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Rana Jagat Singh was clearly a devout worshipper whose faithful adhesion to Rajput standards found exhilarating compensations in Krishna's role as lover. Keshav Das's Rasika Priya achieved the greatest popularity at his court its blend of reverent devotion and ecstatic passion fulfilling some of the deepest Rajput needs.
It is likely that in the early years of the seventeenth century, many areas of India possessed no artists whatsoever and if a Hindu ruler was to copy Mughal fashion, the only artists available to him might be those of an inferior rank. And although exact data are wanting, such circumstances may well explain another document of Krishna, the first illustrated version of Keshav Das's Rasika Priya.
It was written in Hindi, Keshav Das himself supplying both poems and commentary and what was even more significant, the nayaka or lover was portrayed not as any ordinary well-bred young man but as Krishna himself. As a girl waits at the tryst it is not for an ordinary lover but for Krishna that Keshav Das depicts her as longing. 'Is he detained by work? Is he loath to leave his friends?
As vernacular languages were used for poetry, problems of Hindi composition began to dwarf those of Sanskrit. It was necessary to discuss how best to treat each nayika and nayaka not only in Sanskrit but in Hindi poetry also, and to meet this situation Keshav Das, the poet of Orchha in Bundelkhand, produced in 1591 his Rasika Priya.
None the less, in producing their illustrations, the artists made Krishna the central figure and we can only conclude that eschewing the obvious Rasika Priya, Raja Kirpal Pal had directed his artists to do for Sanskrit what Keshav Das had done for Hindi poetry to celebrate Krishna as the most varied and skilled of lovers and as a corollary show him in a whole variety of romantic and poetic situations.
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