(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 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