PRATHAMA MILNA
First Meetings
'A honey-comb and a honey-fower
And the bee shall have his hour.'
Rossetti.
4. The day-lotus closes and fades at night and in the moon's rays; Rādhā is the lotus, Krishna the moon, as also in [XLII], 8.
7-10. 'Sweet reward for sharpest pain.'
Sir Philip Sydney.
12. 'Artless 'or 'innocent,'—mugadhini, as in [XXX], 1 and again in [XXXVII], 10.
12. Lit. Happy is she that can look on him unmoved.
2. Rādhā knows and fears that she will yield to Krishna's wooing.
14. Rāhu, demon that swallows the moon at each eclipse. Cf. [CXX], 10 and [CXXIII], 3.
Mark the contrast between Krishna's memories of the night, and Rādhā's.
12. The Indian woman's purse is a knot tied in her sārī. The suggestion is that of the uselessness of tying up the treasure which the thief has already seen.
3. Cānūra, a wrestler in the service of Kaṅs, slain by Krishna (CF Prema Sāgara, Chs. XLIV, XLV).
5. Cf. The following dohā, the text of a Pahārī drawing:
'Jyoṅ jyoṅ parasai Lāla tana tyoṅ tyoṅ rākhata gō, ē
Navala bāla ḍara Lāla-kai indabadhu-sī hō, ē
'The more that Lāla touches her body, the more she curls up her body,
The tender girl, afraid of Lāla, becomes, as it were, a woodlouse!'
4. The Pairs of Opposites, as also in No. [LXII].
2. 'A wife,'—the original signifies 'woman' or 'wife.' In any case, the reader will observe (Nos. [LXXX], [LXXXVI] and [CXVII]) that Vidyāpati writes of Rādhā as a svakīya heroine, whereas a majority of Vaishnava writers further emphasize the conflict between Love and Duty by making her parakīya, the wife of another. But as Rādhā's was at best a Gāndharva marriage (according to Vidyāpati's indications), ratified at first only by mutual consent (as in the case of Shakuntalā), and willingly accepted by the family, we should perhaps call her anūdha (unmarried) rather than svakīya (Vāgbhaṭālaṅkāra, V, 12,13). It is the yielding before or without marriage which Rādhā often speaks of as her shame and sin, and for which she is blamed by her family. None the less, much of what is here related is quite true to everyday Indian life, where courtship normally follows marriage, and public flirtation is always considered disgraceful.