THE BIRTH OF KRISHNA
Sham S. Misri
The Harivamsha tells the story of Krishna's birth into his double life:
The wicked king Kamsa heard a prophecy that the eighth child born of his
cousin Devaki and her husband, Vasudeva, would kill Kamsa. He let Devaki live,
on condition that Vasudeva would deliver to Kamsa every child she bore, and
Kamsa killed seven infants in this way.
Vishnu placed himself in the eighth embryo, and, at his request, the
goddess of sleep took the form of the goddess Kali and entered the womb of
Yashoda, the wife of the cowherd Nanda.
One night Krishna was born to the princess Devaki and the goddess Kali
was born to the cowherd woman Yashoda. Vasudeva carried the infant Krishna to
Yashoda and brought the infant girl to Devaki. When Kamsa saw the girl, he
dashed her violently to the stone floor. She went to heaven and became an
eternal goddess, Kali, to whom sacrifices of animals are made, for she is fond
of flesh. And Krishna grew up in the village of cowherds. When he was grown, he
killed Kamsa.
Krishna's birth is doubled in yet another way, by the simultaneous birth
of Sleep as Kali and the daughter of Devaki as the daughter of Yashoda. The
worship of the goddess Kali, a new, specifically Hindu element injected into
the basic formula, signals the beginning of a new prominence of women in the
worship of Krishna, starting in the text, where Devaki, in a manner significant
of Draupadi, harasses her husband, Vasudeva, and forces him to stop saying,
"It is all fated," and to do something to save her baby. Indeed
Bhakti texts generally challenge the more fatalistic construction of karma,
believing that people's actions in their current lives can produce good or bad
fortune in this life and that devotion to the gods, in particular, pays off in
this lifetime as well as in the next.
Source: The Hindus an Alternative History by- Wendy
Doniger"
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