[Illustration]

PLATE 14

Krishna’s Favourite deserted

Illustration to the Bhagavata Purana
Kangra, Punjab Hills, c. 1790
National Museum, New Delhi

From the same series as Plates 13 and 15 by ‘the master of the moonlight.’

The girl’s request (Plate 13) that Krishna should carry her brings to a head the question of Krishna’s proper status.  To an adoring lover, the request is not unreasonable.  Made to God, it implies an excess of pride.  Despite their impassioned love-making, therefore, the girl must be humbled and as she puts out her arms and prepares to mount, Krishna vanishes.

In the picture, the great woods overhanging the rolling Jumna are tilting forward as if to join the girl in her agonized advances while around her rise the bleak and empty slopes, their eerie loneliness intensified by frigid moonlight.

[Illustration]

PLATE 15

The Quest for Krishna

Illustration to the Bhagavata Purana
Kangra, Punjab Hills, c. 1790
J.K.  Mody collection, Bombay

By the same ‘master of the moonlight’ as Plates 13 and 14.

Krishna’s favourite, stunned by his brusque desertion, has now been met by a party of cowgirls.  Their plight is similar to her own, for, after enjoying his enchanting love, they also have been deserted when Krishna left the dance taking his favourite with him.  In the picture, Radha holds her head in anguish while to the right the cowgirls look at her in mute distress.  Drooping branches echo their stricken love while a tree in the background, its branches stretching wanly against the sky, suggests their plaintive yearning.

[Illustration]

PLATE 16

The Eve of the final Encounter

Illustration to the Bhagavata Purana
Kangra, Punjab Hills, c. 1790
J.K.  Mody collection, Bombay

From the same series as Plates 3, 5, 6, 8, 9 and 11, here attributed to the Kangra artist Purkhu.

Invited by Kansa, the tyrant king, to attend a festival of arms, Nanda and the cowherds have arrived at Mathura and pitched their tents outside the walls.  Krishna and Balarama are eating their evening meal by candle-light, a cowherd, wearing a dark cloak to keep off the night air, is attending to the bullocks while three cowherd boys, worn out by the day’s march, rest on string-beds under the night sky.  In the background, Krishna and Balarama, having finished their meal, are peacefully sleeping, serenely indifferent to the struggle which awaits them the next day.  The moon waning in the sky parallels the tyrant’s declining fortunes.

[Illustration]

PLATE 17

The End of the Tyrant