Yamunaयमुना

Yamuna (यमुना) is the great tributary of the Ganga and a goddess whose character is all intimacy where her sister-river's is majesty. Dark-watered where Ganga is fair, she is the river of Braj, the country of Krishna's childhood, and Vaishnava devotion holds her especially dear: her banks are the landscape of the god's play.

Daughter of the Sun

In the Puranas, Yamuna is the daughter of Surya, the sun, and his wife Sanjna, and the sister of Yama, the lord of death. Tradition tells that a bath in her waters on Yama Dvitiya, the second day after Diwali, when Yama dined at his sister's home, frees the bather from the fear of death; the day survives as Bhai Dooj, the festival of brothers and sisters. Her other name, Kālindī, derives from Kalinda, the mountain of her source.

Krishna's river

The Yamuna threads the whole Krishna cycle. On the night of his birth, Vasudeva carried the infant across her flood-swollen stream, which parted to give passage. In her depths lived the serpent Kaliya, whose poison the boy Krishna subdued, dancing on the serpent's hoods. On her banks the rasa-lila unfolded, and in the Bhagavata tradition Kālindī herself becomes one of Krishna's wives. For the devotional poets of Braj, the dark river and the dark god are almost reflections of one another.

Iconography

Yamuna is imaged as a dark goddess mounted on the tortoise, bearing a water-pot. From the Gupta period she appears with Ganga on the doorjambs of temples, the two rivers flanking the threshold so that entry itself becomes a symbolic bath at their confluence.