Early History of the Vaishnava Faith and Movement in Bengal, from Sanskrit and Bengali Sources c11.s3.12

c11.s3.12

Kṛṣṇa's Viraha and his lamentations are also in the same approved manner and style of the conventional hero of the sentimental type. But, at the same time, it cannot be said that the little play is not fluent and graceful. The situations are trite and stale, but they are not over-embellished; and in the emotional or descriptive comments, their poetical stanzas are neither tediously profuse nor inappropriate. Perhaps the play was meant as a musical and spectacular entertainment, its characteristic feature being the introduction of Padāvalis or songs, set to different tunes, after the manner of Jayadeva's *Gita-govinda*. It invests the play with a delightful operatic atmosphere, and justifies the description that it is essentially a small *Samgita-nataka*. The number of such songs is twenty-one, there being four in each Act, excepting five in Act IV; and each song contains the author's *bhanita* and the name of his patron Gajapati Prataparudra. We give here one of the songs, which describes the youthful Krsna, as a specimen (Act I):