Radha Ashtami, on the Shukla Ashtami of Bhadrapada, marks the birth of Radha — fifteen days after Krishna's own on Janmashtami. In the Braj and Vaishnava traditions she is not merely Krishna's beloved but his hladini shakti, the very power of his joy and love, so that his name is never spoken first: it is always Radha-Krishna.

To keep her day is to honour bhakti itself in its purest form — love that asks for nothing, seeks no reward, and is complete in the loving. Barsana, her village, becomes the heart of the festival, and devotees fast, sing, and worship the divine couple through the day.

Where Janmashtami's mood is wonder at the descent of God, Radha Ashtami's is tenderness — the celebration of the one through whom that God is most easily reached.

Radha, the tradition tells, was found rather than born in the ordinary way: Vrishabhanu discovered an infant girl lying on a lotus in the waters near Barsana, radiant but with eyes unopened. Kirti and Vrishabhanu raised her, and her eyes are said to have first opened only upon the sight of Krishna. In the theology of the Gaudiya and Nimbarka schools she is Krishna's own energy taken form — the two are one divinity in two persons, love and the beloved inseparable.

The worship of Radha rose to prominence with the bhakti movement from around the twelfth century — Jayadeva's Gita Govinda sang the love of Radha and Krishna, and the later Gaudiya tradition of Chaitanya and the Nimbarka, Vallabha and Radhavallabha sampradayas placed her at the centre of devotion. Barsana and Vrindavan became her great centres, and Radha Ashtami grew into one of the major festivals of the Braj year, second only to Janmashtami.

Radha's glory is sung in the Brahma Vaivarta Purana, which describes her as the supreme goddess and Krishna's eternal consort, and in the Padma Purana; Jayadeva's Gita Govinda and the padavali of the bhakti poets are her living scripture. In the Gaudiya theology set out by the Goswamis of Vrindavan, she is the highest form of devotion embodied.

Falling in Bhadrapada at the close of the monsoon, Radha Ashtami sits in the same green, festival-dense season as Janmashtami and the Braj rains that the Krishna story so loves. Beyond season, its meaning is psychological and devotional: it holds up a love defined entirely by giving, and a mode of worship — bhava, feeling — as valid as ritual or knowledge, which is much of why the bhakti tradition took it to heart.

In Barsana, Vrishabhanu Gop went one morning to the waters and found there a radiant infant girl resting on a full-blown lotus — no ordinary child, for she lay without crying and without opening her eyes. He and his wife Kirti took her home and raised her as their own, and named her Radha.

Her eyes, it is told, did not open for all the love around her. They opened only when Yashoda brought the infant Krishna to Barsana and set him before her — as though she had come into the world only to see him, and would not look upon anything else first. From that first meeting the tradition dates a love that the Puranas and poets have sung ever since as the highest reach of devotion: not two who love, but love itself in two forms.