Radha's Prem (A DRAMA)

This publication titled “Radha’s Prem” by Gurudev Sri Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj is a dramatic presentation of the various stages and phases of Supreme Divine Love, as illustrated in the life of the exemplary symbol of devotion, Shri Radha Ji of Brindavan, in Her love for Lord Krishna. The conversational depiction of the dramatis personae is eminently suited to present a histrionic effect on the minds of the readers. The intention of the work is to highlight the Supremacy of Divine Love or devotion as a pre-eminent way to God-realisation.

Usually, love, in common parlance, is construed as the medium employed by feeling by which the lover and the beloved are brought in contact with each other in an experience of communion, though normally two individuals cannot commune with each other by any amount of mutual affection on account of the fact that individualities maintain their formal self-identity and the one does not lose oneself in the other. Thus, mortal love, human affection, is an artificial mechanism which promises a union of the lover and the loved one but never does really fulfil the promise. Earthly love thus ends in sorrow, bereavement and death, since the principle of separation is permanently at the back of even the attempted union through sensory and mental acts of mutual contact.

Divine Love is of a different nature altogether. Persons who are enmeshed in thinking through their physical body and the senses cannot arise to the level of a state of love which does not require an object outside itself and therefore obviates the necessity for any endeavour for external contact. Divine Love is the soul pouring itself on soul, the Infinite colliding with the Infinite in the forms of perception and objects of cognition.

The life of Sri Krishna and the love of Sri Radha are a famous, lofty tradition come down to us as beckoners to a superhuman form of spiritual longing quite unknown to the mind lodged in physical matter or the bodily encasement. Through the pages of this book will be revealed eminently the forms of Godly love and its ways which are an eludingly multifarious variety. The Rasa Panchadhyayee of the Srimad Bhagavata is supposed to be the quintessential narration of the dramatic enactment through which Divine Love manifests itself in action and ecstasy. The author, a great saint and sage, caters through these pages an excellent treat for the benefit of all devotees throughout the World.

—THE DIVINE LIFE SOCIETY

Shivanandanagar,
25th February, 1987.