’Krishna’ by Bharti Dayal
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Ecological culture is the result of an ‘ecological enlightenment’ to which both ecocriticism and environmental ethics might contribute, while religion as we understand is “a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a super human agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs” (http://www.dictionary.com/browse/religion). Cultures across the world are defined according to their religious practices and ethics. The immaturity of human beings towards an eco-consciousness is the root cause of trepidation today. The ideal representative and harbinger of the new ecological culture would be the enlightened environmental citizen who would have the courage to face, and respond to, the urgent environmental problems of our age. Lea Bill-Rippling Water Woman in her essay “Learning to connect Spirit, mind, body and Heart to the Environment: A Healer’s Perspective” (The Sacred Earth 167-169) discusses Lynn White’s essay which helped initiate a fierce and searching discussion of the relation between Western religions and the environmental crisis. The western theologians’ re-thinking of Bible and Torah’s “desacralization” of the Earth and anthropocentric domination of nature urged me to look a little closely into the Hindu creation myth depicted in the second invocation in Gītagovindaṃ, “The Dasāvatāra”, which promotes a harmony between man and nature. The Gītagovindaṃ was composed by the Odia Vaishnava poet Jayadeva supposedly in the 12^th century AD. Jayadeva, the famed religious poet of Odisha, lived in Puri, one of the religious capitals of Hindu India, in the 12^th Century AD. During this period Puri became a point of confluence of all the streams of religious creeds, which sought their convergence in the cult of Lord Jagannath. It was around this time that Jayadeva composed the Gītagovindaṃ, a semi epic poem, celebrating Krishna’s love and indulgence with his consort Radha, where Nature is an important participant. The Gītagovindaṃ became famous during the lifetime of Jayadeva as it was introduced into the rituals of the Jagannath temple. Bhagyalipi Malla, a researcher comments that, “With the decree of the Ganga emperors, Gita Govinda was sung every day in the temple as a result of which it became popular in every household in Orissa.” (115) Written originally in Sanskrit, it has seen many translations. The text used in the present analysis is an English translation of Gītagovindaṃ (2000) by N S R Ayengar.

Although, Gītagovindaṃ is a poem written in the Bhakti tradition, depicting devotion in the love frolic of Krishna and Radha where devotion takes the consort mode which is a typical product of Vaishnavite Bhakti movement, the love frolic between the divine and the devotee happens in communion with nature. Almost all the critiques of Gītagovindaṃ focus on sensuality, love and devotion typical to the Bhakti tradition. Hardly any other perspective of this devotional script has been ever explored. The grand narrative of this text presupposes that the readers accept this poem as a poem eulogising Lord Vishnu. But read between the lines, the creation myth in the Dasāvatāra or the ten incarnations of Vishnu exposes a little narrative which opens the text to a transdisciplinary inquiry and makes the text an interesting case study in the field of ecocritical and cultural studies. It may be noted that the world is becoming more and more aware of Environmentalism. Environmentalism has become important with the earth threatened with annihilation due to environmental depletion, global warming and climate change. Human beings are faced with no other alternative but to look back at cultures which believed in Nature worship and communion with nature as an essential part of their existence. Rich in mythology, Hinduism is one such religion which advocates and bases itself on ecocentrism. In this paper, I propose to critically evaluate Gītagovindaṃ from the perspective of an ecocritic with an eco-ethical lens.
 
Ecocriticism was born from concern over environmental crisis, awareness of which has affected many literary critics and scholars since the 1980s. A major motive underpinning the ecocritical agenda is its insistence on critical awareness. Thus, the purpose of ecocriticism is to study literary texts and other art-works, in order to generate more caring attitudes towards nature and the whole biosphere. To be more specific, ecocriticism tends to make ethical appeals by pointing, for example, to failings in political and cultural practices. The overall concern of ecocriticism is with human survival on Earth. Sustainability depends upon shunning exploitation and understanding the values and relationship that humans have with nature both in ethical and practical dimensions. Environmental ethics which has sprung from environmental crisis is defined as “a set of principles, values or norms relating to the ways in which we interact with our [natural] environment.” (Dower 11). Western theology has always been anthropocentric and conceived of God at the centre as the doctrinaire of all things. Meister Eckhart’s poem cited here is self-explicatory in the sense that Christianity presupposes an absolute anthropocentric universe. The faithful are asked to:

Western theology apprehends the presence of the Almighty God/Man in everything and all creatures are fearful of and subservient to the Creator. On the contrary, Hindu scriptures show that ecology and ethics share a close relationship creating an interdisciplinary dialogue between the two.  In this paper I shall attempt to pay particular attention to the ways in which Gītagovindaṃ can contribute in significant ways to such dialogue. The ecological relationship between God and His creation advocates a philosophy which deals with facts and values with a critical attitude beyond the mere semiotic representations and imagines possible alternatives. It promotes a critical attitude that questions the nature-human relationship as it critiques the dangers of human survival on earth. Both, ecocriticism and ecoethics attempt to alert us to the precarious state of the environment. They envisage a thorough reconsideration and improvement of our relationship with nature by focusing on recognisable patterns of human behaviour, as either reflected in texts (or works of art) or amenable to philosophical discourse. 

When we discuss religious philosophy, what comes to mind first is the debate on anthropocentrism vs. ecocentrism. This is in fact a highly controversial territory, into which a good many occasional forays and fundamental studies have been made. The traditional anthropocentric view can be presented in the following terms: its most striking characteristic is its “human chauvinism,” which claims that humans are supreme creation and are given privileged power over Nature and everything that exists within it. This has led to the notion, cherished since time immemorial that human beings are so special that the earth exists for human comfort and disposal alone. However, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, deep ecology and other environment-oriented philosophical trends radically questioned the traditional anthropocentric view, emphasising the given priority of the biosphere over the human sphere.
 
Ayengar argues that, “The presence of Dasāvatāra Stuti ... in Gītagovindaṃ is significant in two distinct ways. First, it serves as an invocation, which is customary to begin a poem with, and in the second place it conjures up in our minds the rich spiritual and cultural heritage of India against the background of which the poem is to be read and appreciated.” (67) Nature worship is an integral part of Indian philosophy. Nature and the natural environment are both an ontological given in Hindu philosophy and also social constructs designed to educate the reader in ecocentric existence. The relationship between Nature and human, as seen in Jayadeva’s Gītagovindaṃ, is not one of the dominant and the dominated, rather, it is symbiotic and compassionate in nature. This reminds us of Biophilia, a concept introduced by Edward O. Wilson in his book of the same title, claiming a human dependence on nature that extends far beyond the simple issues of material and physical sustenance to encompass, as well as the human craving for aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive, and even spiritual meaning and satisfaction. That is probably what we need, to save mankind and Earth.  Gītagovindaṃ offers us exactly what Wilson calls biophilia.

Gītagovindaṃ is introduced with three invocatory songs, the first, as per tradition, invokes the Goddess of speech, the second describes the Dasāvatāra or the ten incarnations of Lord Vishnu and the third offers a prayer to Vishnu himself. The doctrine of incarnation is seminal to Hindu philosophy and can be considered as a creation myth. Western creation myths are basically anthropocentric, where man dominates over Nature and is projected as the Supreme Saviour who considers Nature as the other. Greek and Roman mythology is replete with examples of the courage and power of man over Nature and its agents. Christian, Jewish and Islamic faiths share a common creation story. In the book of Genesis God says “let there be light” and in six days He creates Sun, Moon and all other creatures (Shumov Web). God is the patriarch and animals have no role to play in the wellbeing of the world. In The Book of Genesis, God creates a deluge to punish man and annihilate all creation. During the great deluge it was a man, Noah, whom God asked to save a pair of all the creatures created by Him. Noah was His agent, whom He asks to build an arc and bring along with him and his wife, the male and female of all the species. Then God asks Noah to alight from the arc. “Then Noah built an altar to the LORD and, taking of every clean animal and of every clean bird, he offered burnt offerings on the altar” (The Sacred Earth 73). God is pleased with Noah for killing the animals and offering them to Him and blesses Noah to be fertile and rule the world, making him the ultimate ruler of Earth. God says, “The fear and the dread of you shall be upon all the beasts of the earth and upon all the birds of the sky—everything with which the earth is astir—and upon all the fish of the sea; they are given into your hand. Every creature that lives shall be yours to eat; as with the green grasses, I give you all these” (73-74). Man is given absolute power to enjoy and destroy nature at will.
 
On the contrary, Hindu creation myth is ecocentric, building an awareness of the importance and participation of the flora and fauna in the dynamics of existence.  The Hindu triumvirate Brahma, Vishnu and Maheshwara/Shiva are constructs in harmony with nature. Brahma sits in the ether on a lotus, Vishnu’s abode is the Great ocean of milk where he reclines on a bed formed by a huge coiling snake, who also protects his head and his pet bird is Garuda, the eagle, whose primary food is snake and Shiva sits in penance, bare bodied on the top of the icy Himalayas with animals and snakes for company. This communion of the Hindu Gods with nature is indicative of the ecocentric nature of the religious philosophy therein. The relationship of these gods is ecopolitically extended to protection of the elements as well. Vishnu and Brahma are protected by water, whereas Shiva protects water. Ecocritical practice in Hinduism is reflected in its philosophy and represented in religious and literary texts. One such accepted doctrine is the doctrine of the ten incarnations, which has its origin in post-Vedic myth. Out of the ten incarnations Vishnu assumed four incarnations, namely, Matsya/fish, Kurma/Tortoise, Varaha/ Boar and Narasimha/ half human and half lion with an express purpose, that is, for the growth and sustenance of creation.

The description of the deluge in the Fish incarnation reflects the Western myth of the great deluge where God/man assumes the central space and is responsible for both destroying and protecting all else; in other words, the myth is anthropocentric. In the Hindu myth Keshava or God assumes the shape of a fish and saves the Earth and the Holy Scriptures, the Vedas, from the flood and from a demon who had hidden it deep down in the ocean. Looking at this from an ecopolitical perspective we can say that the scripture wants to bring to prominence the significance and importance of the fish, a puny creature in nature. In the second incarnation He assumes the shape of a Great Tortoise to save His creation. The poem reads “On your expansive back is distinct, / The circular scar / Caused by bearing the Earth so long! (90) According to Ayengar, the incarnation of the Great Tortoise seems natural and logical. He says, “If the incarnation of the fish relates to the antediluvian period, the Tortoise refers to a postdiluvian period. The tortoise is an amphibian and it signifies the emergence of land mass out of the vast primordial ocean.” (63) God, in the form of a great Tortoise, held the mount Mandar which spun like a rotor on His vast, hard, convex back, wherewith, He churned the ocean and recovered the wealth of medicinal plants and other natural riches which were drowned during the great flood. The emergence of the moon, which symbolized light, out of the ocean yet again confirms the creation myth.
 
After having saved the flora, the fauna, the elixerine restorative ‘ambrosia’ from the great flood, God perhaps realised that earth was floundering on its normal course and might fall into the vast bottomless abyss. Hence, He projects a “giant boar [that] rescues the earth by raising it out of the ocean on one of his tusks” (Miller 21).   The third incarnation of Varaha/wild Boar indeed held the Earth on the tip of His tusk and put it back in its orbit and gave it back its diurnal and annual motions pointing to the ecological relationship between animals and humans. This incarnation was followed by a fourth, the Man-Lion/Narasimha shape. The myth narrates that God had to assume this weird shape, which is half man and half lion, in order to represent and underline the bestiality in man, whereby he becomes violent and destructive. It also is a pointer to the fact that nature retaliates when provoked beyond endurance. Assuming the form of Narasimha, an intermediary stage between human and animal, He tears open the body of the evil Hiranyakashipu to save the little Prahlad¹ and metaphorically suggests an ecopolitical ideology that rests in social justice. Allowing God the incarnations of a Fish, a Tortoise and a Wild Boar, Jayadeva in Gītagovindaṃ could well be producing a consciousness, through ecomyths in this popular religious narrative, that Nature nurtures and is the ultimate saviour. It is implied that the pre-metamorphic phase of man and lion-Narasimha, indicates the politics of Nature where it can exercise the propensity of being restorative as well as destructive.
 
In the eighth incarnation God assumes the shape of a ploughman/ Haladhara, wielding his mighty plough, representing a civilisation which depended heavily on agriculture and stressed on agriculture as a way of life.

The ninth and last historical incarnation of Lord Vishnu is the Buddha incarnation. ‘Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda which contains one of the earliest lists of incarnation states that Vishnu became Buddha out of compassion for animals, in order to put an end to the Vedic rites of bloody animal sacrifices.’(66) Buddha attains enlightenment under the Bodhi tree. The Buddha and the Bodhi tree are metaphors, very relevant to us today. It is the shade, the atmosphere and various other physical properties of the tree that facilitate the Buddha’s enlightenment. The human Goutama’s active communion with the tree for a sustained period of time results in his enlightenment giving him the qualities of a God and makes him Buddha, the enlightened one. The final and tenth incarnation that is yet to come is that of the Horseman Kalki, who brandishes a flaming sword and will be instrumental in destroying evil in this world.  Even in this incarnation, God is astride a horse implying the interdependence on an animal and the element fire for sustainability. Gītagovindaṃ shows us that the salvation of humanity is dependent on the most insignificant creatures like the fish, the tortoise, the wild boar, a half lion, a horse, a peace-loving Buddha and a plough that bears meaning only in the context of agriculture. Hindu mythology is replete with images of the Supreme God’s dependence on animals and plants for the realisation of their power. The Dasāvatāra described in Jayadeva’s Gītagovindaṃ furthers this notion of interdependence for ultimate survival pitting faith on the pettiest of species to rescue them in moments of crisis. Going back to Water Woman’s discussion of Lynn White’s essay:

In this context one can refer to John Grey’s discussion of Spinoza’s ecological philosophy. Spinoza suggests that there may be situations in which our own welfare depends upon the welfare of a non-human animal, like when a farmer’s livelihood depends upon the welfare of his stock. But only in such situations will a human have reason to care about the welfare of a non-human. (367-388) Although this is regarded as Spinoza’s ecosophy, it is not bereft of anthropocentric views. While the Western theologians and philosophers feel a necessity to reform their religion on ecocentric lines, Hindu religion is embedded in environmentalism. Anticipating environmental crisis and understanding environmental ethics, Hindu religious philosophers and poets, have paved the path for an ecopolitical ideology. They impressed the notion of environmental ethics and justice upon the social and cultural construction of nature and its relationship to humans in the interest of sustainable life on earth and the construction of an interdependent harmonious ecosystem through the religious texts. Ecopolitics is an ideology that “aims to create an ecologically sustainable society rooted in environmentalism, nonviolence [and] social justice” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_politics) envisioning a sustainable green Earth and Jayadeva’s Gītagovindaṃ goes a long way to suggest this.

It follows that, engagement with nature is the only way out of the present critical situation relating to the impending peril faced by Earth as a whole. Indian philosophy ecopolitically suggests that we can worship nature as we worship our parents and our gurus making it a part of our belief system. Then we can still adhere to our faith, be it Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity or Islam, without any conflict within ourselves and also respond collectively to the environmental issues and concerns that face humanity today. Hence, Jayadeva’s re-inscription of the incarnation myth with its distinct ecocentric leanings is suggestive of biosophy which attempts to postulate a harmony and equilibrium between cultures and nature.
 
Notes:

¹ Prahlad in Hindu mythology is the son of the demon king Hiranyakashipu. This little boy was a staunch believer in God and good deeds. This angered his father no end and he ordered Prahlad to show him his God. Prahlad saying that God is omnipresent points to a pillar in the palace of Hiranyakashipu. When the demon king tries to break the wall the Narasimha emerges from that wall and tears Hiranyakashipu’s body apart.
 
Works Cited

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Dower, Nigel. “Introduction” to Ethics and Environmental Responsibility, ed. Nigel Dower. Aldershot & Brookfield VT, 1989.

Gottlieb, Roger S. Ed. The Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment  2^nd. Edition. Routledge, 2004.

Green Politics. Accessed 1.5.2018.  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_politics

Grey, John. “‘Use Them At Our Pleasure’: Spinoza on Animal Ethics.” History of Philosophy Quarterly 30(4), 2013: 367–388.

Malla, Bhagyalipi. Shree Jayadeva and the Cult of Jagannath. Assessed 1.5.2018
http://magazines.odisha.gov.in/Orissareview/june_july-2007/engpdf/Pages115-117.pdf

Miller, Barbara Stoler. Ed. And Trans. The Gitagovinda of Jayadeva: Love Song of the Dark Lord. Motilal Banarasidass Publishers, 1984. Rpt.2016.

Religion. Accessed 10.3.2018 http://www.dictionary.com/browse/religion

Shumov, Angie. “Creation Myths from around the world.” Accessed 12.3.2018 http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/the-story-of-god-with-morgan-freeman/articles/creation-myths-from-around-the-world/

Wilson, Edward O. Biophilia. Harvard Univ Press, 1986.