The Tenth Book and What Grew From It

One book of the twelve carries most of the work's influence. The tenth tells the childhood and youth of Krishna in Vrindavan, the butter thefts, the lifting of the hill, the flute and the circle dance with the cowherd women, and it does so in a register of intimacy and play that had no real precedent in Sanskrit religious narrative.

Later devotional literature across India returns to these episodes constantly. The commentarial and vernacular reception is enormous. Sanskrit commentaries multiplied, and translations and reworkings appeared in Bengali, Braj, Tamil, Telugu, Assamese, Marathi and other languages, often as independent works rather than renderings. Devotional movements from the sixteenth century onward took the tenth book as their principal scripture, and one of them made the text and its commentary the basis of a whole theology of relationship with God. The dating is a separate matter and is argued on linguistic and text historical grounds rather than on the tradition's own account, which places the work far earlier. The atlas records the scholarly range and the traditional claim as two distinct statements, because they answer to different kinds of evidence and neither is a correction of the other.