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| Statue of Krishna with his flute: Source: wikimedia |
This week I decided to look at Sister Nevedita stories of Krishna. I thought this would be a good opportunity to learn more about Krishna, who was a very enigmatic character in Narayan's version of the Mahabharata. Sister Nevedita definitely skews her perspective on the stories towards more religious aspects, and this makes for an interesting contrasts with the other things I've read in this class so far. The first section starts with Krishna's birth, and Nevedita calls him "the Indian Christ-Child," which I'm not sure is entirely appropriate, but oh well. There are a lot of really interesting stories about Krishna's childhood in this first section, including the story about Brahma, who suspected that Krishna was actually an incarnation of Vishnu. Apparently, the easiest way to do this was to make a bunch of cows fall asleep in a cave to see if Krishna would be able to find them and then herd them back. This story is really interesting because we see some motivations of the gods, specifically Brahma who hasn't been talked about a lot in the other stories. It's a bit funny to think about the gods acting like a sort of rivals, keeping tabs on each other's activities and trying to make sure they're always one step ahead of the others. There were a lot of other interesting excerpts in this section, including the battle between the monstrous snake Kaliya and Krishna.
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