Vrindavan

The Krishna of Vrindavan is not the counsellor of the Bhagavad Gita but the cowherd boy of the tenth book of the Bhagavata Purana, who steals butter, plays the flute, lifts a hill on one finger and dances with the milkmaids at night. The theology built on those stories treats play rather than duty as the highest activity and the love of the gopis, and above all of Radha, as the model for the soul.

The town as it stands is the result of a deliberate recovery. Chaitanya came to Braj early in the sixteenth century and identified sites in a landscape that had largely reverted to forest and village. He then sent a group of his followers, remembered as the six Gosvamis, to live there, locate the places named in the texts, build temples and write the theology that would order the whole devotional system. Rupa Gosvami's analysis of the modes of devotional emotion, and the ranking of the sweet mode above the reverent, is the framework Gaudiya Vaishnavism still uses.

Their temples survive in various states. Madan Mohan and Govind Dev are sixteenth century buildings, the latter reduced under Aurangzeb; Radha Raman keeps a small self manifested image and an unbroken line of service; Banke Bihari, from the nineteenth century, is the most crowded, and its curtain is drawn across the image at intervals because the deity's gaze is held to be too intense to meet for long. Several of the original images were carried to Rajasthan during Mughal pressure and are worshipped there to this day.

Vrindavan is a town organised around circumambulation. Pilgrims walk the circuit of the town and the longer circuit of the whole Braj region, stopping at ponds, groves and hills that the tradition maps onto episodes in Krishna's life. The dramatic form called rasa lila, performed by boy actors trained for it, stages those episodes as worship rather than as theatre, and the singing traditions of the temples keep a repertoire of devotional poetry in Braj Bhasha. Holi in the surrounding villages, particularly the exchange between Barsana and Nandgaon, is celebrated with an intensity that draws visitors from across India.

The town also holds a population of widows, women who came or were sent from Bengal and elsewhere to live near Krishna and who have sung in the bhajan ashrams for a small daily allowance of food. Their situation drew public and legal attention in India from around 2012, and government and voluntary programmes have since provided pensions, shelters and medical care, with mixed results. It is a devotional practice and a social problem at once, and it is honest to say both.

Since the 1970s Vrindavan has also been an international place. The Krishna-Balaram temple, opened in 1975 by the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, holds the memorial of its founder Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada and receives foreign devotees in numbers, so a sixteenth century recovery of a sacred landscape now has a global congregation attached to it.