If the Gita gave Krishna to philosophy, the bhakti movement gave him to everyone else, and it is through devotion far more than doctrine that he is actually worshipped.
From the Tamil Alvar poets of the early medieval south to the great northern devotional poets, Mirabai, who sang of Krishna as her only husband, and Surdas, who dwelt on the child of Vrindavan, bhakti made a direct, emotional, often ecstatic love of Krishna the heart of the practice, open in principle across caste and gender in a way the older ritual order was not. The Gita Govinda of Jayadeva set the love of Krishna and Radha to music; Krishna devotion is sung at least as much as it is read.
The festivals carry it into ordinary life. Janmashtami marks his birth; Holi, the festival of colour, is bound up with his play; the rasa-lila is danced and dramatised; and at Puri in Odisha the temple of Jagannath, a form of Krishna, mounts the vast chariot procession from which the word "juggernaut" entered English.
In the twentieth century the devotion went global. In 1966 A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami founded the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, the Hare Krishna movement, in New York, carrying the Gaudiya worship of the Vrindavan Krishna and chanting the divine names in Western streets. The village cowherd whom colonial commentators had found an embarrassment thus became one of the most globally visible faces of Hinduism, and did so precisely through the devotional Krishna they had wanted to play down.