and an impassioned milkmaid; and, at the same time, it is a devotional poem about Krishna, the god absolute, the source of the avatars who redeem the universe throughout the cycles of eternity, and his relationship with his divine consort, the goddess of Prosperity.

As is the case with the majority of Sanskrit poets, very little is known about the life of Jaya·deva. But the dialectic of the text, the ambiguities inherent in its juxtaposition of sexual and religious sensibilities, has encouraged constructions of two very different biographies, one of a sophisticated court poet, commissioned to compose erotic verse for a royal Vaishnava patron, and the other of a divinely inspired bard singing in devotional service to Krishna.

It has been generally accepted, though not uncontested, in academic literature that Jaya·deva was a poet in the court of Lakshmana·sena, the last of the Sena kings in Bengal at the end of the twelfth century. This is deduced from a prefatory stanza to the “Gita·govinda” in which Jaya·deva is named as one in a group of poets that includes Sharana, Go·vardhana, Dhoyi, and Uma·pati·dhara. Although it is certain that Dhoyi, whose “Wind Messenger” (Pavanaduta) extols the kingship of Lakshmana·sena, was a member of that court, inscriptions indicate that Uma·pati·dhara was patronized by Vijaya·sena, Lakshmana·sena’s grandfather. Nothing is known of Sharana or his work. The association of Jaya·deva and the other poets with Lakshmana·sena is corroborated by no more than an inscription (albeit a lost one), reportedly seen in Bengal by two disciples of the Vaishnava saint Chaitanya some three-hundred years after Jaya·deva. It identifies the poets as “five jewels orna- ________