Visakha
Sri Visakha is in her fresh blooming youth and is the personification of the highest auspiciousness.
She is a priya-narma-sakhi and is proficient in all areas. She gives faultless and useful advice and is highly expert in speaking joking words in Sri Govinda’s presence. She is especially competent in understanding the sentiments of Sri Radha and Sri Krishna and skilfully and intelligently carrying out the duties of a messenger. She knows well all the schemes regarding the art of love, like how to bring the hero to the heroine. She also knows all the means to nourish this meeting: sama (negotiations to get to mutual agreement), dana (alluring the hero), bheda (sowing discord) and so forth.
Sri Visakha shows great expertise in using substances like red ochre to paint beautiful and enchanting pictures of creepers, flowers and so forth on various parts of the body. She is expert in stringing garlands and flower wreaths for head decorations. She is skilful in sarvato-bhadra-mandala, which means painting auspicious diagrams (mandalas) in multi-colours on doors and other places. Sarvato-bhadra-mandala also refers to a style of writing poems mentioned in the acrostics (citra-kavya) section of the kavya-sastra[1]. Employing this style, Visakha intelligently composes poetry containing double meanings by using variegated aphorisms (sutras); thus, she continually displays her extraordinary deftness.
She is talented in using words to bewilder people and in other similar activities. She is expert in preparing the various ingredients for the worship of the Sun-god, in singing songs in different languages, in singing with styles like dhrupada and in writing poetry.
Sri Visakha-devi is the supervisor of the eight sakhis (beginning with Rangavali) who can expertly converse about any subject matter; of Madhavi, Malati, Candrarekha and other sakhis; and of the sakhis and maidservants entrusted to take care of Sri Radha’s clothes. She is also the supervisor of the forest goddesses[2], who bestow joy and amuse everyone with their activities, and of the sakhis, beginning with Malika, entrusted to take care of trees that have flowers.
[1] Scriptures teaching poetry
[2] They are called vana-devis
This is a section of the book “Sri Sri Radha Krishna Ganoddesa Dipika”.
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