include Jaya·deva’s songs in their repertoire, and perform them at the festival held in mid-January each year in honor of the poet-saint in Kenduli village, West Bengal.

The medieval theology that developed interpretively around the erotic mythology of Radha and Krishna was significantly influenced by the “Gita·govinda.” Jaya·deva seems to have been largely responsible for the establishment of Radha as the particular and primary consort of Krishna, she whom the god himself describes in the opening of canto three of the poem as “the chain that bound him to this world.”

Krishna is introduced in the first song as the ultimate and absolute form of Vishnu, the source of the avatars in whose forms, in each cycle of cosmic creation and destruction, he redeems the world from chaos. By the second song, in the midst of recollections of his heroic deeds as a slayer of demons, his erotic propensities are indicated—his chest is “pressed against the Goddess’s breasts in rest.” And then, in the next song, the heavenly deity becomes hypostasized into the philandering cowherd, playing in the forest at night with the milkmaids of Vrinda·vana. That cultic figure, Govinda the bucolic lover, had been well developed during the millennium before the “Gita·govinda” in such scriptural narratives as the Harivamsa, Visnu Purana, and Bhagavata Purana. But that mythological Krishna took collective delight in lovemaking with all the cowherd women and had no particular favorite among them. Radha was new to the story.

The inveterate conventions and conceits of the Sanskrit court epic having love as its principal theme and sentiment ________