A messenger has arrived from Mathurā. Before he can deliver anything, a gopī notices a bee at her feet and starts speaking to it — as though the bee were also a messenger, sent by the same man.
Uddhava is standing right there. Everything that follows is said in his hearing and none of it is addressed to him.
"O bee! You are the friend of someone who is deceitful. Do not touch our feet with your beard. It is stained with kunkuma from his garland, when it pressed against the breasts of our rival."1
The device does a specific job. It lets her say to an insect what protocol would not let her say to an envoy — and it lets the envoy hear all of it.
The speech builds, and then it stops being about her and becomes an indictment of his whole record:
"Like a hunter, he followed the dharma of a hunter and pierced the Indra among the apes. He was vanquished by a woman and disfigured a woman who desired him. Like a crow, he ate Bali's offerings and thereafter, bound him up."1
Three counts, and note where they come from.
Count one is Vālin, shot from cover in the Rāmāyaṇa. Count two is Śūrpaṇakhā, mutilated for wanting Rāma. Count three is Bali, fed and then bound in the Vāmana story.
None of them is Kṛṣṇa's. All three belong to earlier avatāras — and the gopīs hold him to account for them anyway, in a single sentence, as evidence of a consistent character.
⚑ This is the volume's most sustained attack on its own God, and it is a propensity argument assembled across incarnations.
The volume has an obvious move available and does not make it. Nobody rebuts the charges. Nobody says the gopīs have misunderstood. Uddhava, who speaks at length immediately afterwards, does not address a single count.
What he does instead is praise them — "your devotion towards Uttamashloka is supreme" — and deliver the message.
⚑ The three charges are stated, in a woman's voice, and the volume moves on with them standing. They are still standing at the end of the Skandha.
Before the bee speech, addressing Uddhava directly, the gopīs supply a general theory of relationships, and it is bleaker than the charge-sheet:
"The friendship towards others is mockery, because it is driven by a specific purpose and lasts until the objective has been accomplished. It is like the conduct of men towards women, or that of bees towards flowers."1
Then the list:
Seven cases, one rule. Every relationship outside kinship is instrumental, and it terminates when the instrument stops paying.
The last item is the one they mean. The first six are there to establish that it is a law rather than a grievance.
The speech contains its own defeat, stated plainly:
"Therefore, even though we can't give up hearing about him, enough of friendship with that dark one."1
And a self-diagnosis, which is the harshest line in the chapter:
"We trusted him and took his deceitful words to be true. We are like does, the wives of a black antelope, ignorant about the songs sung by a hunter."
They compare themselves to animals lured by a sound. And the hunter figure has already been used in this same speech, eight lines earlier, about Vālin.
⚑ The image they choose for what was done to them is the image they used for his worst recorded act. The volume does not remark on the repetition and it is unlikely to be accidental within a single speech.
You say the unsayable thing to the dog, or the window, or the cat, while the person it concerns is in the next room with the door open. Everyone understands the arrangement. Nobody has to respond to it.
Someone lists six examples of a general principle before they get to the seventh, which is the one about you. The six are not evidence. They are cover, so the seventh does not have to be an accusation.
You assemble a person's whole record into a pattern and present it as character. It is fair, in the sense that every item is true. It is also unanswerable, in the sense that no single item can be defended without conceding the shape.
The bee is not a whim. Three separate things depend on it.
It supplies deniability. Nothing said to an insect can be formally received. Uddhava cannot be required to answer it, and the gopīs cannot be accused of having accused anyone.
It supplies the accusation's own vehicle. Bees towards flowers is already in their taxonomy of instrumental relationships, two paragraphs earlier. The creature being addressed is a worked example of the thesis.
And it supplies the physical evidence. The bee's beard carries kunkuma from another woman's breasts. That is the same forensic move as the footprints at 10(30) — a trace read off a surface, producing an accurate picture of an exclusion.
⚑ The insect is simultaneously the audience, the illustration and the exhibit, which is a considerable amount of work for one image and suggests the speech is more constructed than the "maddened" framing of these chapters admits.
He hears all of it — the deceit, the three counts, the abandonment law, the hunter's song.
And his response is to rank them above himself and above the sages. By the end of the chapter he has said he wants to be a shrub in their forest, so that the dust of their feet might touch him.
⚑ The man sent to defend the arrangement is converted by the prosecution. Whatever the charges were meant to accomplish, their effect on the only official listener is total.
The strongest support is the cross-incarnational structure. A grievance would have stayed local — he left us. This speech reaches into three other stories and returns with three acts that share a shape: harm done to someone who trusted or desired him. That is an argument, not an outburst, and its construction is the evidence that the volume built it deliberately.
The tension, preserved. The charges are never answered anywhere in the volume. The nearest thing to a response is Uddhava's praise, which changes the subject entirely. ⚑ Held with the volume's other unanswered indictments — Balarāma at 10(54), the galleries at 10(44), Śiśupāla at 10(74) — [n≥3 PATTERN] on indictment printed and left standing within the range read.
A second tension. The abandonment taxonomy says all non-kin relationships terminate when the purpose is served. The gopīs are, on the volume's own account, the supreme devotees. Their theory of relationships would classify their own devotion as the one exception to a universal law, and neither they nor the text addresses that.
Open question. The three counts are drawn from Rāmāyaṇa and Vāmana material outside this volume's range. Whether Volumes 1–2 narrate them, and how, has not been checked. No claim is made about how the corpus elsewhere frames Vālin, Śūrpaṇakhā or Bali — only that this speech treats all three as established and damaging.
Set against The Love Song With a Charge In It, these are the two halves of the same prosecution and the difference in venue matters. The Gopī-gīta is addressed to him, in the second person, and it produces his return. The Bhramara-gīta is addressed to an insect in front of his envoy, and it produces nothing except Uddhava's conversion.
Direct address gets a response; indirect address gets a witness. The volume runs both experiments sixteen chapters apart.
Against God Beyond Morality: Līlā, this speech is the position that framing exists to answer, stated at full strength by characters the volume endorses. The three counts are exactly the acts the līlā frame is needed for — and the frame is not deployed here, by anyone, at any point in the chapter.
Mystery Versus a Reputation for Deceit — the same behaviour, twelve years apart: the woman inventing Javanese princesses reads as mystique at first and as fraud later. Nothing in the conduct changed. What changed was the frame the audience was using to sort it.
The charge-sheet is that reframing performed deliberately and in one sentence. Vālin, Śūrpaṇakhā and Bali are, in their own stories, episodes in a divine biography. Reassembled by the gopīs they become a pattern of conduct toward people who trusted him — and the reassembly requires no new facts.
⚑ What neither field gives alone: the reframe is available to the injured party as a weapon, and it is the only weapon available to someone with no power. The Mata Hari case is about a reputation shifting around a person as the public mood changes; the subject is passive. Here the shift is authored, by the least powerful people in the story, using material that is already public and already canonical.
And it cannot be defended against piecemeal. Answer the Vālin count and the shape survives; answer all three and you have conceded that there is a shape to answer. That is why nobody in the chapter attempts it. A propensity argument built from a target's own authorised biography is the cheapest attack available and the hardest to rebut, which is worth knowing in both directions.
Self-Interest as the Universal Language — Greene's position that appeals succeed when framed in the other party's interest, because self-interest is what actually moves people, and that the natural error is to appeal to sympathy or to one's own need instead.
The gopīs state the same anthropology and reach the opposite conclusion. Friendship towards others is mockery, because it is driven by a specific purpose and lasts until the objective has been accomplished. Seven examples, from courtesans to birds in a tree. Greene's descriptive claim, offered as an indictment.
⚑ The insight: the strategist's premise and the abandoned party's grievance are the same sentence read from different ends. For Greene, universal self-interest is an operating fact you work with; for the gopīs it is the reason nothing they did counts for anything. Neither disputes the mechanism.
What separates them is whether you are in a position to use it — and the speech shows what the premise looks like from the side that cannot. The gopīs' list is a competent piece of social analysis produced by people it has just destroyed, which is a reminder the influence literature rarely supplies: the accuracy of the model is not comforting to the person it accurately describes.
Sharpest implication. The most sustained attack on God in the volume is a propensity argument assembled from three other incarnations, delivered to a bee within earshot of his envoy, and never answered by anyone. Its authors know it will not free them — even though we can't give up hearing about him — and its only measurable effect is that the envoy changes sides.
Generative questions.