A description of the Radharaman temple Unlike many deities, Radharaman has never left the temple that is his home. And it is built to look like a home. Many of the shrines of Vrindavan, in fact, are integral parts of the family houses; they are platforms built along one side of a courtyard whose other three sides hold the family’s living quarters, or the living quarters are built above and behind the deity’s shrine. Seen from the outside, Radharaman might seem to be just another of these household shrines. It is nestled at the back of a compound, Radharaman Ghera, which one enters from the street through a massive doorway with heavy wooden doors that are closed at night. The compound courtyard is lined with the houses of Goswamis. To the left, just inside the gate, is a small passageway that gives access to a red sandstone archway and a shrine marking the spot where Radharaman revealed himself. A tree next to the archway is identified as the very tree in which the basket of shalagramas hung. Next door, there is a memorial shrine of Gopala Bhatta and all the deceased Goswamis. If one walks straight across the courtyard from the gate, without turning into the passageway with the memorial shrine, one can then turn left, go through another massive doorway with heavy wooden doors, and enter another courtyard lined with more houses. A few steps inside the courtyard, there is a communal pump on one side, often with children playing around it, people washing their hands or feet, or someone drawing water in a bucket. Now one is facing Radharaman temple itself, a simple sandstone structure at first glance hardly distinguishable from the houses around it. Behind it, still out of sight to the visitor and accessible by a narrow passageway behind the temple, is the small building originally built for Radharaman in the late sixteenth century. This was supplemented after some time by a somewhat larger one built next to it. Both are very plain, small buildings, now used as the kitchen, dining room, and bedroom for the deity. Because of this discretion in building design and the small size of the image, which could easily be hidden, Radharaman never had to be removed during the political disorders of the seventeenth century, when larger images of the deity left Vrindavan for the safety of Rajput territory; Govindadeva, Gopinatha, Vinodilala, and Radha Damodara, for example, are still in Jaipur. In the nineteenth century, there was an influx of wealth and a spate of building in Vrindavan, and Radharaman was one of the beneficiaries. Then, as now, devotees of Radharaman were spread over a wide area. One of the more prominent ones was Shah Kundan Lal, finance minister of Wajid Ali Shah, the last Nawab of Avadh. When the Nawab was defeated by the British and Shah Kundan Lal lost his position, he turned his attention and resources to his deity in Vrindavan. First, he built what he felt to be the most beautiful temple that money could buy. The result was a hybrid edifice of Italian marble “fronted with a colonnade of spiral marble pillars, each shaft being of a single piece, which though rather too attenuated are unquestionably elegant,” wrote a late nineteenth-century British observer. “The mechanical execution is also good; but all is rendered to no avail by the abominable taste of the design. The facade with its uncouth pediment, flanked by sprawling monsters, and its row of life-size female figures in meretricious, but at the same time most ungraceful attitudes, resembles nothing so much as a disreputable London casino. . . . Ten lakhs of rupees are said to have been wasted on its construction.” The Goswamis of Radharaman temple declined to allow their deity to move to this lavish new temple, and Shah Kundan Lai resigned himself to building the modest sandstone temple that is now Radharaman’s home. The gaudy marble Shahji Mandir, which stands on the other side of Jaisingh Ghera from Radharaman Ghera, and whose massive courtyard walls tower over the street that leads from Jaisingh Ghera to the bazaar, is maintained chiefly as an attraction for pilgrims and tourists. [See here also.] As such, the ambience of a busy pilgrim site prevails: stalls with mementos crowd around the courtyard entrance, including four or five that sell cassettes with songs celebrating Radha and Krishna, set to popular and film tunes, competing with each other in a decibel war that deafens the passerby. A notable feature of the small plaza and steps in front of Shahji Mandir is the abundance of brazen monkeys, who are fed by the pilgrims. They swarm over this area, as well as Jaisingh Ghera and Nidhivan, a wild garden area enclosed by high walls, a few yards away—the place where the popular deity Banke Bihari was discovered by the saint Haridasa in about 1534, and one of the places where Radha and Krishna are said to have their nightly trysts. The monkeys steal anything one might be carrying, especially food, and are skilled at snatching glasses off the faces of passers-by. If the monkey stays within range, it can usually be tempted to return the glasses in exchange for food, and the merchants at the stalls around the temple do a brisk business retrieving pilgrims’ specs for a fee of ten rupees. The crowds, the merchants, and the blaring music are all absent from the ambience of the present temple of Radharaman. The first harbinger of change appeared in 1994, when a video rental store opened in the small plaza just outside Radharaman Ghera—but it does not broadcast its programs. In 1997, a small shop selling items to decorate one’s personal deities at home opened inside the compound, at the foot of the steps to the temple itself, but it was closed within a few months. Radharaman temple, built of the same light pink sandstone as most of Vrindavan’s nineteenth-century buildings, nestles comfortably among the houses around the quiet compound. The simple doorway on the south side of the temple, under a sign in Hindi and English identifying it, is flanked by two standing male figures holding lotus buds. Just inside is a small vestibule, where shoes and socks are to be left—for none may be worn in the temple—and to the right a small flight of four steps leads to the interior of the temple. The temple is built around an inner courtyard about thirty-five feet square, partially open to the sky but at night and in bad weather covered by a sliding tin roof. This style of temple architecture, known as the haveli style, derives from a common form of domestic architecture in the region—one, two, or three stories built around an inner courtyard. The floor of Radharaman temple is a checkerboard of black and white marble. On the left as you enter, there is a marble platform about four and a half feet high, and behind it is the inner sanctum. The courtyard is surrounded on the other three sides by porticos, each with three arches that were recently painted a slightly surprising bright pink and green. Even when the doors to the inner sanctum are closed, and the deity is not visible, a few devotees are usually to be found sitting in the porticos or standing around in the courtyard, perhaps chatting with one another. In the rear (east) portico, facing the sanctum, a singer sits in the morning and evening with a harmonium, perhaps with a tabla (drum) player or with other devotees who keep time with hand cymbals as he sings chants of praise to Krishna. The raised platform that serves as the antechamber to the inner sanctum also has three cusped arches, these of unpainted sandstone; at the rear is an embossed silver double-leaved door leading to the sanctum. There the deity stands facing east. For about a century, two sets of stairs led from the courtyard up to the platform, and worshipers could go up for close darshan of the deity. When the Temple Entry Act was passed by the British, requiring that temples be open to all Hindus regardless of caste, the stairs were removed, and now only Goswamis and temple servants go up to the platform.* In the hot weather and on certain festival days, the deity is brought out to the platform so as to allow his devotees closer access to him. *Such an arrangement can still be seen in the Banke Bihari, Radha Damodar and Radhavallabha temples. [Editor] From the book Seeing Krishna by Margaret Case. Photos courtesy: Vasudeva Jarvinen, Ananta Vrindavan, Jagadananda Das, Nishant Sharma, Kirtan-Premi Das, Kusha Devi Dasi. news.vrindavantoday.org/2014/12/description-radharaman-mandir/
Posted on: Sat, 06 Dec 2014 06:13:00 +0000
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