Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/15

 The Legends of Krishna. 5

At the time of the birth of Krishna we find the rightful king, Ugrasena, like so many savage half-priests, half- monarchs, when their power of controlling the deities becomes abated, deposed by his son, the usurper Kamsa. He, we are told, cruelly persecuted his rivals, an incident in which some have recognised a conflict of cults, and some have gone so far as to call Kamsa a Jaina, an opponent of the neo-Vaishnava faith. However this may be, Krishna, who was a cousin of the usurper, defeated and slew him and restored Ugrasena to the throne. But his triumph did not last long. He was himself attacked by the father-in-law of Kamsa, Jarasandha, king of Magadha or Bihar, who was allied with a monarch known as Kala-yavana, the Ionian or Greek, who may have been a king of Kashmir or one of the Bactrian descendants of the Great Alexander. Krishna, we learn, was forced to abandon Mathura and retire to Dwaraka on the Gulf of Kaclih, where, after various adventures, including his interposition on the side of the Pandavas in the great war recorded in the Mahabharata, by which their success was assured, he is said to have been slain, and his bones, according to later Brahmanical tradition, rest inside the famous idol at Jaggan-nath.

From a saga like this, obviously the work of many hands and embodying many variant traditions, it is hopeless to sift any historical facts. Krishna may have been a local hero of the Yadava clan of Kshatriyas ; they may have brought with them some part of his cultus from their home in Central Asia ; they may have absorbed parts of it from the indigenous idolatries ; his tale may suggest a conflict between more than one rival faith. For the sober historian it possesses little more value than the myths of the Arthurian cycle. To one school of mythologists, of course, the whole story is only a solar myth.

We are perhaps on safer ground when we suggest that round a single figure, which may possibly be historical, the cultus, as we find it, may be the result of that syncretism