The Krishna trail

Born at midnight in Kaṁsa's prison, carried across the Yamunā the same night to Nanda and Yaśodā's house in Gokul. Everything the country sings about a child — the stolen butter, the flute, the calves, lifting Govardhan hill on one finger for seven days, the moonlit dance with the gopīs in Vṛndāvan — happened inside a circle a day's walk wide. Braj still does the walk: the twenty-one kilometre Govardhan parikramā, barefoot, any day of the year.

Here he isthe child, and the lover. The only address where both are true at once.

After Kaṁsa, the two brothers were sent to school. Sāndīpani Muni's āśrama in Avantikā — today's Ujjain — is where Krishna and Balarāma learnt the sixty-four arts in sixty-four days, and where the third boy on the bench was a poor brāhmaṇa called Sudāmā. The tank where he is said to have washed his writing slate is still called Aṅkapāta, "the fall of the numerals". A god who had to sit down and do his sums.

Here he isthe student. The one story the whole trail needs and nobody tells at Janmashtami.

Jarāsandha attacked Mathurā seventeen times. Rather than let the city be ground down, Krishna moved everyone west to a strip of coast and had Viśvakarmā raise a city on land taken back from the sea. He ruled from here for the rest of his life; the Jagat Mandir's flag is changed five times a day, and Bet Dwarka across the water is where the household lived and where Sudāmā arrived with his handful of rice. Down the coast at Porbandar stands the one temple in India dedicated to Sudāmā himself. The friendship got its own address.

Here he isthe king. The administrator who chose retreat over a siege and was called a deserter for it — a name Gujarat later turned into a title.

He came to the war with no weapon and the reins of a friend's chariot. Under a banyan at Jyotisar, between two armies who had stopped to watch, he told Arjuna the seven hundred verses that most of India has since treated as its operating manual. Then he drove the chariot for eighteen days. The tree is still there. The Gītā Jayantī is kept every Mārgaśīrṣa.

Here he isthe driver. Not the general, not the hero — the man holding the reins who will not fight your battle but will not leave your side either.

Thirty-six years after Kurukshetra, the Yādava clan destroyed itself in a drunken brawl on this beach. Krishna sat under a pipal tree to rest. A hunter named Jarā saw his foot move through the leaves, took it for a deer, and shot. He forgave the man before he left. A few kilometres away, where the Hiraṅ meets the sea below Somnath, is Dehotsarga — the place the body was set down. The trail of his life ends here, on the same coast where his kingdom was.

Here he isthe one who left. Killed by a mistake, and gracious about it.

Kerala's Krishna is small. The image here — four-armed, but a boy — is said to be the very one Krishna himself worshipped at Dwarka; when the sea took the city, Guru and Vāyu carried it south and set it down where Śiva pointed, hence the name. Kerala calls Janmashtami by its second half, Aṣṭamī-Rohiṇī, and the temple's poet Melpathur wrote the Nārāyaṇīyam here while sick, one canto a day, until he was not. Down the road at Ambalappuzha he is fed rice pudding, and at Aranmula he is the charioteer whose boats race on Onam.

Here he isthe child you feed first. Kerala never let him grow up, and does not intend to.

In the thirteenth century Madhvācārya stood on Malpe beach, calmed a ship in a storm, and was offered its ballast: a lump of gopī-chandana clay with a child Krishna inside, churning rod and rope in hand. He installed it here and his eight maṭhas have taken turns caring for it since. Two hundred years later a low-caste singer named Kanakadāsa was refused entry. He sang from outside the back wall. The image turned to face him, and the wall opened a crack — the Kanakana Kiṇḍi, through which everyone now takes darśana, facing west, as Kanaka did.

Here he isthe one who turns around. The temple that built its front door where the back wall used to be.

Krishna came to visit a man called Puṇḍalīk, who was busy washing his parents' feet. Puṇḍalīk tossed a brick over his shoulder — stand on that, I'll be a moment — and did not look up. Krishna is still standing on the brick, hands on his hips, waiting. Every Āṣāḍha, hundreds of thousands of Vārkarīs walk two hundred kilometres to see him, singing Tukārām and Jñāneśvar and Nāmdev, who all wrote to this same man in this same pose.

Here he isthe one who waits. Maharashtra's whole devotional literature is addressed to a god who was told to wait, and did.

The city's Krishna is not in a temple. On the day after Janmashtami, in every lane from Dadar to Thane, a pot of curd is strung nine storeys up and teams of young men called Govindās build a human pyramid to break it. It is the Braj butter theft with a municipal permit, a sponsor's banner and — since the courts got involved — an insurance form. Nobody who has stood in that crowd when the top boy reaches the pot thinks the god is missing.

Here he isthe boy on top of the pyramid. Bombay reads a child's mischief as a team sport, which may be the most Bombay reading possible.

A Rājpūt named Boḍāṇā walked to Dwarka every six months for most of his life. When he was too old to walk, Krishna is said to have left with him in a bullock cart. The Dwarka priests caught up and demanded gold equal to the image's weight. On the scale, the image weighed no more than Boḍāṇā's wife's nose-ring. Gujarat took the insult in his name — Raṇchhoḍ, one who fled the fight — and made it a title of affection.

Here he isthe one who goes with the devotee, and weighs nothing when weighed against love. Also: the one who is willing to be called a coward.

The image is Krishna at seven, lifting Govardhan with his left hand, and it emerged from that hill itself — the arm first, in 1409, the face seventy years later. In 1672, with Aurangzeb's men approaching, the priests loaded him onto a cart and fled southwest until the wheels stuck at this spot in Mewar. He lives in a haveli, not a temple, and is visited eight times a day like the head of a household: woken, bathed, dressed, fed, put to rest. The families who keep his house are largely the merchant castes of Gujarat and Rajasthan — the Pichwai painters work for them, and the fifty-six-dish offering, the chhappan bhog, is a bania's idea of a proper meal for a child.

Here he isthe lord of the house, in a trader's town. Ninety kilometres east, at Chittorgarh, Mīrā called the same boy Giridhar Gopāl and left a palace for him.

The image was found in Vṛndāvan by Rūpa Gosvāmī in the sixteenth century, and Mān Singh built it the grandest temple in Braj. When the temples there were threatened, it travelled west with the Kachwaha kings and was settled in 1735 in the garden of the new city, in direct line of sight from the ruler's window. Sawai Jai Singh II is said to have declared Govind Dev the king of Jaipur and himself the dīvān. Every Jaipur morning still begins with the queue to his maṅgalā darśana.

Here he isthe king with a human deputy. The one Krishna who holds an actual office.

Odisha's Krishna is never alone. He stands as three: elder brother Balabhadra, sister Subhadrā, and himself — round-eyed, armless, carved from a neem log that is ritually replaced every twelve to nineteen years so that he, too, changes bodies. Once a year the three siblings are pulled through the streets to their aunt's house and back, and anyone may touch the rope. Jayadeva's Gīta Govinda, the twelfth-century love poem of Rādhā and Krishna, is sung to him every night as he is put to bed.

Here he isthe sibling. The one address where he is defined by who stands beside him.

In 1486 a boy called Nimāi was born here, on the Gaṅgā. As Caitanya Mahāprabhu he took Krishna out of the temple and into the lane: kīrtan, drums, dancing, the sixteen-word mantra repeated until the singer forgets who is singing. Bengal's Krishna is the one Rādhā loved, and Caitanya's followers held that the highest thing a human can feel is her longing. Five centuries later his movement has a headquarters here whose dome you can see across the river, and a branch in most cities of the world.

Here he isthe beloved. Bengal's contribution was to say that Rādhā's side of the story is the point.

In 1779 King Bhāgyachandra, who had dreamt the form of Krishna dancing, had it carved from a jackfruit tree and choreographed a Rāsa Līlā for its installation, with his own daughter as Rādhā. The Manipuri Rāsa became one of India's eight classical dance forms; the Manipuri Saṅkīrtana — drums, cymbals, and a devotion that looks like a martial art — is on the UNESCO list of intangible heritage. At the eastern edge of the country, Krishna is the god you meet by moving.

Here he isthe dancer. The Braj moonlight, restaged in a valley two thousand kilometres east, and never stopped.

Śrīmanta Śaṅkaradeva was born here in 1449 and spent a long life arguing that Assam needed one Lord, one Name, one book, and no images. His Ekaśaraṇa Dharma is Krishna without an idol: a nāmghar in every village, a scripture on a throne where the image would be, and Bhāonā plays that turn the Bhāgavatam into theatre. The monasteries on Majuli island still run the way he set them up. It is the most austere Krishna on the map, and Assam's most crowded institution.

Here he isa name, not a face. The one region that chose the sound over the sight.

One of the 108 Vaiṣṇava divya-deśams, sung by the Āḻvārs, and the only Krishna I know of who wears a moustache. He stands here as the charioteer of Kurukshetra, and the processional image bears the marks of the arrows that struck him while he held Arjuna's reins. Tamil Nadu's Krishna is a grown man who has been to the war. Further south, Mannārguḍi calls itself Dakṣiṇa Dvārakā and keeps a Rājagopāla who is a king with a cowherd's name.

Here he isthe veteran. The scars are on the face, and they are counted.

A girl called Kōdai, found under a tulsi plant, grew up wearing the temple garlands before they went to the deity and refusing every human groom. Her thirty verses, the Tiruppāvai, are a Tamil gopī's vow: every dawn of Mārgaḻi she goes door to door waking her friends to go and see him. Tamil households still sing one verse a day for the month. The temple tower is on the state's emblem. The god of the poem is Braj's; the voice is entirely hers.

Here he isthe one worth waking your friends for. Tamil bhakti's first-person, in a girl's voice, twelve hundred years old.

No great temple here: a farmer-poet. In the fifteenth century Bammera Pōtana ploughed his field by day and by night rendered the whole Bhāgavatam into Telugu verse so sweet that children still learn the stanzas about the boy stealing butter before they learn arithmetic. A king asked him to dedicate the book to the court. He refused, and dedicated it to Rāma instead, and went back to his field. Telugu's Krishna is a poem, not a place.

Here he isa language. Andhra and Telangana know him in metre — and, this site would add, in the Tyāgarāja and Annamayya kīrtanas that followed.