lover.  There is a tendency for the older Krishna to disparage the younger.  Krishna the prince’s subsequent meetings with the cowgirls are shown as very different from his rapturous encounters with them in the forest and the fact that his later career involves so sharp a separation from them indicates that the whole episode was somewhat frowned upon.  This is especially evident from the manner in which Krishna addresses the cowgirls when they meet him during the eclipse of the sun.  By this time he has become an ardent husband constantly satisfying his many wives.  He is very far from having abjured the delights of the flesh.  Yet for all his former loves who long for him so passionately he has only one message.  They must meditate upon him in their minds.  No dismissal could be colder, no treatment more calculatingly callous.  And even the accounts of Krishna’s love-making reflects this bias.  The physical charms of the cowgirls are minimized and it is only the beauty of Rukmini which is stressed.  It is clear, in fact, that however much the one tradition involved a break with morals, the second tradition shrank from countenancing adultery and it was this latter tradition which commanded the authors’ approval.  Finally, on one important issue, the Purana as a whole is in no doubt.  Krishna’s true consort is Rukmini.  That Krishna’s nature should be complemented by a cowgirl is not so much as even considered.  The cowgirls are shown as risking all for Krishna, as loving him above all else but none is singled out for mention and none emerges as a rival.  In this long account of Krishna’s life what is overwhelmingly significant is that the name of his supreme cowgirl love is altogether omitted.

V

THE KRISHNA OF POETRY

(i) The Triumph of Radha

During the next two hundred years, from the tenth to the twelfth century, the Krishna story completely alters.  It is not that the facts as given in the Bhagavata Purana are disputed.  It is rather that the emphasis and view-point are changed.  Krishna the prince and his consort Rukmini are relegated to the background and Krishna the cowherd lover brought sharply to the fore.  Krishna is no longer regarded as having been born solely to kill a tyrant and rid the world of demons.  His chief function now is to vindicate passion as the symbol of final union with God.  We have already seen that to Indians this final union was the sole purpose of life and only one experience was at all comparable to it.  It was the mutual ecstasy of impassioned lovers.  ’In the embrace of his beloved, a man forgets the whole world—­everything both within and without; in the same way, he who embraces the Self knows neither within nor without.’[46] The function of the new Krishna was to defend these two premises—­that romantic love was the most exalted experience in life and secondly, that of all the roads to salvation, the impassioned adoration