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14. THE CONCEPT OF AVATARS
The two characters have little in common, except their lawlessness, and the date and locality of the two cycles of legend are different. But the death of Kamsa which is one of the oldest incidents in the story (for it is mentioned in the Mahâbhâshya) belongs to both and Kamsa is consistently connected with Muttra. The Mahâbhârata is mainly concerned with Krishna the warrior: the few allusions in it to the freaks of the pastoral Krishna occur in passages suspected of being late interpolations and, even if they are genuine, show that little attention was paid to his youth. But in later works, the relative importance is reversed and the figure of the amorous herdsman almost banishes the warrior.
We can trace the growth of this figure in the sculptures of the sixth century, in the Vishnu and Bhagavata Puranas and the Gît-govinda (written about 1170). Even later is the worship of Râdha, Krishna's mistress, as a portion of the deity, who is supposed to have divided himself into male and female halves. The birth and adventures of the pastoral Krishna are located in the land of Braj, the district round Muttra and among the tribe of the Abhîras, but the warlike Krishna is connected with the west, although his exploits extend to the Ganges valley. The Abhîras, now called Ahirs, were nomadic herdsmen who came from the west and their movements between Kathiawar and Muttra may have something to do with the double location of the Krishna legend.
Both archæology and historical notices tell us something of the history of Muttra. It was a great Buddhist and Jain centre, as the statues and vihâras found there attest. Ptolemy calls it the city of the gods. Fa-Hsien (400 A.D.) describes it as Buddhist, but that faith was declining at the time of Hsuan Chuang's visit (c. 630 A.D.). The sculptural remains also indicate the presence of Græco-Bactrian influence. We need not therefore feel surprise if we find in the religious thought of Muttra elements traceable to Greece, Persia or Central Asia.
Some claim that Christianity should be reckoned among these elements and I shall discuss the question elsewhere. Here I will only say that such ideas as were common to Christianity and to the religions of Greece and western Asia probably did penetrate to India by the northern route, but of specifically Christian ideas I see no proof. It is true that the pastoral Krishna is unlike all earlier Indian deities, but then no close parallel to him can be adduced from elsewhere, and, take him as a whole, he is a decidedly un-Christian figure. The resemblance to Christianity consists in the worship of a divine child, together with his mother. But this feature is absent in the New Testament and seems to have been borrowed from paganism by Christianity.
The legends of Muttra show even clearer traces than those already quoted of hostility between Krishna and Brahmanism. He forbids the worship of Indra, and when Indra in anger sends down a deluge of rain, he protects the country by holding up over it the hill of Goburdhan, which is still one of the great centres of pilgrimage. The language which the Vishnu Purâna attributes to him is extremely remarkable.
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