CROSS-DRESSING GODS & ISKCON IDOLATRY

In the pilgrimage town of Vrindavan, you are apt to meet cross-dressing bicycle-rickshaw operators whose devotion to the Krishna legend is apparent both from the cloth bead bags dangling from their necks and the cheap, see-through saris they wrap about their dusty pajama kurtas. When I first caught sight of these creatures, I was still a teenager--and a very naïve one at that!--and thus can hardly be blamed for bursting into a fit of uncontrollable laughter.  For this innocent faux pas, I got a cold, hostile stare. In that case, it came from a carefree bicycle rickshaw driver who, like most of the similarly-attired men in his line of work, appeared to be decent and deviant at the same time. After hearing the barely-smothered laughter coming from the passenger seats, they would occasionally snicker themselves as if they were as amused by us as we were by them. 

Struck by the novelty of the place, it never occurred to me to wonder why these foot-peddling cabbies turned gopis got that way. Unknown to me, religious festivals depicting sexual ambiguity featured in various Hindu scriptures have flourished in India for centuries and, although its participants have probably always been socially marginalized, they have ingenious ways of breaking into the mainstream.

The element of fantasy in all of this role-playing is obvious: these are poor people who engage in their mobile rasa-lila as a way of finding a socially acceptable way of expressing their sexuality or the piety-induced temporary madness many people from most major religions exhibit when visiting holy pilgrimage sites. 

Superficially, these cheerful devotees (whom I was informed were otherwise family men) appear to be diverting themselves, but their behavior actually lowers the inhibitions of their audience. Delusion, illusion, and religious sentiment all combine to make these cross-dressers seem overcome with devotional fervor, thereby to some extent legitimizing their bizarre proclivities. However, their behavior is just the tip of the iceberg.

If you have ever visited any major Indian city, you might have either noticed or been accosted by its garishly-dressed intersex beggars, all of whom appear to be male transvestites. These individuals are members of the hijra class or Kinnars, as they prefer to call themselves.

In the case of the intersex people—all of whom appeared to be aggressively masculine and garishly feminine at the same time—religious devotion seemed absent. Instead, they just whirled about while twitching their menacing, brisling eyebrows at the shopkeepers, who would often throw a rupee at them while looking utterly bored by their antics. All of this I found highly diverting (little did I know that these beggars supplemented their income by prostitution). Little did I know that what I witnessed in microcosm was an ancient practice in most of India: like conservative societies everywhere, sexual deviancy is officially condemned, but is tolerated when its practice is hidden by the guise of religious fervor.

Until recently, I had no idea that a female avatar of Vishnu “existed” at all. Fish, yes, boar, why of course. But a woman! Never. Consorts, wives, and girlfriends of Vishnu and especially Krishna number in the thousands, but the idea that Vishnu could have chosen to incarnate himself in the form of a woman (and probably most other Hare Krishna devotees as just wrong. Not that the representations of Vishnu or Krishna are masculine in any sense; rather, they are usually borderline effeminate or androgynous. Absent the musculature one expects of a physically active, heroic male, most depictions of these deities were oddly sexually indeterminate, and that is how our guru wanted it. To him, muscles meant sexual desire and so he instructed the ISKCON artists to depict Krishna with barely a hint of them. 

Imagine my surprise when recently, during the course of my research for this essay, I discovered that the incarnation of Vishnu as a woman—Mohini, literally, “enchantress”—was first described in all places, in the Bhagavad Purana! Furthermore, the type of woman she personifies, we know from the stories of various apsaras who are seductresses from the sphere of the demigods. The most famous of these is Menaka, who seduction of the great sage Vishwamitra produced Shakuntala, the mother of the Bharat, after whom India is named. 

Mohini is a special case, however, because her appearance as a form of personification of illusion or Maya before Lord Shiva precipitates his own temporary madness during which he abandons his wife Parvati and chases after Vishnu-Mohini. This tale has a great many variations throughout India, but what is significant here is the fact that the annual enactments that are highlights of the festivals commemorating these stories feature hijra members exclusively. The connection between sexual deviance and social acceptance by caste members of Hindu society is clearly tolerated on a temporary basis and only for illustrative purposes. What happens when folklore depicting the extra-marital frolic of the blue cowherd god Krishna and his gopis becomes the focus of a group of 16th c. Bengali Brahmins and develops into a full-fledged, thinly veiled erotic cabal?

Usually depicted with Chaitanya Mahaprabhu in the center surrounded by his four associates, these are regarded by the Gaudiya (Bengali) Vaishnava sect as incarnations of Krishna and his associates. In particular, Chaitanya is regarded as “Krishna in the mood of Radha,” which is a transparent concession to his cross-dressing and fervent manifestations of “gopi-bhava” (adoration and love of the gopis or cowherd girls for the cow-herd Krishna whose illicit dalliances with them is an intrinsic part of the Vrindavan-based Krishna legend). My concern here is not for the Krishna legend or Chaitanya’s personal beliefs. What motivated the devotional cabal (principally detailed in Krishna Das Kaviraj's Chaitanya Charitamrita) of the associates and followers of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu was another version of the heightened emotion (in this case "gopi-bhava") that is present in Hindu holy places such as Vrindavan and Puri. It did not, moreover, make any of them incarnations of Radha or Krishna any more than depicting Vishnu-Mohini would make a group of feminized hijra actors incarnations of Vishnu or Shiva. Keep this in mind if you ever visit an ISKCON temple and see the idols of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and his associates.

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