parallel in
style to the work of the modern artist Fernand Leger, have a robust gaiety
and bounding vigour, not inappropriate to the Krishna theme. The third
type of painting is the work of professional village minstrels known as
_jadupatuas_. As a means of livelihood, _jadupatuas_ travel from village
to village in West Bengal, entertaining the people by singing ballads and
illustrating their songs with long painted scrolls. As each ballad
proceeds, the scroll is slowly unwound, one scene leading to another until
the whole is concluded. Among the ballads thus intoned, the romance of
Krishna is among the most common and the style of painting with its crude
exuberance suggests the strength of popular devotion.[126]

There remains one last form of painting. During the twentieth century, the
modern movement in Indian art has produced at least four major
artists--Rabindranath Tagore, Amrita Sher-Gil, Jamini Roy and George Keyt.
Of these four, the first two did not illustrate the Krishna theme. Jamini
Roy, on the other hand, has often painted Krishna as flute-player and
dancer.[127] It would be unrealistic to suggest that these pictures spring
from a lively sense of Krishna as God--Jamini Roy has, in fact, resorted
to themes of Christ with equal, if not greater, frequency but has shown no
signs of becoming a Christian. It is rather that in painting these
pictures, he has treated Krishna as a symbol of rural vitality, a figure
whose boisterous career among the cowherds is an exact reflection of his
own attitudes and enthusiasms. To Jamini Roy, the Bengali village with its
sense of rude health is infinitely to be preferred to a city such as
Calcutta with its artificiality and disease and in a style of bold
simplifications, he has constantly celebrated the natural vigour and
inherent dignity of simple unsophisticated men.

Such pictures stress a comparatively unimportant side of Krishna's
character and it is rather in the paintings of George Keyt that Krishna
the lover is proudly portrayed. Born in Ceylon of mixed ancestry, Keyt
has, for many years, been acutely responsive to Indian poetry. In 1947,
he published the translation of the _Gita Govinda,_ excerpts from which
have been quoted in the text, and throughout his career his work has been
distinguished by a poet's delight in feminine form and sensuous rapture.
To Keyt such a delight is a vital component of adult minds and in the
romance of Radha and Krishna he found a subjec