of God was the one most valid.  God must be adored.  Krishna himself was God and since he had shown divine love in passionately possessing the cowgirls, he was best adored by recalling these very encounters.  As a result, Krishna’s relations with the cowgirls were now enormously magnified and as part of this fresh appraisal, a particular married cowgirl, Radha, enters the story as the enchanting object of his passions.  We have seen how on one occasion in the Bhagavata Purana, Krishna disappears taking with him a single girl, how they then make love together in a forest bower and how when the girl tires and begs Krishna to carry her, he abruptly leaves her.  The girl’s name is not mentioned but enough is said to suggest that she is Krishna’s favourite.  This hint is now developed.  Radha, for this is the girl’s name, is recognized as the loveliest of all the cowgirls.  She is the daughter of the cowherd Vrishabhanu and his wife, Kamalavati, and is married to Ayana, a brother of Yasoda.  Like other cowgirls, her love for Krishna is all-consuming and compels her to ignore her family honour and disregard her husband.  Krishna, for his part, regards her as his first love.  In place, therefore, of courtly adventures and battles with demons, Krishna’s adulterous romance is now presented as all in all.[47] It is the moods, feelings and emotions of a great love-affair which are the essence of the story and this, in turn, is to serve as a sublime allegory expressing and affirming the love of God for the soul.  With this dramatic revolution in the story, we begin to approach the Krishna of Indian painting.

Such a change can hardly have come about without historical reasons and although the exact circumstances must perhaps remain obscure, we can see in this sharp reversal of roles a clear response to certain Indian needs.  From early times, romantic love had been keenly valued, Sanskrit poets such as Kalidasa, Amaru and Bhartrihari celebrating the charms of womanly physique and the raptures of sex.  What, in fact, in other cultures had been viewed with suspicion or disquiet was here invested with nobility and grandeur.  Although fidelity had been demanded in marriage, romantic liaisons had not been entirely excluded and thus there was a sense in which the love-poetry of the early Indian middle ages had been partly paralleled by actual courtly or village practice.  From the tenth century onwards, however, a tightening of domestic morals had set in, a tightening which was further intensified by the Muslim invasions of the twelfth and thirteen centuries.  Romance as an actual experience became more difficult of attainment and this was exacerbated by standard views of marriage.  In early India, marriage had been regarded as a contract between families and romantic love between husband and wife as an accidental, even an unexpected product of what was basically a utilitarian agreement.  With the seclusion of women and the laying of even greater stress on wifely chastity,