Love in Hinduism
Kāma, prema and bhakti: how the Hindu traditions understand love, and why devotion became its highest form
Ask an English speaker what love is and they will struggle, partly because one word has to cover a parent’s tenderness, a lover’s passion, a friend’s loyalty and a saint’s devotion. Sanskrit never had this problem. It has separate words for all of these, and several more besides, and the Hindu traditions built distinct philosophies around each of them.
That is the first thing to know about love in Hinduism: there is no single doctrine, because there is no single Hinduism. The word covers three thousand years of texts, dozens of schools and many gods, and they do not agree about love any more than they agree about anything else. The second thing to know is that, out of this variety, one strand became dominant from roughly the seventh century onwards and has shaped Hindu religious life ever since. It is called bhakti – devotion – and its central claim is that the highest form of love, and the surest way to God, is to love God the way you would love a person: with longing, tenderness, jealousy, grief and joy.
This entry gives a map of the traditions and then focuses on bhakti, since that is where the Hindu philosophy of love is richest. Sanskrit terms are given in the standard scholarly spelling; well-known names (Krishna, Radha, Shiva, Vishnu) are left in their familiar English forms.
The Qur’an says that God loves and is loved, and Muslims have argued for fourteen centuries about what that means. This guide explains the key Arabic words, sets out the three main theories – the theologians' love as obedience, the philosophers' love as cosmic attraction, and the Sufis' love as the secret of creation – and shows how the mystical tradition turned even Layla and Majnun into a parable of the soul. Part of our series on love in the world religions.
The words
Five terms recur throughout, and it helps to have them in view.
Kāma is desire, especially sensual and erotic desire, and also pleasure in general. It is personified as the god of love who shoots flower-arrows, but it is also, in the earliest texts, a cosmic force. Kāma is not sinful; it is one of the legitimate aims of human life. But it is self-directed – it seeks the satisfaction of the one who desires – and this becomes the crucial contrast.
Prema (or prīti) is love in the fuller sense: tender, selfless affection that seeks the good of the beloved. In devotional theology prema is the name for the highest love of God, the love that has burned away all desire for one’s own gratification.
Bhakti comes from a root meaning to share, to participate in, to belong to. It is usually translated “devotion,” and it means loving attachment to a personal God, expressed in worship, song, service and surrender. Bhakti is the relationship; prema is its perfected emotional content.
Sneha is warm affection, the love of close friends and family. Vātsalya is specifically parental love, the tenderness of a cow for her calf, from which it takes its name. Karuṇā is compassion for those who suffer, and maitrī is benevolence or friendliness towards all beings – both terms shared with Buddhism.
Notice what this vocabulary does. It separates desire from love by giving them different names, and it puts parental, friendly and erotic love on a list alongside devotion. The devotional theologians will later take that list and turn it into a ladder.
Many traditions, many loves
The Vedas: desire at the origin
The oldest Hindu texts, the Vedic hymns (c. 1500–1000 BCE), are mostly ritual and cosmology, but love appears at the very beginning of things. The famous creation hymn of the Ṛgveda (10.129) says that in the beginning there was neither being nor non-being, and that the first thing to arise was kāma – desire, “the first seed of mind.” A hymn in the Atharvaveda addresses Kāma directly as the firstborn of the gods, greater than any of them. Desire, here, is not a moral problem. It is the engine of creation.
The Upaniṣads: love as recognition of the Self
The Upaniṣads (c. 800–300 BCE) shift the emphasis inward, and they contain one of the most striking philosophical statements about love in any tradition. In the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, the sage Yājñavalkya is about to leave home for the forest and offers to divide his property between his two wives. Maitreyī asks whether wealth would make her immortal. It would not, he says. Then, she replies, what use is it? And he teaches her:
The point is not selfishness. The ātman, the Self, is for the Upaniṣads the one reality present in everyone, identical with brahman, the ground of all being. When we love another person, Yājñavalkya says, what we are really responding to is that reality shining through them. All love is, at bottom, love of the one Self – and to see this clearly is liberation. This idea will return, in different forms, in every later school.
Dharma and kāma: love in the ordered life
The lawbooks and the epics – the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa – deal with love as part of a well-ordered human life. Classical Hinduism recognises four legitimate aims of life (puruṣārthas): dharma (duty, righteousness), artha (prosperity), kāma (pleasure, including love and sex) and mokṣa (liberation). Kāma is on the list. The householder stage of life is meant to include marriage, children and erotic pleasure, and the Kāmasūtra of Vātsyāyana (c. 3rd century CE) – far more a treatise on the refined life than the sex manual of its reputation – treats the cultivation of love as an art worthy of study. The ideal is not the suppression of desire but its integration: kāma pursued within dharma. The Rāmāyaṇa offers Rāma and Sītā as the model of married love, faithful through exile and separation, and their story remains the template for conjugal devotion across India.
Advaita Vedānta: love and non-duality
The philosophical school of Advaita (“non-dual”) Vedānta, systematised by Śaṅkara in the eighth century, takes the Upaniṣadic insight to its limit. There is only brahman; the apparent multiplicity of selves and objects is māyā, a misperception. Liberation is knowledge (jñāna), the direct realisation that one’s self is not different from the absolute.
Where does love fit? Strictly, there can be no love in the highest state, because love requires two, and there is only one. But Advaita does not dismiss devotion. Śaṅkara wrote hymns to the gods, and a text traditionally attributed to him, the Vivekacūḍāmaṇi, says that “among the means to liberation, bhakti is supreme” – and then redefines it as “the search for one’s own true nature.” Love of God, in Advaita, is a stage on the way and a way of speaking about what is ultimately self-knowledge. This is precisely the view the devotional theologians will reject.
Yoga: love as a cultivated attitude
Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra (c. 400 CE) is a manual for stilling the mind, and it prescribes, among its methods, the cultivation of maitrī, karuṇā, muditā (joy in others' happiness) and upekṣā (equanimity) towards all beings. Here love is not a passion but a discipline – an attitude deliberately practised until it becomes the mind’s default state. The Buddhist parallels are exact, and the two traditions clearly drew from a common source.
The Bhagavad Gītā: the turn to devotion
All of this is background to the text that changed the Hindu understanding of love more than any other. The Bhagavad Gītā (c. 200 BCE–200 CE), a dialogue between the warrior Arjuna and the god Krishna set on the eve of battle, lays out three paths to liberation: disciplined action (karma-yoga), knowledge (jñāna-yoga) and devotion (bhakti-yoga). It is careful not to disown any of them. But its emotional climax is unmistakably devotional. Krishna reveals himself in his cosmic form, Arjuna is terrified, and Krishna tells him that this vision is granted not by study or ritual but “by undistracted devotion alone.” He says that whoever offers him “a leaf, a flower, a fruit, or water” with love, that he accepts. He says that he is the same to all beings, “yet those who worship me with devotion are in me, and I in them.” And in the final chapter he tells Arjuna to abandon all duties and take refuge in him alone: “I will free you from all evils; do not grieve.”
Three ideas are planted here that bhakti will grow. God is a person who can be loved and who loves in return. Love is available to everyone, regardless of learning or status – the Gītā explicitly includes women and the lower castes. And love can be sufficient: a leaf offered with devotion outweighs a sacrifice offered without it.
Krishna with the gopīs, to Radha's sorrow. A folio from Jayadeva's Gītagovinda in the Kangra style, which made the love of Radha and Krishna its central theme.
The rise of bhakti
The devotional traditions did not begin with philosophers. They began with poets, and they began in the south. Between roughly the sixth and ninth centuries CE, in the Tamil country, two groups of wandering saints composed hymns in the vernacular rather than Sanskrit, addressed not to an abstract absolute but to Vishnu and Shiva as they were present in particular temples. The twelve Āḻvārs (“those immersed” in God) sang to Vishnu; the sixty-three Nāyaṉmār sang to Shiva. Their poems are intensely personal, full of longing, complaint, ecstasy and self-abasement. Nammāḻvār, the greatest of the Āḻvārs, speaks to Vishnu as a lover, a servant and a lost child. Āṇṭāḻ, the only woman among them, imagines herself as a bride of the god and refuses any human husband. Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār, among the Nāyaṉmār, asked Shiva to strip her of her beauty so that she could follow him as a ghoul in the cremation ground.
From the south the impulse spread north over the following centuries, changing language and deity as it went. In Karnataka in the twelfth century, the Vīraśaiva poets – Basava, Allama Prabhu, Akka Mahādevī – composed short free-verse vacanas to Shiva that rejected temple, caste and ritual. In Maharashtra, from the thirteenth century, the Vārkarī tradition of Jñāneśvar, Nāmdev, Eknāth and Tukārām sang to Viṭṭhal at Pandharpur. In the north, between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, came the poets everyone in India still knows: Kabīr, the weaver who mocked Hindu and Muslim ritual alike; Sūrdās, blind singer of Krishna’s childhood; Mīrābāī, the Rajput princess who abandoned her marriage for Krishna; Tulsīdās, whose Hindi Rāmcaritmānas became the Rāmāyaṇa of the north; and Narsinh Mehta in Gujarat, whose hymn “Vaiṣṇava jana to” (“call that one a true Vaiṣṇava who feels the pain of others”) was later Gandhi’s favourite.
Historians now caution against picturing all this as a single “bhakti movement” sweeping across the subcontinent – the phrase is a modern one, and the regional traditions differ sharply. But they share a family resemblance: vernacular language, direct emotional address to God, songs meant to be sung rather than recited, and a conviction that love matters more than learning, birth or ritual correctness.
The theology of devotional love
Behind the poets came the theologians, who had to explain what the poets were doing and defend it against Advaita. Their work is the philosophical core of the Hindu understanding of love.
God as a person: Rāmānuja and the Vaiṣṇava schools
The decisive move was made by Rāmānuja (traditionally 1017–1137), the great theologian of the Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition that had grown up around the Āḻvārs. Against Śaṅkara, Rāmānuja argued that the ultimate reality is not an impersonal absolute but a personal God, Vishnu-Nārāyaṇa, possessed of infinite auspicious qualities, and that individual souls are real and remain distinct from him even in liberation. His system is called Viśiṣṭādvaita, “qualified non-dualism”: the world and souls are related to God as a body is to the self that animates it – inseparable, dependent, but not identical. This matters for love because love needs two. If the soul simply is God, devotion is a misunderstanding to be outgrown. If the soul is God’s body, servant and beloved, devotion is the truth about the soul, and liberation is not the dissolution of the relationship but its perfection.
Later Vaiṣṇava theologians drew the line even more sharply. Madhva (1238–1317) taught Dvaita, outright dualism: God and souls are eternally different, and love bridges the gap without closing it. Vallabha (1479–1531) built a school centred on Krishna’s grace (puṣṭi) in which the devotee’s role is simply to receive. Caitanya (1486–1534), the ecstatic saint of Bengal, taught what his followers called acintya-bhedābheda – “inconceivable difference-and-non-difference” – the view that the soul is simultaneously one with God and distinct from him, in a way that cannot be resolved by logic and is only experienced in love.
Grace: the cat and the monkey
If love of God is the path, does the devotee walk it, or is she carried? Śrīvaiṣṇavism split over this question, and the two positions were captured in a pair of famous images. A baby monkey clings to its mother as she leaps from branch to branch: it must hold on. A kitten is picked up by the scruff of the neck and carried: it does nothing. The northern (Vaṭakalai) school inclined to the monkey – grace is essential, but the soul must at least cling. The southern (Teṉkalai) school insisted on the cat – God’s grace is unconditional, and any thought that we contribute to our own salvation is a subtle form of pride. Both schools agree on the practice of prapatti, complete surrender, as the culmination of bhakti: the moment when the devotee stops trying to earn love and simply accepts it.
Kāma and prema: the test of love
The devotional texts draw one distinction above all others. In the Bhāgavata Purāṇa (c. 9th–10th century), the great scripture of Krishna devotion, the cowherd women of Vṛndāvana – the gopīs – abandon husbands, children and reputation to dance with Krishna in the forest at night. The text knows exactly how this looks. It insists, nonetheless, that the gopīs' love is the highest of all, higher than the knowledge of sages and the austerity of yogis, because it is entirely for Krishna and not at all for themselves.
Caitanya’s biographer Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja states the criterion in a single couplet: the desire to gratify one’s own senses is kāma; the desire to gratify Krishna’s is prema. The two may look identical from outside – both involve longing, passion, obsession. What distinguishes them is the direction of concern. Kāma asks “What do I get?"; prema asks “What does the beloved need?” Kāma is described as darkness, prema as light. And the test is what happens when the beloved is absent or does not respond: kāma withers, prema deepens.
This is not a rejection of the erotic. It is the claim that erotic love, purified of self-interest, is the closest human analogy to love of God – which is why the theologians reached for it rather than for cooler metaphors.
The five moods of love
The Gauḍīya (Caitanya) tradition produced the most systematic Hindu analysis of love ever written: the Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu (“Ocean of the Nectar of Devotional Feeling”) of Rūpa Gosvāmī (1541). Rūpa borrowed the theory of rasa – aesthetic “flavour” or emotional mood – from Sanskrit dramatic theory, where it had been developed to explain how a play produces in the audience a refined, impersonal version of an emotion like grief or love. He argued that devotion is itself a rasa, indeed the supreme one, and that it comes in five primary forms, corresponding to five human relationships:
- Śānta – peaceful contemplation: the love of the sage for the absolute, calm and without intimacy.
- Dāsya – servitude: the love of a servant for a master, marked by reverence and obedience. Hanumān’s love for Rāma is the model.
- Sakhya – friendship: love between equals, playful and trusting, as Krishna’s cowherd companions loved him without knowing he was God.
- Vātsalya – parental love: the tenderness of Krishna’s foster-mother Yaśodā, who worries about her child and scolds him for stealing butter.
- Madhura (or śṛṅgāra) – sweet or erotic love: the love of the gopīs and, above all, of Radha.
The order is a hierarchy of intimacy. Each higher mood contains the qualities of those below it and adds something: the friend has the servant’s devotion without the distance, the parent has the friend’s intimacy plus protective care, the lover has all of it plus total self-giving. At the summit stands Radha, Krishna’s beloved, who does not appear in the Bhāgavata by name and enters literature fully only in Jayadeva’s twelfth-century Gītagovinda, but who became, for the Gauḍīyas, the very embodiment of prema – theologically, Krishna’s own power of bliss (hlādinī-śakti) taking form so that God can experience the joy of being loved.
Rūpa’s definition of the highest devotion is worth having in full: it is “the cultivation of favourable service to Krishna, free of any other desire, and not covered over by knowledge or ritual action.” Love, on this account, is not a feeling that happens to you. It is something you cultivate, like a musician’s ear, until it becomes the whole of your inner life.
Love in separation
One feature of bhakti strikes every newcomer: how much of it is about absence. The gopīs' most intense love is felt when Krishna leaves Vṛndāvana for Mathurā and never returns. Mīrābāī’s songs are almost all songs of waiting. Nammāḻvār’s poems return again and again to the lover pining for a god who does not come. The Tamil tradition even has a technical distinction between love in union (sambhoga) and love in separation (vipralambha, or viraha in the north), and it consistently ranks the second higher.
The reasoning is psychological and precise. In union, love is mixed with enjoyment and can hardly be told apart from kāma. In separation, nothing is being enjoyed; whatever remains is pure love. The pain of longing is thus not a failure of devotion but its proof and its intensifier – the fire in which prema is refined. Caitanya himself was said to have spent his last years in a state of near-constant viraha, weeping for a Krishna he could not reach, and his followers regarded this as the highest spiritual attainment a human being had ever reached.
Mīrābāī (c. 1498--1546) with her vīṇā. The Rajput princess who left her marriage for Krishna became the best-loved of the women poet-saints.
Love as practice
If love is cultivated, how? The Bhāgavata Purāṇa lists nine forms of bhakti (navadhā bhakti) that became the standard curriculum: hearing about God (śravaṇa), singing his praise (kīrtana), remembering him (smaraṇa), serving his feet (pāda-sevana), worshipping his image (arcana), bowing (vandana), serving as a servant (dāsya), befriending him (sakhya) and offering oneself entirely (ātma-nivedana). The list moves from external to internal, from doing to being, and it makes clear that devotional love was never merely an emotion. It was a set of daily practices – above all communal singing, kīrtan and bhajan – that shaped the heart over years. The Nārada Bhakti Sūtra, a short aphoristic text of uncertain date, defines bhakti as “of the nature of supreme love (parama-prema) for Him” and “of the nature of immortality,” and then spends most of its length on how to protect and nurture it: avoid bad company, seek the company of saints, do not argue about God, sing.
Love and the social order
Bhakti had a social edge. If love of God is what matters, then birth, gender and learning do not, and the poets said so loudly. Kabīr asked what use it was to a Brahmin to be born of a Brahmin mother if he did not come out by a different door. The saint-lists of every regional tradition include untouchables – Nandanār among the Nāyaṉmār, Chokhāmeḷā among the Vārkarīs, Ravidās among the northern sants – and women who defied family and convention: Āṇṭāḻ, Akka Mahādevī, Lal Ded in Kashmir, Mīrābāī. The Gītā’s promise that women and śūdras could reach God through devotion was taken at its word.
Historians add a caveat. Devotional egalitarianism was largely an equality before God, expressed in the space of the temple, the song and the pilgrimage; it did not usually translate into a challenge to the caste order in the world outside, and the great theologians were mostly Brahmins who accommodated bhakti to the existing hierarchy. But the songs remained, and they gave later reformers – from the nineteenth century to Ambedkar’s followers today – a vocabulary of religious protest that was already their own.
Love of God and love of others
Does love of God, on this account, leave room for love of human beings? The traditions answer in two ways. The first is Yājñavalkya’s: since the one Self or the one God is present in everyone, to love another person rightly is to love God, and the devotee who sees Krishna in all beings cannot help but treat them with tenderness. The Gītā’s model devotee is one who “hates no creature, is friendly and compassionate,” and Narsinh Mehta’s true Vaiṣṇava is defined not by his worship but by his response to others' pain.
The second answer emerged in the modern period, when Hindu reformers reinterpreted bhakti as service. Rāmakṛṣṇa (1836–1886), the Bengali saint whose ecstasies of devotion to the goddess Kālī were matched by his insistence on the unity of all religions, coined the phrase “service to living beings in the knowledge that they are Shiva.” His disciple Vivekānanda made it a programme: the poor, the sick and the ignorant are God in disguise, and to serve them is the highest worship. Gandhi’s fusion of devotional piety with political service belongs to the same current. In contemporary Hinduism, sevā – selfless service – is routinely described as a form of bhakti, which would have puzzled the medieval poets but is a natural extension of their claim that love of God and love of God’s creatures cannot finally be separated.
Relevance to life
The Hindu philosophy of love is not only a chapter in the history of religion. Several of its ideas bear directly on how we love now.
Kāma or prema? The single sharpest tool in this tradition is the question it asks of any love: is it for my gratification or for the beloved’s good? The two can feel the same from inside, and the tradition’s insistence that only their direction differs is a useful diagnostic for anyone trying to understand a relationship – including a relationship with a cause, a career or a child.
Love is cultivated. Modern culture treats love as something that happens to you, and its absence as bad luck. Bhakti treats it as a skill built by daily practice: attention, remembrance, song, service. That is a more hopeful view, and it fits what psychologists now say about how attachment and gratitude are actually strengthened.
Longing is not failure. A culture that expects love to feel like fulfilment has no place for the long stretches of absence, waiting and unrequited desire that make up much of anyone’s emotional life. The theology of viraha says these are not a defect in love but the place where it is proved and deepened. That reframing has consoled people for a thousand years.
Many moods, one love. Rūpa Gosvāmī’s five rasas offer a map of human relationship that is more generous than most. The reverence one feels for a teacher, the ease of friendship, the fierce protectiveness of parenthood and the abandon of erotic love are not rivals but variations on one thing, each with its own dignity. It is a useful antidote to the modern tendency to treat romantic love as the only kind that counts.
Surrender. The image of the kitten carried by its mother makes a claim that modern self-reliance finds hard to hear: that some of the most important things in life cannot be earned, only received, and that the effort to earn them can get in the way. Whether or not one believes in Krishna, most people who have loved and been loved will recognise the point.
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Where to start reading
- The Bhagavad Gītā, translated by Laurie L. Patton (Penguin, 2008) or Gavin Flood and Charles Martin (Norton, 2012) – the essential text; chapters 9, 12 and 18 are the devotional core.
- Edwin F. Bryant, Krishna: The Beautiful Legend of God (Penguin, 2003) – a translation of Book 10 of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, including the gopīs and the rāsa dance, with an excellent introduction. His Bhakti Yoga: Tales and Teachings from the Bhagavata Purana (North Point, 2017) is a broader guide.
- A. K. Ramanujan (trans.), Hymns for the Drowning (Princeton, 1981) and Speaking of Śiva (Penguin, 1973) – the Āḻvār poet Nammāḻvār and the Vīraśaiva vacana poets, in the finest English versions.
- John Stratton Hawley and Mark Juergensmeyer, Songs of the Saints of India (Oxford, 1988) – Ravidās, Kabīr, Nānak, Sūrdās, Mīrābāī and Tulsīdās, with translations and biographical essays. The best single introduction to the northern poets.
- John Stratton Hawley, A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement (Harvard, 2015) – how the idea of a single “bhakti movement” was constructed, and what the regional traditions actually looked like.
- David L. Haberman (trans.), The Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu of Rūpa Gosvāmin (Motilal Banarsidass, 2003) – the great treatise on the five moods of love, with a substantial introduction.
- Friedhelm Hardy, Viraha-Bhakti: The Early History of Kṛṣṇa Devotion in South India (Oxford, 1983) – scholarly and demanding, but the definitive study of love-in-separation.
- Barbara Stoler Miller (trans.), Love Song of the Dark Lord: Jayadeva’s Gītagovinda (Columbia, 1977) – the poem that made Radha the queen of devotional love.
- Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar (trans.), Kamasutra (Oxford World’s Classics, 2002) – the classical treatment of kāma, with an introduction that corrects the usual misconceptions.
- Gavin Flood, An Introduction to Hinduism (Cambridge, 1996) – the standard survey for orienting oneself in the traditions.
Read more
- The Bhagavad Gītā – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. A philosophical reading of the text, with attention to bhakti-yoga.
- Ramanuja – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The theologian of qualified non-dualism and the case for a personal God.
- Śaṅkara – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The Advaita position that bhakti was reacting against.
- Madhva – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Dualist Vedānta and its account of the soul’s relation to God.
- Advaita Vedanta – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. A clear overview of non-dualism.
- Hindu Philosophy – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The schools, the texts and the key concepts, for orientation.
- Bhakti – Encyclopaedia Britannica. A concise, reliable account of the devotional traditions and their history.
- Kangra painting – Wikimedia Commons. Public-domain images of the Radha-Krishna tradition in art.
