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hari is one of a set of words which seem to derive from a stem meaning yellow or yellowish green The word has a lot of meanings including yellow, horse, monkey, frog, etc. Isha means master (from Ish meaning to possess) so, harIsha means lord of monkeys. It is an epithet of viSNu, the protector amongst the Hindu trinity, who in one incarnation called Rama was helped by the monkey race in his quest to dominate over rAvaNa, the holy powerful lord who was the evil incarnate and had kidnapped his wife and imprisoned her (because of complications he could not satisfy himself without her consent). Rama with the help of the monkey race, and other gods, and rAvaNa's brother, managed to kill rAvaNa (after, of course, accepting him as a teacher and learning from him, since he was the holiest of mortals) and get back his wife, whom he exiled because his subjects were worried about her virginity. After further humiliation she called upon the earth, her mother to shelter her, and she disappeared into the earth, leaving behind two sons to rAma.

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The root rAdh means to succeed, accomplish, finish, prosper, propitiate, etc., and rAdhA means success or prosperity. rAdhikA is the diminutive from that, and hence used as the name for a young maiden (as if old people are regularly named!). In mythology that developed about a thousand years back, she was the heart-throb of the young kRSNa, another of viSNu's incarnations. She was married and kRSNa ultimately left her and went his way, so the love never reached fulfillment, but with the development of the cult in which the human thought of himself/herself as the lover (feminine) of the divine (masculine), rAdhA became a very important symbol. The love of kRSNa and rAdhA (and in this context she was often called rAdhikA/rAi, basically as a pet form) was the literary vehicle for a lot of depiction of the ideal of love through the various periods, some of the physical aspects of which will very clearly offend the modern American sensibility, to put it mildly.