this marvellous efflorescence.  Rana Jagat Singh was clearly a devout worshipper whose faithful adhesion to Rajput standards found exhilarating compensations in Krishna’s role as lover.  Keshav Das’s Rasika Priya achieved the greatest popularity at his court—­its blend of reverent devotion and ecstatic passion fulfilling some of the deepest Rajput needs.  Between the years 1645 and 1660 there accordingly occurred a systematic production not only of pictures illustrating this great poetic text but of the various books in the Bhagavata Purana most closely connected with Krishna’s career.  Krishna is shown as a Rajput princeling dressed in fashionable garb, threading his way among the cowgirls, pursuing his amorous inclinations and practising with artless guile the seductive graces of a courtly lover.  Each picture has a passionate intensity—­its rich browns and reds, greens and blues endowing its characters with glowing fervour, while Krishna and the cowgirls, with their sharp robust forms and great intent eyes, display a brusque vitality and an eager rapturous vigour.  A certain simplification of structure—­each picture possessing one or more rectangular compartments—­enhances this effect while the addition of swirling trees studded with flowers imbues each wild encounter with a surging vegetative rhythm.  Krishna is no longer the tepid well-groomed youth of Mughal tradition, but a vigorous Rajput noble expressing with decorous vehemence all the violent longings denied expression by the Rajput moral code.  Such pictures have a lyrical splendour, a certain wild elation quite distinct from previous Indian painting and we can only explain these new stylistic qualities by reference to the cult of Krishna himself.  The realization that Krishna was adorable, that his practice of romantic love was a sublime revelation of Godhead and that in his worship lay release is the motive force behind these pictures and the result is a new style transcending in its rhythmical assurance and glowing ardour all previous achievements.

Such an outburst of painting could hardly leave other areas unaffected and in the closing quarter of the seventeenth century, not only Bundi, the Rajput State immediately adjoining Udaipur to the east, but Malwa, the wild hilly area farther south east, witnessed a renaissance of painting.  At Bundi, the style was obviously a direct development from that of Udaipur itself—­the idioms for human figures and faces as well as the glowing colours being clearly based on Udaipur originals.  At the same time, a kind of sumptuous luxuriance, a predilection for greens and oranges in brilliant juxtaposition, a delight in natural profusion and the use of recessions, shading and round volumes give each picture a distinctive aura.[81] In Malwa, on the other hand, the earlier tradition seems to have undergone a new resuscitation.  Following various wars in Middle India, the former Muslim kingdom had been divided into fiefs—­some