Blue Lotus (Water Lily)

Lotus or Water Lily

The flower in question is called by Sanskrit utpala, kuvalaya or indīvara. All three names the Amarakosha places in its section on water lilies and explains that they belong to the blue kind, while the white are kumuda and kairava. The lotus has an entry of its own in the same lexicon, under the names padma and kamala¹.

The poets, though, do not keep this border strictly: in the Govinda-lilamrita the commentator explains indīvara-dvaya, “two indivaras”, by the words nīla-padma-dvaya, “two blue lotuses” – that is, he uses both words as one. So the question cannot be settled by names.

Botany settles it. The true lotus is the genus Nelumbo, and it has only two species: the Indian, with pink and white flowers, and the American, with pale yellow ones. There are no blue ones among them and there cannot be: the lotus does not produce blue pigment at all. Among the water lilies, Nymphaea, blue forms are common – in India this is Nymphaea nouchali, in Egypt Nymphaea caerulea, the very “blue lotus” of the ancient paintings. So the blue flower of the shastras is, botanically speaking, a water lily, and “blue lotus” is a translation that has taken root but is conventional. Further on in this article it is still called the blue lotus: the name has settled both in translations and in Vaishnava usage.

The Blue Lotus in Vrindavan

Into the verses this flower enters above all by its colour. The body of Krishna is dark – not black, but exactly that dark blue of a thundercloud and of this petal. And so, when a poet wants to name the colour of Krishna in one word, he takes the blue lotus. Srila Jayadeva Gosvami in the Gita-Govinda paints Krishna playing with the gopis in spring just so:

In a Pair and in Its Element

The blue lotus usually goes in a pair – with the golden champaka. Srila Prabodhananda Sarasvati in the Vrindavana-mahimamrita sets them side by side again and again: Krishna is the blue indivara, Radha the golden flower of the champaka, and the whole forest is clothed in these two colours.

And the blue lotus grows in the Yamuna and in the forest ponds of Vraja. “He who has never seen the Yamuna of Vrindavan, full of ever-blooming indivara, kamala, kahlara and kumuda – is he alive at all?” exclaims Prabodhananda Sarasvati. But even here, in its own element, the flower remains in a secondary role: the dark water of the Yamuna itself, in the words of Jiva Gosvami, “dims the lustre of the blue lotus”. And Krishnadasa Kaviraja Gosvami notes a subtlety: when the moon of Radha’s face rises above the pond, both the blue lotuses and the white night lilies open in the water at once. The blue lotus is a flower of the day, the white lily one of the night, and neither sun nor moon will make them open together.

And in the pastimes themselves the blue lotus more often serves as an occasion than as an ornament. Krishnadasa Kaviraja has a scene where Radha, turning her neck aside as if afraid of His touch, adorns Krishna with a garland of blue lotuses – Her own sidelong glances – and, with a barely audible reproach, walks away³.

And in the Krishna-bhavanamrita of Srila Vishvanatha Chakravarti Thakura, Krishna takes a lotus in His hand, kisses it and praises it: “you have defeated everyone with your fragrance!” Radha flares up, and He, pleased, promises to smell both the flower and Her face, so as to sing with His flute of whichever is the sweeter.

Worship

The blue lotus is offered to Krishna as well. The Hari-bhakti-vilasa lists the flowers always pleasing to the Lord, and the blue lotus is there; more than that, Srila Sanatana Gosvami gathered a separate little chapter on its greatness, quoting verses from the Vishnu-dharmottara:

The Eyes of Radha

But most often the blue lotus is recalled in describing eyes. The eyes of Radha and Krishna, elongated and slightly reddish at the corners, the poets of Vraja compare with it constantly. And here Krishnadasa Kaviraja Gosvami turns the usual order of things upside down:

The Sixth Arrow of Kama

This is why the blue lotus always loses: it is itself the discarded remnant of the eyes of Radha, and not the other way round. The same image is unfolded by Srila Rupa Gosvami in the Utkalika-vallari, going through the things to which those eyes were compared. And still they do not stop comparing. In another line of Prabodhananda Sarasvati the eyes of Radha are two chakora birds with a single friend: the dark, blue-lotus “moon” of Krishna; let Him go, and the chakora eyes go blind⁵.

The name itself stands in a row with its neighbours. Srila Rupa Gosvami in the Ujjvala-nilamani puts into Krishna’s mouth a list of flower names: the white bud is kairava, the red lotus kokanada, the bee indindira, and the blue lotus indīvara. With these names Krishna plays at once: the white bud of His flute in the dark locks of Radha seems a blue indivara. And through the blue lotus the god of love enters the verses as well. Kama carries five flower arrows, and the verse that Rupa Gosvami quotes there calls the eye of Radha “the sixth arrow of the five-arrowed Kama”⁶ – the one against which there is no defence. And the flower itself stands among those five – in the list of the Amarakosha, under its own name nīlotpala, beside the aravinda (the ordinary lotus), the ashoka, the chuta (mango) and the navamallika⁷.

Beyond Vraja

The blue lotus flowers in the shastras outside Vrindavan too. When Narada Muni arrives in Dvaraka, the Bhagavatam describes its lakes, full of opened indivara, ambhoja, kahlara, kumuda and utpala, where swans and cranes call to one another – the same flower as in Vraja, but now in the adornment of a royal city. And in the verse of the Bhagavatam about Vaikuntha, which Srila Sanatana Gosvami quotes in the Brihad-bhagavatamrita, the utpala – another name of the same flower – stands among the heavenly flowers that honour the austerity of Tulasi, seeing how the Lord prefers her to all the rest. From the ponds of Vraja to the gardens of Vaikuntha – everywhere this lily turns out to be the companion of a more glorious neighbour.

Ayurveda

Ayurveda values the blue lotus for its coolness. The Raja-nighantu calls it cooling and pleasant in taste, recommends it for burning, exhaustion, vomiting and fever, and names it a remedy for rakta-pitta – bleeding. Its taste (rasa) is astringent: so says the Charaka-samhita, and it sets the utpala against the same things. The names in the nighantus speak for themselves: Anushna (“not hot”), Hima-abja (“the icy lotus”), Shita-jalaja (“the cool one, water-born”). The rhizome, the young leaves and the flower stalks are used: they are eaten as a vegetable, and a powder of the rhizome is given for haemorrhoids, diarrhoea and indigestion.

One qualification. Beside the “cool” names the same compendium sets Ratri-pushpa (“the night flower”) and Nisha-phulla (“blooming at night”), while our lily is closed by night. Under the name utpala the Ayurvedic compendia keep more than one species of water lily, and the medicinal properties are recorded for the whole group at once.

Botany

Botanists know the blue lotus as Nymphaea nouchali; the formerly current name N. stellata refers, by the present Kew checklist, not to the whole species but to its type variety. This is a water lily and not the pink lotus-padma (Nelumbo), with which it is often confused in translations: two different plants from different families. The rounded leaves, 25–40 cm across, float on the water, while the flower rises above it; its centre is pale yellow.

This lily occurs throughout the tropical and subtropical Old World – from Egypt and Africa through India to northern Australia – and in India it is native, not introduced. Its light blue variety (var. caerulea) is the very “blue lotus of the Nile”, famous already in ancient Egypt. The name nilotpala itself is made of nīla, “blue”, and utpala, “lotus”; in Hindi the flower is called by the same word – nilotpal, and also nilkamal, “the blue kamala”.