THE SYNTHESIS OF HINDUISM 169
Krishna had been written in the twentieth century, Brahma would have had no place in it at all. Partially forgotten as He was then, He is wholly forgotten now. From this evidence then, we may infer that the personality of Brahma was the first, and that of Shiva the next, to be developed as concepts of Supreme Deity.
Thus there was a period in Hinduism when the name of Brahma the Creator was held in reverence—having dominated the theology of a preceding age—and used in conjunction with those of Shiva and Vishnu to make the specification of deity complete. Hinduism at that time deliberately preached God as the Three-in-One, the Unity-in-Trinity. This theological idea we find expressed in its purity in the Caves of Elephanta, and perhaps slightly later in the Ramayana of Valmiki.
The poet Kalidasa also, writing both the Kumara-savibhava and the Raghuvamsa, would appear to have been under the inspiration of this Hindu idea of the Trinity. He shared the desire of the power that carved Elephanta to represent the synthesis of Hinduism by doing something to concretise both its popular aspects.
But the form under which Vishnu appears in Elephanta is purely theological. It is Lakshmi-Narayana, the idea that to this day is more familiar to the West and South of India than to Bengal. This theological concept — or divine incarnation, as it is called — was fully formulated before the Ramayana was written, and is referred to there
