Madhura Bhava and the Erotic Mysticism of Radha-Krishna Devotion in Select Songs of Kazi Nazrul Islam

The Radha-Krishna tradition in South Asian devotional literature provides a significant space where divinity, love, and emotional intensity converge. Within this framework, Kazi Nazrul Islam reconfigures devotional expression through a sensuous and psychologically nuanced poetic idiom. His selected songs foreground Madhura Bhava as a devotional mode in which longing, anticipation, and embodied emotion shape the devotee's relationship with the divine. Rather than approaching these compositions merely as religious or musical artefacts, this study emphasizes their literary and affective dimensions, arguing that they construct an interiorized feminine consciousness marked by desire, absence, and emotional yearning. The paper examines how Nazrul transforms acts such as adornment, offering, waiting, and dream encounters into expressions of eroticized devotion. Drawing on Indian aesthetic concepts of rasa, dhvani, vipralambha and sringara, the study situates Nazrul within the Vaishnava devotional tradition while highlighting his modern psychological sensibility. The analysis is further informed by Judith Butler's theory of performativity and Lacanian notions of desire structured through lack, which illuminate the formation of feminine subjectivity and emotional asymmetry in the lyrics. The study also demonstrates that Krishna appears as elusive and emotionally dispersed, making absence the generative centre of devotion. Nature imagery and dream sequences intensify interior affect and longing. Ultimately, the paper argues that Nazrul modernizes the Radha-Krishna dynamic by internalizing it within feminine consciousness, transforming devotion into an embodied, sensuous, and emotionally charged experience.