The Hill That Refused a God

The Govardhan episode is short and consequential. The cowherds of Braj are preparing their annual offering to Indra, the Vedic god of storm and rain, and Krishna asks them what Indra has ever done for them that the hill and the cattle have not. He tells them to make the offering to Govardhan instead. Indra sends a storm to punish them, and Krishna lifts the hill on one finger and holds it over the whole community and its herds for seven days until the storm exhausts itself. The story is usually read as marking a turn in Hindu worship away from the sacrificial gods of the Vedic order and towards a personal deity who protects the people he lives among. It is also a story about local religion prevailing over imported religion, since Govardhan is a specific hill in a specific district and the offering Krishna recommends is made to it. The hill is worshipped as Krishna rather than as the place where Krishna acted, and the tradition insists on that distinction.

Pilgrims therefore do not climb it. They take stones from it home and treat them as images of the god in their own right, and the practice of keeping a Govardhan stone as a household deity, washed, dressed and offered food like any other image, is widespread well beyond Braj and well beyond the reach of any pilgrimage to the hill.