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INTRODUCTION

A Poetic Exploration of Love and Life,

Women and Gods from Twelfth-century Bengal

G

o·vardhana, like his classical model Hala, has been a source of entertainment and fascination for me for nearly forty years. These miniature poems make ideal reading for moments of leisure and reflection, and in the company of congenial friends offer ample amusement.

But those forty years have seen many changes, both in my own attitudes and in the cultural environment. Intellectual fashions are almost as transient as those of clothes, and so are a society’s moral climate and aesthetic sense. Inevitably my own perception of Go·vardhana has been influenced by these factors. He has become more, not less, of a problem and a challenge. In presenting the full corpus of his poetry, I was initially tempted to relate it explicitly to some contemporary issue, by extricating a particular position on, for example, the relationship between religion and human love. But this temptation had to be resisted: what may be a hot issue at the time of writing will surely be outdated in a few years’ time. Moreover, this kind of approach to culturally alien material, viz. using it merely as raw material to back up some fashionable grand theory orism, represents to me a travesty of scholarship. Instead, let Go·vardhana stand there, undisguised by modern dress, and challenge our imagination by representing a view of the world that lies outside our Judeo-Christian values, feminist concerns, Orientalist critique, Freudian analysis, and Marxist theory.