Illustration to the Gita Govinda
Basohli.  Punjab Hills, c. 1730
State Museum, Lahore

Having brusquely dismissed Krishna, Radha is overcome with longing and when he once again approaches her she showers on him her adoring love.  The friend urges her to delay no longer.

  ’Your friends are all aware that you are ready for love’s conflict
  Go, your belt aloud with bells, shameless, amorous, to the meeting.’

Radha succumbs to her advice and slowly approaches Krishna’s forest bower.

In the picture, Krishna is impatiently awaiting her while Radha, urged onward by the friend, pauses for a moment to shed her shyness.  The picture is part of an illustrated edition of the poem executed in Basohli in 1730 for a local princess, the lady Manaku.  As in other Basohli paintings, trees are shown as small and summary symbols, the horizon is a streak of clouds and there is a deliberate shrinkage from physical refinement.  The purpose of the picture is rather to express with the maximum of power the savagery of passion and the stark nature of lovers’ encounters.

[Illustration]

PLATE 27

The closing Scene

Illustration to the Gita Govinda
Basohli, Punjab Hills. c. 1730
Art Gallery, Chandigarh, East Punjab

From the same series as Plate 26.

After agonies of ‘love unsatisfied,’ Radha and Krishna are at last reconciled.

  ’She looked on Krishna who desired only her, on him who for long wanted
    dalliance,
  Whose face with his pleasure was overwhelmed and who was possessed with
    Desire,
  Who engendered passion with his face made lovely through tremblings of
    glancing eyes,
  Like a pond in autumn with a pair of wagtails at play in a fullblown
    lotus. 
  Like the gushing of the shower of sweat in the effort of her travel to
    come to his hearing,
  Radha’s eyes let fall a shower of tears when she met her beloved,
  Tears of delight which went to the ends of her eyes and fell on her
    flawless necklace. 
  When she went near the couch and her friends left the bower, scratching
    their faces to hide their smiles,
  And she looked on the mouth of her loved one, lovely with longing, under
    the power of love,
  The modest shame of that deer-eyed one departed.’

In the picture, Radha and Krishna are again united.  Krishna has drawn Radha to him and is caressing her cheek while friends of Radha gossip in the courtyard.  As in Plate 25, the artist has preferred a house to the forest—­the sharp thrust of the angular walls exactly expressing the fierceness of the lovers’ desires.

[Illustration]

PLATE 28

Krishna awaiting Radha

Illustration to the Rasika Priya of Keshav Das
Bundi (Rajasthan), c. 1700
National Museum, New Delhi