It is interesting that popular stories often bordering on the scandalous and the profane should now be so freely and evocatively retold in the English language for, as a student of history, I am apt to recall that only about a hundred years back, the same had been indignantly assailed by the first crop of English educated Indians. Following Renan and his bid to separate the Christ of history from that of Christian mythology, the Hindu Renaissance too had looked to discover the historically verifiable Krishna. Also, deeply influenced as it was by Anglo Protestantism and the emerging philosophical moods in contemporary Europe, this Renaissance attempted to understand Krishna not so much as god but as a man who might justifiably be elevated to the status of god. There was, besides, a polemical side to this since Krishna was, for most Hindu protagonists, a more exemplary figure than Christ.
January 2006, volume 30, No 1