Mathura

Vaishnava tradition places the birth of Krishna in a prison cell at Mathura, where his uncle Kamsa had confined his parents to prevent the fulfilment of a prophecy that their eighth child would kill him. The infant was carried across the Yamuna to Gokul the same night and raised among cowherds, and the whole cycle of childhood stories that Braj country celebrates follows from that displacement. The city is therefore the beginning and the return point of the narrative rather than its setting: Krishna comes back to Mathura as a young man, kills Kamsa, and later leaves for Dwarka on the western coast.

Pilgrims work a circuit that takes in the Janmasthan in the city, the temples of Vrindavan a few miles upstream where the childhood is remembered, the hill of Govardhan that Krishna is said to have lifted on one finger, and a long circumambulation of the whole Braj region on foot. Holi at Mathura and its neighbouring villages is unusually elaborate and lasts far longer than the single day kept elsewhere, including the well known exchange at Barsana in which the women of the village drive the men off with staves. The Yamuna itself is an object of devotion here as much as the temples on its bank, and the ghats are used for bathing and for the evening lamp offering.

Mathura was one of the two great workshop cities of the Kushan empire in the early centuries of the common era, and its mottled red sandstone travelled as far as the northwest. Its carvers produced some of the earliest images of the Buddha in human form, alongside Jain votive tablets, Hindu deities and portrait statues of the Kushan kings, often from the same yards, so the school stands as evidence that one craft tradition served several religions at once rather than dividing along them. A Jain council was held at Mathura, traditionally under Arya Skandila, to recover and settle the Svetambara scriptures after famine had scattered the community, and the recension it produced is one of the two that the later council at Valabhi had to reconcile. The modern city is better known for a dispute.

The Katra Keshav Dev complex, held to stand on the prison site, adjoins the Shahi Idgah mosque built in the seventeenth century, and litigation seeking possession of the mosque ground has continued for decades. The Places of Worship Act of 1991 froze the religious character of such sites as they stood at independence, with the Ayodhya case expressly excluded from it, and how far that statute applies at Mathura is precisely what the current suits are about. The atlas records the claim and the statute rather than adjudicating between them.