26/03/2024
🙌🙌🙌
✨ Happy Holi! Holi, the festival of colors, is celebrated around the world today. Today's shows Kṛṣṇa playing Holi with Rādhā. This poem is from the 15th century bhakti saint Sūrdās and celebrates Holi:
"Ho, ho, ho, Holi!
They joyfully play and their love comes clear—
Hari there, here fair Radha.
Long drums, round drums, cymbals, and tambourines
pound—and through it faintly, the flute—
as Kanh and Brishabhanu’s daughter
sing open insults at each other.
Musk, sakh, javadi, kumkum, saffron, sandal—
these they take and churn to a liquid
and let passion’s ocean brim with love’s color
and surge with a force to flood its shores.
Long gone, modesty and concern for the family name.
They hardly care what teachers or cowherds might say,
like thieves drunk on deeds who regale the gang at dawn
with tales of what they stole the night before.
His once-yellow garments—now dyed red;
her bodice—it’s drenched in yellow;
with all that happiness, there’s no holding back,
so a friend jumps in and finishes the act
by knotting their clothes together.
No words can describe the delight of what’s fashioned:
the beauty of their sparring tug-of-war.
Surdas says, This performance leaves the lucid-minded
Goddess of Learning stunned—stupefied!"
- Sūrdās, translated by John Stratton Hawley
📚 Holi begins on the evening of Purṇimā, the full moon day in the month of Phālguna, and marks the beginning of spring. Worshippers of Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā view Holi as a festival celebrating their love.
📷 A Holi festival. From Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, 18th century.
