Akrura's Chariot

A chariot comes to Vrindavan, and the Bhagavata treats its arrival as the end of the only unbroken happiness in the book. The cowherd years are over; they will not return; and the Purana makes the reader feel that before it makes anything happen.

The driver is Akrura — a noble of Mathura, a devotee, sent by Kamsa under a pretext. Kamsa, still unable to find the child who would kill him but now certain he is in Vrindavan and grown, devises a trap: invite Krishna and Balarama to Mathura for a festival and a sacrifice and a wrestling exhibition, and have them killed there, on his ground, by his champions. Akrura knows the errand is a snare and goes anyway, because the Bhagavata wants the messenger of the catastrophe to be a lover of the one he is summoning — and it gives Akrura, on the road, a private rapture: stopping to bathe, he sees in the water the vision of the divine form, and travels the rest of the way carrying a joy the boys he is fetching cannot yet share.

The chapter’s true weight is the leaving, and the Bhagavata spends it on the gopis. When Vrindavan learns the chariot will take Krishna away, the Purana does not stage protest or rescue; it stages grief, and grief of a particular kind. The gopis do not try to stop him. They block the chariot with their bodies and their weeping, they reproach the cruel “Akrura” — “the un-cruel one,” the Bhagavata lets the irony of the name stand — they say everything the heart says when it is being left, and then they let him go, because the love the Rasa refined is not a love that holds. It is the love that was already, since the disappearance in the dance, learning to burn toward an absence. The Purana has been preparing them, and the reader, for exactly this departure since the night he vanished mid-dance: the leaving is the disappearance made permanent.

The Bhagavata is precise and almost cruel about the finality. Krishna promises to return; the Purana lets the promise be spoken; and the tradition, and the text’s own arc, know that in the form they loved he does not come back. The cowherd boy is leaving Vrindavan to become the prince of Mathura and the king of Dwarka, the friend of the Pandavas, the speaker of the Gita, the figure of the Mahabharata — and none of those is the boy with the flute the gopis are watching ride away. The Bhagavata is making its structural statement: the book’s centre of pure love is now behind it, and everything ahead, however magnificent, is lived after the loss of it.

For the reader the chapter is the hinge of the whole Purana. Until now the Bhagavata has been ascending — frame, cosmos, devotees, descents, the infancy, the dance — toward this love. From here it descends through the world: the killing of a tyrant, the building of a kingdom, marriages, wars, the great war’s burden, and finally the leaving of the body itself. The Purana wants the gopis’ grief to hang over all of it, because their longing is the thing it has just spent its central canto establishing as the highest, and the rest of the book is, in a sense, the world without what they had.

Akrura’s chariot carried the brothers toward Mathura and the trap. The Bhagavata’s next movement is the king’s work — the washerman and the bow, the elephant and the wrestlers, the death of Kamsa, the throne returned — and it begins on the road into the city, where the boy who was nothing but love in a forest starts, deliberately and a little sorrowfully, becoming the figure history needed him to be.