The Gopī-gīta is sung by women on a riverbank at night to a man who has walked out on them. It is one of the most-loved passages in the devotional literature and it is recited as praise.
Eight lines in:
"O one who bestows boons! Without paying a price, you have obtained us as your female servants. You are killing us. Is that not the same as murder?"1
Read it as a sentence rather than as a hymn.
Without paying a price — an acquisition claim. They were taken without consideration. Obtained us as your female servants — a status claim, and not a flattering one. You are killing us — a harm claim. Is that not the same as murder? — a question put to the person responsible, in the second person, asking him to classify his own conduct.
The song runs for a long time after that, and the accusation does not soften into anything.
"O deceiver! The private conversations with you touch our hearts, but also agitate our minds."
"O deceiver! Who but you will abandon women in the night?"
"O lotus-eyed one! O brave one! You do what you ask us to and we are bewildered."1
Deceiver, twice. An observation that he does what he tells them to do — which is the charge that he applies his instructions to them and not to himself. And a description of being abandoned in the dark that treats it as characteristic rather than as an accident.
⚑ This is a devotional set-piece and a charge-sheet in the same document, and the volume never sorts them into separate registers. The praise is real; so is the indictment; they are in adjacent clauses.
There is one more object of grievance and it is not Kṛṣṇa.
"The curly locks hang over your handsome face. We look at you. However, the creator must be foolish. He gave us eyelashes that make us blink."1
That is a joke, and it is also a real theological complaint filed against the designer of the body: the equipment interrupts the seeing.
It sits oddly beside the volume's repeated position that Kṛṣṇa is himself the cause behind all causes. The song blames a creator for a design fault in a chapter belonging to a book whose central claim is that the addressee is that creator.
The requests are unusually physical and they repeat.
Place your lotus feet on our breasts — asked three separate times. Grant us the amṛta of your lips. Place your hand on our heads. Show us your face.
And the frame around all of it is servitude, requested rather than resented: "We, women, are your servants", "Grant us this servitude."
⚠ Hold both halves of this without averaging. The same song calls him a deceiver, accuses him of killing them, asks whether that is murder — and asks to be his servants and to have his feet on their bodies. The vault does not get to keep the half that is easier to file.
And note that the servitude is being requested, which changes what the earlier line means. At the murder point they said he obtained them as servants without paying a price — a complaint about acquisition. Here they ask to be granted the same status. So the objection was never to the servitude. It was to having been taken into it without a transaction, and the remedy they propose is not release but a properly consented version of the same arrangement.
That is a coherent position and it is not the one either the accusation or the devotion reading predicts on its own.
A provenance point that bears on how the passage can be used.
Debroy's note 128 records that the speaker of the Gopī-gīta cannot be determined from the text: "whether a single gopi is singing this, whether they are singing this collectively, or whether they take turns. Probably the last."2
So the volume's sharpest accusation against its own protagonist is delivered by an unattributable voice. It is not assigned to a named character who could be answered, contradicted, or later corrected.
⚑ That is worth setting beside the volume's other unanswered indictments. Balarāma's "wicked… contemptible" at 10(54) has a named speaker. Śiśupāla's legitimacy attack at 10(74) has a named speaker, and he is beheaded. The charge that is never answered and never punished is the one with no one behind it to answer or punish.
He comes back. That is the response — not a reply, an appearance.
"Shouri appeared in their midst, a smile on his lotus face."3
No engagement with the murder question. No account of where he went. The song's specific claims — the unpaid price, the abandonment, the deception — are not addressed, then or later.
What he does offer, in the following chapter, is a debt statement: "Even if I possess the lifespan of the gods, I cannot pay you back."
⚑ That concedes the accounting and declines to settle it. The gopīs said he took them without paying. He agrees, raises the figure, and says the account cannot be closed.
You write the message at two in the morning and it is the truest thing you have said to them. It contains a real accusation and a real declaration, and you cannot separate them, and in the morning you notice that a version with only one of them in it would have been a lie.
Someone tells you exactly what you did wrong and asks you to stay. Most people hear one half. Which half you hear says more about you than about them.
You raise the grievance and the response is not an answer, it is presence — they turn up, they are warm, the matter is not discussed. Something in you settles and something else does not, and the thing that does not settle is still there in a decade.
The Gopī-gīta works, in the plot's own terms. He returns immediately after it, having ignored the tree-questioning, the enactment and the footprint reading that preceded it.
Consider what is different about it.
The enactment was addressed to each other. The tree-questioning was addressed to trees. The footprint reading was addressed to the ground. The song is the first thing in two chapters addressed to him.
And it is the first thing that makes a claim on him rather than about him. You are killing us is a sentence that requires a defendant.
⚑ What produced the return was not the intensity of the longing — they had been at maximum intensity for two chapters — but the moment the longing was formulated as an address with a charge in it. The volume shows three failed methods and one that works, in sequence, and does not remark on the difference.
The strongest support is that the accusatory lines are not marginal. Deceiver appears twice, and the murder question is placed early, before the song has established its devotional credentials. A text uncomfortable with the charge would have buried it.
The tension, preserved. Praise and indictment run simultaneously and neither is withdrawn. The traditional reading — that the reproach is itself the highest form of intimacy, available only to those with the standing to reproach — is available, it is old, and it is not in the chapter. The song does not say the accusation is a form of love; it makes the accusation.
A second tension. The creator is called foolish for the design of the eye, in a book whose thesis is that the addressee made the eye.
Open question. The accusation is never answered, and it is delivered by a voice the translation itself cannot attribute. Does the volume ever answer an indictment against Kṛṣṇa from any speaker? Balarāma's is not answered; the bee speech at 10(47) is not answered; Śiśupāla's is met with a beheading. [n≥3 PATTERN] on unanswered indictment within the range read — and no claim about Volumes 1–2.
Set against The Gopīs as Supreme Bhaktas, the Gopī-gīta is normally the proof text and it is a stranger proof than the framing suggests. What it demonstrates is not the purity of their love but its litigiousness — a capacity to name a wrong precisely while still asking for the person who did it.
That is arguably a higher claim than the standard one. It is also not the claim usually made, and the murder line does not appear in most treatments.
Against He Argued Against It First, the pairing shows a consistent construction across five chapters. At 10(29) he argues against the episode and they defeat him on his own premise. At 10(31) they accuse him and he does not defend himself. The volume gives the women the better argument twice, and prints both.
The Ambivalence Toward Leaders — Greene's claim that love and resentment toward anyone with power over you run simultaneously rather than in sequence: the gratitude and the private irritation at having to answer to them, the flicker of pleasure at their stumble, the relief when their run ends. Not hypocrisy — structure.
The Gopī-gīta is that structure with the usual concealment removed. What the model says people feel and suppress, this song says out loud, to the leader's absent face, in a form the tradition later canonised. We are your servants and is that not the same as murder are not phases. They are clauses.
⚑ What neither field gives alone: the ambivalence model assumes the resentment must stay private for the relationship to survive, and this text shows it published in full with the relationship intact — because the resentment is addressed to the person rather than about them. Greene's flicker of pleasure at a leader's stumble is corrosive precisely because it has nowhere to go; it is felt in the same room and never said, and it accumulates. The gopīs' version is stated, in the second person, at maximum intensity, and it produces his return rather than a rupture.
That suggests the damaging variable is not the ambivalence but its direction — resentment held about a leader rots, resentment delivered to one is a claim, and a claim can be responded to even when it is not answered. The volume then supplies the limit of that consolation: he comes back, and the specific charges are never addressed, and the women are still making them at 10(47) and at 10(82). An unanswered claim beats an unspoken one and does not close either.
(One handshake. A second, to the reciprocity-obligation material, was available on the "without paying a price" line and is deliberately not built here — the debt claim is answered directly in the next chapter and belongs with the reciprocation taxonomy, where it can be handled once rather than twice.)
Sharpest implication. The most beloved song in the volume asks its object whether what he is doing to them counts as murder, and he never answers, and it is recited as devotion. The accusation is not a stage the love passes through on its way to acceptance — it is the same sentence as the love, and the volume declines to separate them for us.
Generative questions.