Vrindaban Days: Memories of an Indian Holy Town

Chapter 3 - A Brief History

"This transcendental land of Vrindaban is populated by goddesses of fortune, who manifest as milkmaids and love Krishna above everything. The trees here fulfill all desires, and the waters of immortality flow through land made of philosopher's stone. Here, all speech is song, all walking is dancing, and the flute is the Lord's constant companion. Cows flood the land with abundant milk, and everything is self-luminous, like the sun. Since every moment in Vrindaban is spent in loving service to Krishna, there is no past, present or future." [Brahma-samhita]

Mathura! Birthplace of Lord Krishna. God's hometown. "Muttra! Muttra! Muttra!" the drivers helper cries out. The bus halts at one of the station platforms. Mathura. Muttra. Matura. The British favored the “Muttra" spelling, perhaps because it best approximates the local pronunciation. But this seems as antiquated as "Hindoo." Today, the "Mathura” spelling prevails.

The Skanda Purana dates Mathura's history back to Satya Yuga, more than two million years ago, when Dhruva Maharaj performed austerities here. Srimad Bhagavatam relates that over a million years ago, during the Treta Yuga, the Mathura area was a dense forest inhabited by a giant ogre named Madhu. Being a conceited demon, Madhu named this forest after himself—Madhuban—and bequeathed it to his son, the fierce Lavana. At that time, Lord Rama was ruling the earth as King of Ayodhya. The superhuman Lavana challenged Rama to single combat, but Rama considered Lavana an unworthy opponent and sent His younger brother Satrugna to battle him. After killing Lavana, Satrugna hewed down the woods at Madhuban and founded on its site the city of Madhu Puri.

More recent were Lord Krishna's times, only five thousand years ago. Then, the throne of Mathura was occupied by the family of Bhoja, descendants of the great Yadu dynasty. King Ugrasena was the last emperor in this family, and Kamsa was his only son. Although he would have been crowned in due time, Kamsa was so demonic that he imprisoned his father and usurped the throne. Kamsa was no ordinary mortal, but a reincarnation of the demon Kalanemi, who had been killed ages ago by Lord Vishnu Himself.

Kamsa learned of his previous life through the sage Narada. Narada prophesied that Lord Vishnu, as the son of Vasudeva and Kamsa’s sister Devaki, would kill Kamsa again. Hoping to thwart destiny, Kamsa imprisoned Vasudeva and Devaki and killed their offspring as soon as they were born. When Devaki became pregnant for the seventh time, the Supreme Lord appeared in her womb in the form of Balarama. By the Lord’s own yoga-maya potency, Balarama was transferred from Devaki’s womb to that of Rohini, one of the wives of Vasudeva in Vrindaban, and everyone thought that Devaki had a miscarriage.

Devaki’s eighth child, Krishna, was not begotten in the womb like an ordinary child. He manifested Himself before Vasudeva and Devaki in an effulgent form colored like a raincloud. He had four arms, and in His hands He held a conchshell, mace, disc, and lotus flower. His hair was long, as black as a raven, and His beautiful dark eyes were shaped like lotus petals. He was dressed in yellow silks, and He wore necklaces, bracelets, earrings, a crown, and other ornaments, all made with precious metals and dazzling jewels. Indeed, the very brilliance of His body lit up all directions.

Devaki feared that Krishna would meet the same fate as her other children. “I understand that this transcendental form is generally seen only by great sages,” she said, “but I'm still afraid. As soon as Kamsa realizes that You're here, he will try to kill You. For now, please, become invisible to our material vision.” The Lord relieved Devaki's anxiety by assuming His primal two-armed form as Krishna and casting a spell over all the residents of Kamsa’s palace. The dungeon guards fell into a deep sleep, and the gates of the dungeon flew open. Vasudeva then picked up Krishna, who now appeared as an infant, and carried Him from Mathura to Gokul on the other side of the River Jamuna. There, while everyone was asleep, he exchanged Krishna with a girl who had just been born to a cowherd king, Nanda Maharaj, and his wife Yasoda. Vasudeva then returned to the prison with the girl.

When Kamsa was informed of the birth, he hurried to the dungeon and seized the newborn infant to dash her upon the stone floor. Instantly, the infant rose into the air and assumed the eight-armed form of Durga, goddess of material nature. “Fool!” said Durga. “You can’t kill me. And the child who will kill you is already born.”

It was then that Kamsa began his persecutions, sending forth powerful demons to hunt out and kill Krishna, but Krishna and His brother Balarama easily dispatched them all.

Living in the beautiful land of Vrindaban and tending cows, Krishna manifested His transcendental pastimes with His parents and friends, the gopas (cowherd boys) and gopis (milkmaids). Through the ages, these pastimes have given joy to sages, who worship them as replicas of the Lord’s eternal activities in the spiritual sky. Dancing with the gopis, herding cows and playing with the other cowherd boys, killing demons and protecting the inhabitants of Vrindaban, Lord Krishna at all times displayed His divine opulences.

When Krishna attained His sixteenth year, He left Vrindaban and went to Mathura. He promptly killed King Kamsa and restored Ugrasena to his throne.

Krishna defended Mathura seventeen times against Jarasanda, the vain king of Maghda (modem Rajgir in Bihar). Finally, Krishna chose to retreat to Dwarka on the coast of modem Gujarat. There He ruled an opulent kingdom. When Mathura fell into Jarasanda’s hands, all the palaces and temples of the Yadu dynasty were destroyed and new buildings erected in honor of Jarasanda’s conquest. During the Battle of Kurukshetra, Lord Krishna, Bhima, and Arjuna invaded Maghda, killed Jarasanda, and burned his capital.

Reportedly, at the site of Lord Krishna’s birth, a temple was built by Vajranabha, King of Mathura and son of Lord Krishna’s grandson Aniruddha. Apart from references in the Ramayana and Mahabharata—and the later Puranic accounts, which fix the advent of Kali Yuga and death of Maharaj Pariksit (Arjuna’s grandson) at 3042 B.C.—there’s no specific historical mention of Mathura until Alexander’s crossing of the Indus in 326 B.C.

Though bhakti cults devoted to Lord Krishna are known to have existed in Mathura centuries before Christ, Mathura’s Buddhist culture thrived after Emperor Ashoka espoused the faith in the third century B.C. About 175 B.C., Pushyamitra Sunga, a Hindu sun-worshiper whose origin is unknown, repelled a Greek invasion by Demetrios of Bactria and Menander. Pushyamitra occupied Mathura and inaugurated brahminical resistance against Buddhism. At this time, Patanjali was compiling his Sanskrit grammar. The Yuga Purana of the Gargi Samhita refers to a Greek conquest in 144 B.C.

Then those hateful conquerors, the Greeks, after reducing Saketa [Ayodhya or Oudh], the country of Panchala [the area north and west of Delhi, from the Himalayas to the River Chambal], and Mathura, will take Kusuma-Dhvaja [Pataliputra, modern Patna], and every province will assuredly become disordered.

Beginning in the first or second centuries B.C., the Sakas migrated from the northern passes and established their kingdoms in the Punjab and Mathura. “Saka” was a term given loosely by the Indians to the Afghans and other tribes dwelling in the northwest frontier.

Geographically, north India is most vulnerable to attack. Century after century, soldiers would sweep through the northwest mountain passes and cross the Indus River: Persians, Greeks, and Afghans, the armies of Alexander the Great, Mahmud of Ghazni, Timur, and Babur. Nothing could discourage the hordes from Central Asia. They crossed the Indus and took the route of least resistance, avoiding the scorching desert of Rajputana and entering the fertile Ganges and Jamuna plains, rich alluvial land capable of sustaining great armies. The Ganges and Jamuna flowed through India’s spiritual and artistic center, its heart’s core, a valuable place for a conqueror to obtain and hold. Here indeed was the seat of empires.

The Buddhist sculptures of Sarnath and Mathura date from the reign of Kanishka in the second century A.D. They include gracious lifesize carvings of standing Buddhas and bodhisattvas whose faces and delicate flowing robes combine the best of the Greek influences with Indian art. Like Ashoka before him, Kanishka dedicated himself to the spread of Buddhism, though his ancestors were Zoroastrians. Architecture also flourished under his reign and that of his successors, and many fine buildings lined Mathura’s streets. Indeed, Mathura attracted Buddhist pilgrims from as far away as China. In 400 A.D., Fa Hian journeyed to India in search of ancient Buddhist texts. He noted that most citizens of Mathura were staunch Buddhists. There were no less than twenty Buddhist monasteries, some stupas, and three thousand Buddhist monks.

Chandragupta founded the great Gupta dynasty in 320 A.D. He ruled from Pataliputra, and his son Samudra added Mathura to the Gupta empire. His grandson, Chandragupta Vikramaditya, built a great temple at Lord Krishna’s birthplace, and this temple stood until the advent of the Muslims in 1018. With the Guptas dawned a Hindu renaissance, a golden age of music, sculpture, painting, and architecture. A partial breakup of the empire in 480 was precipitated by an invasion of nomadic Huns pouring in from central Asia. With the death of Harsha in 647, the empire disintegrated into small kingdoms whose histories are unknown.

In the seventh century, Hwen Thsang visited Mathura. He noted that five temples had been erected to Vedic deities and that the number of Buddhist monks had declined to two thousand. “The people [of Mathura] are soft and easy-natured,” wrote Hwen Thsang, “and take delight in performing meritorious works with a view to a future life.” At that time, the soil was fertile, and grain grew abundantly. Cotton of a fine texture was cultivated, and there were great forests of mango trees. Hwen Thsang even described the two different types of mango: the large, which remains green, and the small, which turns yellow as it ripens.

By the ninth century, all the Buddhist edifices in Mathura had been destroyed. Once again Mathurans sought shelter in the authority of the Vedas, which had been rejected by Buddha. This change is generally attributed to the influence of Shankaracharya’s teachings. Shankara’s exact dates are unknown, but most scholars place him in the eighth or ninth century. In any case, his Vedantic doctrine succeeded in weakening Buddhism in India by the ninth century. The Muslim invasions of the twelfth century dealt the death blow to Buddhism as an organized religion in India. To escape massacre, Buddhist monks fled to Nepal and Tibet.

In 1018 A.D., Mahmud of Ghazni and his Muslim hordes attacked Mathura. Mahmud’s secretary, Mir Alutbi, writes:

A Hindu king named Kulchand was overconfident of his strength, for no one had ever defeated him. He ruled vast territories, owned great wealth, and led a numerous and brave army with huge elephants. When Kulchand saw Mahmud of Ghazni advancing against him, he drew up his army and elephants in a great forest [maha-ban]. Unable to repulse the invaders, the Hindus quitted the fort and tried to cross the broad river [Jamunal. When some 50,000 men had been killed or drowned, Kulchand took a dagger, slew his wife, then killed himself. From this victory, the Sultan Mahmud gained 185 fine elephants, besides other booty. (Tarikh-i-Yamini)

The Muslims quickly proved themselves a destructive force, for their policy was one of systematic plunder and massacre. Mahmud’s attack on Mathura was devastating. Vikramaditya’s great temple at Krishna’s birthsite was destroyed, although Mahmud himself admitted that it must have taken two hundred years to construct. “In the middle of the city there was a temple larger and finer than the rest, which can neither be described nor painted,” Mahmud noted. The Deities included “five of red gold, each five yards high, with eyes formed of priceless jewels.” After viewing the great temple, Mahmud ordered it and all other Hindu temples in the area “burned with naptha and fire, and leveled to the ground.” Thus he obliterated the grandest monuments of ancient India.

When Mahmud died in 1030, his kingdom stretched from Mesopotamia and the Caspian to the Punjab and the northern Jamuna, almost to Delhi itself. Thus he paved the way for the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire, which would engulf most of the subcontinent.

Despite torture and oppression, most Mathurans remained Hindu, thanks to the almost exclusively brahminical population. It was the low shudra (laborer) caste, as well as the outcastes, that the Muslims managed to convert. Hindu temples were robbed, jewels torn off the Deities, altars desecrated, priests beaten. If temples were left standing, it was because it took too much effort to knock them down.

Mathura’s history is almost a total blank during the five hundred years from Mahmud’s first attack to the beginning of Akbar’s reign (1018-1556). The Hindus tried to live inconspicuously, afraid of provoking their conquerors. They continued to worship in their impoverished temples and were careful not to display wealth by offering large donations to temples and priests. A jealous Muslim was dangerous indeed. Muslim zealots would sometimes desecrate Hindu holy places by slaughtering cows and defecating in temples. They even made several attempts to change the name of Mathura to Islamabad (or Islampur) and the name of Vrindaban to Muminabad, but the steel will of the Hindus always won out.

In October, 1512, Lord Chaitanya Mahaprabhu arrived at Vrindaban, looking for the site of Krishna’s pastimes. Vrindaban was then a thick forest. Only Krishna Himself, in the guise of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, could have discerned the exact locations of His lila.

He ordered His principal disciples, the six Goswamis, to excavate the newly discovered sites and build temples there. That Lord Chaitanya did this during the height of the Muslim persecutions testifies to His fearlessness and supernatural abilities. The Goswamis also displayed great bravery by following Lord Chaitanya’s orders and going to Vrindaban during the reign of a series of fanatical sultans.

Examples of Muslim cruelty at this time were recorded by Abdullah in Tarikh-i-Daudi:

Sultan Sikandar Lodi [1488-1516] was so zealous a Muslim that he utterly destroyed many places of Hindu worship and left not a single vestige remaining. He entirely ruined the shrines of Mathura and turned their principal temples into serais and colleges. Their stone images were given to the butchers to serve them as meat-weights, and all the Hindus in Mathura were strictly prohibited from shaving their heads and beards and performing their ablutions. He thus put an end to all Hindu rites there.

In contrast was the enlightened reign of Akbar (1556–1605). Akbar tried to fuse the best of all cultures. Although he was illiterate, he would invite Hindu sages to his court to recite the shlokas of Ramayana and Mahabharata. Akbar’s religious tolerance permitted a flourishing of temples, particularly in Vrindaban. In 1573, Akbar even paid the Goswamis a visit, and they led him blindfolded into the sacred Vrinda groves at Nidhuban, where Lord Krishna and Radha had rested after the rasa dance. There, surrounded by sacred tulasi trees, the emperor experienced a vision of such intensity that he proclaimed Vrindaban to be holy ground indeed. He therefore supported the Hindu kings, who, at the request of the Goswamis, decided to erect a series of magnificent buildings in homage to Lord Krishna. The varied architectural styles reflecting Akbar’s own eclectic views were successfully combined in the temples of Govindaji, Madana Mohana, and Gopinath. The temples of Keshava Dev at Krishna’s birthsite, and Radha Ballabha and Jugal Kishore in Vrindaban, were built during the reign of Akbar’s son, Jahangir (16051627). Jahangir more or less followed his father’s policy of religious tolerance, but the next emperor, Shah Jahan (1628-1658), reverted to barbaric cruelty, trying to stamp out everything non-Muslim. His son was the cruelest tyrant of all—Aurangzeb.

Aurangzeb (1659-1707) was a compulsive destroyer of Hindu temples. He was so demoniac that Hindus still consider him a reincarnation of Kalayavana, the demon who pursued Krishna and was burned to ashes by the glance of the sage Muchukunda. Like Kamsa, Aurangzeb was so eager to seize the throne that he imprisoned his own father. Shah Jahan died captive in the fort at Agra, within view of his beloved Taj Mahal.

Whenever Aurangzeb saw a Hindu temple, he quickly thought of reasons to knock it down. He leveled the top stories of Vrindaban’s Govindaji Temple because he wanted nothing higher than his own palace in Mathura. Deities were stripped of their jewels and taken to Agra, where they were buried under the steps of a mosque “so that Muslims might trample upon them forever.” In 1669, using a Jat peasant rebellion as an excuse, he razed the great 250-foot high Keshava Dev Temple, which had replaced Vikramaditya’s temple, destroyed by Mahmud, and also another Krishna temple built in 1150 A.D. and destroyed by Sikandar Lodi. Aurangzeb constructed his own mosque over the ruins of Keshava Dev, and there it still stands.

Rulers following Aurangzeb also dealt cruelly with the Hindus. Mathura was the scene of dreadful slaughter in 1757, when the army of the Afghan chief Ahmad Shah Durrani passed through. In 1759, the Hindus formed the Maratha Confederacy, a powerful alliance to cast off the yoke of oppression, but they were scattered two years later at the Battle of Panipat.

As the Mughal Empire finally broke into conflicting factions, the British began to consolidate the country. In 1803, Mathura became a military station on the line of the British frontier, which then extended to the Jamuna. As soon as the British took over, Mathura was rocked by the most violent earthquake in recorded history (August 31, 1803). Many buildings collapsed, and fissures opened up in fields. The Jama Masjid’s gateway cracked, and one minaret fell over.

The British annexed the adjacent kingdom of Bharatpur in 1826, and in 1832 Mathura was made the capital of a new district out of the remnants of the old districts of Agra and Sa’dabad. During the 1857 rebellion, the Mathura sepoys killed a British lieutenant and seized the treasury, but after seven months the rebellion was quelled, and Pax Britannia restored.

When digging the foundation of a new courthouse in 1860, the British discovered a number of Buddhist statues, pillars, and bas reliefs, all executed in the beautiful red sandstone that is so plentiful around Mathura. They also found a pedestal, dating from the first century A.D., of a seated figure called Vasudeva, another name for Krishna.

Since Independence, Hindus have dreamed of restoring Mathura to its former Puranic glory, even planning to build a Radha-Krishna temple adjacent to Aurangzeb’s mosque. This temple will replace the Keshava Dev Temple destroyed by Aurangzeb.

Hindus have suffered through nine centuries of oppression. Now they are looking forward to a reawakening of Vedic culture. By bending like the reeds of the great plains about them, they have prevailed.