The forest of Krishna
In the Harivamsha, the Vishnu Purana and above all the Bhagavata Purana, Krishna grows up among cowherds in the countryside of Braj, near Mathura. Vrindavan, "the forest of tulasi", is the scene of his play with the cowherd girls, the gopis, and his love for Radha, of the circle dance on the bank of the Yamuna, and of his victory over the serpent Kaliya. These stories became the centre of Vaishnava devotion across India, and the landscape of Braj became a sacred geography of groves, ponds and hills, each linked to an episode.
Rediscovery
By the early sixteenth century the places of the stories were, according to the tradition of the Gaudiya school, largely forgotten or unidentified. The Bengali saint Chaitanya visited Braj around 1515, and he sent his followers there to recover the sites and to write. The brothers Rupa and Sanatana, former officials of the Bengal sultan, settled in Vrindavan with a small group of companions, later known as the six Gosvamis. They identified the places of Krishna's play, composed the Sanskrit works that became the theology and aesthetics of Gaudiya devotion, and founded temples for images that they said they had discovered. Other schools, especially the followers of Vallabha at Govardhan and the Radhavallabha and Haridasi schools, were active in Braj at the same time.
The temples
The Gosvamis' temples were built with the help of Rajput nobles in Mughal service. The greatest, the Govindadeva temple, was built in 1590 by Raja Man Singh of Amber, Akbar's general. It is a huge cruciform building of red sandstone that originally rose several storeys higher than it does now. The loss of its upper storeys is traditionally attributed to an order of Aurangzeb, though the evidence for the details is debated. During the late seventeenth century the main images were moved for safety to Rajasthan: Govindadeva to Jaipur, where he is still worshipped in the palace complex, and others to Karauli and elsewhere. Replacements were installed at Vrindavan.
Later temples include the Radha Raman, the Banke Bihari, associated with the musician-saint Swami Haridas, and nineteenth-century temples built by merchants and rulers, among them the Rangaji temple in a south Indian style. The International Society for Krishna Consciousness opened its temple in 1975, and Vrindavan has since drawn many foreign devotees.
The town today
Vrindavan receives very large numbers of pilgrims, especially at Holi and Janmashtami, and many walk the circuit of the Braj groves. It is also known for its widows, many from Bengal, who came or were brought to live by chanting in the temples. Their poverty has been the subject of court cases and welfare schemes. Rapid growth, pollution of the Yamuna and building on the old groves have changed the town greatly.
Further reading
- Eck, Diana L. India: A Sacred Geography. Harmony Books, 2012
- Hawley, John Stratton. A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement. Harvard University Press, 2015
- Dimock, Edward C. The Place of the Hidden Moon. University of Chicago Press, 1966
See also
- Krishna — Krishna is a central deity of Hinduism, worshipped as the eighth avatar of Vishnu and, in many traditions, as the supreme god in his own right, whose life is narrated primarily across the Mahabharata, the Harivamsa, and the Bhagavata Purana.
- Mathura — Mathura is an ancient city on the Yamuna River in western Uttar Pradesh, revered in Hindu tradition as the birthplace of Krishna and, in antiquity, a major political capital and centre of religious sculpture under the Kushan Empire.
- Krishna Janmabhoomi — Krishna Janmabhoomi is a temple complex in Mathura, Uttar Pradesh, venerated as Krishna's birthplace and the site of repeated temple destruction and reconstruction, most consequentially under Aurangzeb in 1670, and of ongoing legal dispute with the adjacent Shahi Idgah mosque.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.