Mathura Krishna

Kṛṣṇa of Mathura — the city of the flute

The Braj that the scriptures remember

For Krishna, Mathura is not a place he passed through. It is the city of his birth, of his first deeds, and of the years in which he grows — and the Harivaṃśa and Bhāgavata Purāṇa narrative material is set in a Braj landscape that medieval and later tradition fixed with a precision the texts themselves do not have. That traditional fixing is the work of commentarial and devotional literature over centuries, and its geography is real to the tradition even where it is not textual. An entry on Krishna of Mathura should therefore distinguish two things that are easily merged: what the Purāṇas say, and what the Braj cult has built on them.

The Braj tradition is the most elaborately developed Krishnaite geography in India — the Braj Bhāṣā devotional poetry of Surdas, whose Sūrdāsa Padh is one of the great works of Hindi literature, and the wider body of Braj verse by Meera, Haridas, Nanddas and their successors. Their Braj is not the Braj of the Purāṇas; it is a literary language with its own audience and its own theology, and the rasa theory that governs it is a theory of devotion before it is a theory of love.

The Braj temple circuit — Govardhan, Radha-kunda, Śrī Govindarāja at Vrindavan, Kusum Sarovar, the gīrgāra and mān harī temple of Govardhan where Krishna is said to have lifted the hill — is a pilgrimage landscape that grew out of that literature and of dharmsetu* pilgrimage, and it is administered by the Vaishnava institutions rather than by the temple of any one deity. That is why a deity entry for Krishna of Braj should point to the circuit and the literature rather than describe a single shrine.

The Braj cult has a social history too: its sampradāyas, the bhagavata lineages with their own initiation and their own claims about who may eat in the temple, and the long tension in Braj ritual practice between those who observe and those who do not.

Sources and what is still unverified

The Harivaṃśa, the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and the Mahābhārata for the scriptural material; a history of Sanskrit literature for the commentarial tradition; the district gazetteer for the local record.

For a named guardian, ideally a Braj or Hindi speaker: which rasa and which specific commentarial tradition is meant when the entry speaks of Braj theology; the current administration of the Govardhan and Vrindavan institutions; and the contemporary practice of dharmsetu* pilgrimage, which is a live religious and legal subject rather than a heritage item.