The Interpretation of Legacy: Honoring Without Imitating
As Krishna aged further and finally passed into peace—not all at once but gently, like twilight—the city found itself without its founding voice. The immediate grief was deep but was accompanied by a question that threatened everything: how do we honor what he built without becoming a museum of his choices?
Different factions emerged with different answers. Some wanted to preserve everything exactly as Krishna had established it, believing that the purity of his wisdom lay in unchanging rules. Others wanted to discard his guidance entirely, believing that honoring him meant proving they could do better. Both positions, Pradyumna recognized, were forms of dishonor—either making his wisdom into frozen dogma or rejecting it out of a need to prove independence.
Pradyumna proposed instead a principle: Krishna's methods were not sacred, but the values that motivated them were. The equal rationing during drought was not a rule for all time but an expression of the principle that burden should be shared. The youth councils were not a permanent structure but an expression of the principle that participation was essential to legitimacy. Honoring Krishna meant understanding what problems he had solved and asking whether those solutions still solved those problems, or whether new solutions, rooted in the same values, were now needed.
This interpretation was tested almost immediately. The merchant faction that had been suppressed during Aniruddha's leadership began to advocate again for different practices—not a return to exploitation, but a new model of commerce based on incentive and differentiation rather than equality. Pradyumna listened and asked the crucial question: "Does this serve the value that motivated our current practice?" Some proposed changes passed this test; others did not.
The city discovered that honoring a legacy was not about copying the ancestor but about inheriting the ancestor's capacity for wisdom. It was learning to ask the questions that Krishna had asked, not merely to apply his answers. This required both deep respect for what had come before and genuine freedom to reshape it.
Over time, the city evolved—not abandoning its founding principles but expressing them differently as circumstances changed. What had seemed dangerous—that a city could change while remaining faithful to its values—turned out to be the condition for remaining truly faithful. A tradition that could not evolve could only decline.