e earlier legends he is a man of arms: in the later
he is not one who devotes his life to teaching but a forceful
personage who explains the nature of God and the universe at the most
unexpected moments. Now the founders of religions such as Mahavira and
Buddha preserve their character as teachers even in legend and do not
accumulate miscellaneous heroic exploits. Similarly modern founders of
sects, like Caitanya, though revered as incarnations, still retain
their historical attributes. But on the other hand many men of action
have been deified not because they taught anything but because they
seemed to be more than human forces. Rama is a classical example of
such deification and many local deities can be shown to be warriors,
bandits and hunters whose powers inspired respect. It is said that
there is a disposition in the Bombay Presidency to deify the Maratha
leader Sivaji.[380]

In his second aspect, Krishna is a pastoral deity, sporting among
nymphs and cattle. It is possible that this Krishna is in his origin
distinct from the violent and tragic hero of Dvaraka. 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 Mahabhashya[381]) belongs to both and Kamsa is
consistently connected with Muttra. The Mahabharata 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 Gita-govinda (written about 1170). Even later is the worship
of Radha, Krishna's mistress, as a portion of the deity, who is
supposed to have divided himself into male and female halves.[382] 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 Abhiras,
but the warlike Krishna is connected with the west, although his
exploits extend to the Ganges valley.[383] The Abhiras, now called
Ahirs, were nomadic herdsmen who came from the west and their
movements between