nlight.'

The girl's request (Plate 13) that Krishna should carry her brings to a
head the question of Krishna's proper status. To an adoring lover, the
request is not unreasonable. Made to God, it implies an excess of pride.
Despite their impassioned love-making, therefore, the girl must be humbled
and as she puts out her arms and prepares to mount, Krishna vanishes.

In the picture, the great woods overhanging the rolling Jumna are tilting
forward as if to join the girl in her agonized advances while around her
rise the bleak and empty slopes, their eerie loneliness intensified by
frigid moonlight.

[Illustration]

PLATE 15

_The Quest for Krishna_

Illustration to the _Bhagavata Purana_
Kangra, Punjab Hills, c. 1790
J.K. Mody collection, Bombay

By the same 'master of the moonlight' as Plates 13 and 14.

Krishna's favourite, stunned by his brusque desertion, has now been met by
a party of cowgirls. Their plight is similar to her own, for, after
enjoying his enchanting love, they also have been deserted when Krishna
left the dance taking his favourite with him. In the picture, Radha holds
her head in anguish while to the right the cowgirls look at her in mute
distress. Drooping branches echo their stricken love while a tree in the
background, its branches stretching wanly against the sky, suggests their
plaintive yearning.

[Illustration]

PLATE 16

_The Eve of the final Encounter_

Illustration to the _Bhagavata Purana_
Kangra, Punjab Hills, c. 1790
J.K. Mody collection, Bombay

From the same series as Plates 3, 5, 6, 8, 9 and 11, here attributed to
the Kangra artist Purkhu.

Invited by Kansa, the tyrant king, to attend a festival of arms, Nanda and
the cowherds have arrived at Mathura and pitched their tents outside the
walls. Krishna and Balarama are eating their evening meal by candle-light,
a cowherd, wearing a dark cloak to keep off the night air, is attending to
the bullocks while three cowherd boys, worn out by the day's march, rest
on string-beds under the night sky. In the background, Krishna and
Balarama, having finished their meal, are peacefully sleeping, serenely
indifferent to the struggle which awaits them the next day. The moon
waning in the sky parallels the tyrant's declining fortunes.

[Illustration]

PLATE 17

_The End of the Tyrant_

Illustration to the _Bhagavata Purana_
Kangra, Punjab Hills, c. 1790
Chester Beatty Library, Dublin

In the same style as Plate 1