for the relationship, and as the spiritual path to union with God. The devotional (bhakti) traditions identify the soul as feminine in nature. They have historically provided an important venue for women poetess-saints whose songs about their divine “husband” are still used as hymns today.
Along with material success, religious duty and virtue, and spiritual liberation, the Hindu classification of the four aims of life includes aesthetic and sensual pleasure (kama). The integration of kama into the fabric of a meaningful human life gave rise to its own literary genre (kama shastra). A distinction exists between kama—erotic love based on desire— and prema—pure love based on surrender and sacrifice, which includes but transcends kama, and is one way to love God. An examination of the permeable margins between secular, mainly courtly, literature and devotional poetry suggests that the devotional poets and writers adapted elements of secular poetic theory and the erotic aesthetics of the kama shastra, employing them to elicit an acute sensual response to a soteriology of love.
Love legends are common in Hindu mythology and folklore, as are anthologies of romantic poetry and their commentaries. Tropes used in courtly poetry, narrative, and erotic literature reappear in mythic contexts in devotional poetry and theological texts. Although marriage was the norm in Hindu life and romantic love within its folds was an ideal, literary pragmatism upheld the possibility of love outside conjugal life. The best-known love legends include those of Shakuntala and Dushyant and of Savitri and Satyavan, who were married couples. Their stories appear in the epic poem Mahabharata, ca. 400-300 BCE. Underlying these narratives are the twin themes of separation and longing—potential in the case of Savitri, and actual in the case of Shakuntala.
The juxtaposition of love and longing is a favorite device in secular Sanskrit poetry and drama. Theistic devotional poets employed the theme of union and separation to heighten the sense of distinction between the theistic God and the devotee who yearns for Him, to emphasize the complexity of the relationship as one of equals in union, but of unequals in separation. The urgency of longing was also thought to be critical to the evocation of God’s responsive grace.
However, Gita Govinda, the celebrated twelfth-century poetic masterpiece by the devotional poet Jayadeva, subtly alters the relational landscape of love in the religious imagination. He allows tension into the heart of God (Krishna), wrought by emotional and erotic longing for Radha, thus transforming sensual passion into divine love and equalizing the relationship between God and His beloved. In some traditions, Radha symbolizes the soul’s yearning for God; in others, she represents the divine feminine.
