Yamuna is the river Yamuna worshipped as a goddess, the great river of northern India that runs beside the Ganga and joins it at the sacred confluence of Prayag (Allahabad). In myth she is a daughter of the sun-god Surya and the twin sister of Yama, the lord of the dead, a striking pair, the life-giving river and the god of death born together, and she is imagined as dark in colour, where her sister-river Ganga is white, the two often shown together at temple doorways as guardians of the threshold.
Yamuna's particular sanctity comes from her association with Krishna: her waters run through Braj, the countryside of Krishna's childhood and youth around Vrindavan and Mathura, and the river is bound up with the stories of his life. It is across the flooded Yamuna that the infant Krishna is carried to safety on the night of his birth, the river parting or subsiding to let him pass; it is in the Yamuna that the many-headed serpent Kaliya poisons the water until Krishna subdues him, dancing on his hoods; and it is on her banks that Krishna sports with the cowherd girls. For the devotees of Krishna the Yamuna is therefore not merely sacred water but the intimate companion of the Lord's earthly life, and bathing in her, especially in the Braj country, is an act of deep devotion. Like the Ganga, the physical river faces severe modern pollution, which has sharpened among the devout a sense of the goddess as a suffering sacred person.