Juhi

The vine in Vrindavan

In the thirtieth chapter of the Tenth Canto of the “Bhagavatam” the gopis, maddened by separation, rush about the night forest and ask every plant they meet about Krishna. Tulasi, Krishna’s favourite, keeps silent as though too proud, and then the girls turn to the jasmine bushes – to malati, mallika, jati and yuthika:

The jasmine of the rains

The gopis call out to yuthika for a reason: the jasmines too give Krishna their best flowers, which makes them His maidservants, His sevikas, just as the girls are – companions one may confide in. The commentators read botany out of the verse as well: “the touch of the hand” is Krishna’s hand plucking the flowers, and by which bush has blossomed more richly than its season one can see which of them it touched. Yuthika stands here beside jati for a reason too: both are jasmines of the late, rainy and autumn months, and Vishvanatha Chakravarti tells them apart by their time of flowering.

Yuthika is the jasmine of the rains: its season is varsha, when the clouds gather over Vraja. Then it is the mistress of the forest. Srila Krishnadas Kaviraja Goswami in the “Govinda-lilamrita” paints the monsoon Vrindavan, lush from the downpours and covered with clouds, and draws the attention of the whole swarm of bees to a single flower – to the yuthi¹. It lures the bees away from the neighbouring mallika creepers as well: its fragrance is the stronger.

But most often juhi is remembered for its colour. Yuthika comes in more than one kind: in the “Brihad-bhagavatamrita” of Srila Sanatana Goswami, where the flowers for Krishna’s garlands are listed, “two kinds of yuthika” are named² – which kinds exactly the verse does not say. The poets of Vraja almost always mean the golden one, svarna- or kanaka-yuthika, and that is why its creeper turns up again and again beside a dark tree.

In the bowers where Radha and Krishna meet, creepers twine about the trees of which the walls and vaults are made: in the “Govinda-lilamrita” golden yuthi creepers embrace the ashokas. And in the “Krishna-bhavanamrita” of Srila Vishvanatha Chakravarti there is a whole little scene about this. Krishna points Radha to a tamala twined about with golden yuthika and teases Her: here is the shameless one – embracing a tree in full view. And the embarrassed Radha covers the creeper with the hem of Her garment.

In separation this image deceives the eye outright: in Srila Jiva Goswami’s “Gopala-champu” a gopi, seeing a tamala in the distance twined about with flowering yuthika, takes it for a moment for Krishna beside His golden companion³.

Worship

Juhi is offered to Krishna as well. Gathering the rules of service from the Puranas, Srila Sanatana Goswami cites in the “Hari-bhakti-vilasa” a list of the flowers “best for the worship of Achyuta”: yuthika stands there on a par with jati, kunda and karavira, while of the whole list only ketaki is rejected⁴.

But more often juhi finds its way into the hands of the manjaris – the young confidantes of Radha who weave garlands for the Divine Couple and dress Their hair. In the “Ujjvala-nilamani” of Srila Rupa Goswami, Rupa-manjari says to Rati-manjari: from today let us not pick fresh jasmine, let us look rather for yuthika and lotus petals to spread the flower bed⁵. Rupa-manjari’s service is to prepare the bower for Radha’s meeting with Her Beloved, and juhi comes into her hands.

Gold upon the dark

Garlands for Krishna are woven of juhi too. Srila Krishnadas Kaviraja Goswami in the “Govinda-lilamrita” paints Him in the bower like this:

Chaitanya Mahaprabhu

In His last years in Jagannatha Puri, Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu lived in the mood of Radha in separation – and that very scene from the “Bhagavatam”, where the gopis question the jasmines, was especially close to Him. The “Chaitanya-charitamrita” relates how, seized by this feeling, He repeats the gopis’ verse and then retells it in Bengali, addressing the flowers as though they were alive:

Beyond Vraja

Beyond the krishna-lila yuthika’s life is wider. Its flowers have long been offered to Devi and to Shiva: in the Anangatrayodashi vow, kept in the month of Shravana, it is yuthika that is prescribed for Shiva. It has found its way even where one would not look for flowers – into the books on mercury and on elephants: the alchemists count yuthika among the sixty-seven great substances for processing mercury, while the “Matanga-lila”, the old science of elephants, mentions its scent among the signs of an elephant’s temper.

Not a medicine but a fragrance

Neither a taste, rasa, nor a potency, virya, is fixed to yuthika, and to ascribe to it the properties of its kinswoman jati would be a stretch. A folk use it does have: the handbooks of useful tropical plants call the leaf of yuthika a remedy for mouth ulcers. But its place is not in the physician’s bag: it is a fragrant flower with which the air is freshened, the hair anointed and the Deity adorned.

Botany

Juhi is Jasminum auriculatum, a true jasmine of the genus Jasminum. The poets call it a creeper, the botanists a climbing shrub. Its leaves are now simple, now trifoliate: the lateral leaflets are tiny, rarely wider than four millimetres, while the middle one reaches three and a half centimetres. The flowers are satiny, with a slender tube a centimetre and a half long, and they smell very heavily, almost like a gardenia. The fruit is a black globular berry about five millimetres across. Juhi flowers through the whole rainy half of the year.

The name “juhi” itself is Hindi; in Sanskrit it is yuthika and magadhi, in Tamil mullai, in Telugu virajaji. As for the golden yuthika of which the poets of Vraja speak, botany knows none in this species: in every description the flowers are white. A yellow jasmine does exist in India – Chrysojasminum humile – but it is a Himalayan one, living at a height of one and a half to four kilometres, and in Vraja it is not to be met; and in Hindi it is called “pili chameli”, “yellow chameli”, so that even by name it is kin not to juhi but to jai. What the golden yuthi of the poets was – a garden form the handbooks do not know, or a name rather than a colour – cannot be settled from the sources we have.