The pain of separation from a beloved.
The pain of separation from a beloved — the pining anguish of love-in-absence. In Sanskrit poetics, love felt in separation; in bhakti, the devotee's longing for an absent deity.
Specifically the felt anguish of separation, not the bare fact of it (Sanskrit distinguishes viyoga, the fact, from viraha, the pain). Anchored to a specific absent beloved (human or divine) and intensely painful — unlike the diffuse, gently melancholic saudade or the ideal-directed Sehnsucht. In bhakti the lover/devotee “burns” (viraha-jvara, “fever of separation”).
vi- “apart” + √rah “to leave, separate” = “a parting, separation.”
From vi- (“apart, away”) + the root √रह् (rah) “to leave, abandon” + -a. Monier-Williams: vi-raha “abandonment, parting, separation (esp. of lovers).”
From a plain “abandonment / absence” it became the central technical term for “love-in-separation” in Sanskrit poetics, and in Vaishnava bhakti was spiritualized into viraha-bhakti — devotional longing for the absent divine, treated as a most potent form of devotion.
Spiritual/wellness writing romanticizes it as “sacred emptiness drawing the soul to union” — authentic to bhakti theology, but not the plain lexical sense (“separation”). (A web claim linking viraha to vīra “hero” is incorrect — the etymon is vi- + √rah.)