ks my heart.
Says Chandi Das:
O sweet girl, how I understand.

(Chandi Das)

xi

O friend, I cannot tell you
Whether he was near or far, real or a dream.
Like a vine of lightning,
As I chained the dark one,
felt a river flooding in my heart.
Like a shining moon,
I devoured that liquid face.
I felt stars shooting around me.
The sky fell with my dress
Leaving my ravished breasts.
I was rocking like the earth.
In my storming breath
I could hear my ankle-bells,
Sounding like bees.
Drowned in the last-waters of dissolution
I knew that this was not the end.
Says Vidyapati:
How can I possibly believe such nonsense?

(Vidyapati)

[Footnote 60: Plate 29.]

[Footnote 61: Plate 35.]

[Footnote 62: Note 20.]

[Footnote 63: Note 20.]

(iv) The Rasika Priya

It is a third development, however, which reveals the insistent
attractions of Krishna the divine lover. From about the seventh century
onwards Indian thinkers had been fascinated by the great variety of
possible romantic experiences. Writers had classified feminine beauty and
codified the different situations which might arise in the course of a
romance. A woman, for example, would be catalogued according as she was
'one's own, another's or anyone's' and whether she was young, adolescent
or adult. Beauties with adult physiques were divided into unmarried and
married, while cutting across such divisions was yet another based on the
particular circumstances in which a woman might find herself. Such
circumstances were normally eight in number--when her husband or lover was
on the point of coming and she was ready to receive him; when she was
parted from him and was filled with longing; when he was constant and she
was thus enjoying the calm happiness of stable love; when, for the time
being, she was estranged due to some quarrel or tiff; when she had been
deceived; when she had gone to meet her lover but had waited in vain,
thereby being jilted; when her husband or lover had gone abroad and she
was faced with days of lonely waiting; and finally, when she had left the
house and gone to meet him. Ladies in situations such as these were known
as _nayikas_ and the text embodying the standard classification was the
Sanskrit treatise, the _Bharatiya Natya Sastra_. A similar analysis was
made of men--lovers or _nayakas_ being sometimes divided into fourteen
different types.

Until the fourteenth century, such wr