Deities
Yamuna
Hindu Deities
Citation Formats
General Reference
APA Style
BibTeX
Yamuna is the river Yamuna as a goddess, daughter of the sun Surya and twin sister of Yama the lord of the dead, and she is dark where her sister-river Ganga is white. Her water runs through the country of Krishna: he is carried across her in flood on the night of his birth, he subdues the serpent Kaliya in her poisoned pool, and the games of his boyhood at Vrindavan are played on her banks, so that for Vaishnavas she is not only a river but the setting and the witness of the divine play. She rides a tortoise, and from the Gupta period she and Ganga stand carved on the two jambs of temple doorways, the rivers guarding the threshold. Bathing in her is held to remove the fear of death, on the strength of her brother's office. She is among the most polluted rivers in India today, and the distance between her sacred standing and her measured condition is one that tradition and state both acknowledge.
Facts
Cult
Principal Cult CentreVishram Ghat at Mathura, where tradition holds Krishna rested after slaying the tyrant Kansa, and the ghats further downstream at Vrindavan. 5 Attributes and IconographyPersonification of the Yamuna river, sister of Yama, the god of death, closely associated in devotional tradition with Krishna's youth on her banks at Vrindavan. 1 Worship and PracticePilgrims bathe in the Yamuna at Vrindavan and Mathura in the belief that the river, personified as this goddess, carries the same purifying and love infused quality the Bhagavata Purana attributes to her waters during Krishna's youth there. 5 Sources
Textual NoteYamuna is named as one of seven sacred rivers grouped together in Hindu tradition, alongside the Ganga, Godavari, Sarasvati, Narmada, Sindhu and Kaveri, a set invoked together in the sankalpa recited at the opening of many rites. 4 Function
Domain / FunctionRivers, lakes and springs 1 Domain / Function History
Historical NoteDespite her sacred standing, the Yamuna is today among the most polluted rivers in India, a gap between religious veneration and measured condition that both tradition and the state acknowledge. 4 Historical NoteFrom the Gupta period she and Ganga stand carved on the two jambs of temple doorways, the rivers guarding the threshold, and bathing in her is held to remove the fear of death, on the strength of her brother Yama's office. 1 Origins
Origin of the NameYamuna's name is traditionally linked to Yama, the god of death, as his twin sister, an etymological and mythological pairing already found in the Rigveda, where the two figures debate the ethics of a union between twins in one of its more unusual hymns. 3 Attributions
Mythic AssociationDaughter of the sun god Surya, closely associated in the Bhagavata Purana and Krishna traditions with Krishna's youth at Vrindavan on her banks. 2 Attestation
Era of Attestation Veneration TodayActively venerated in a living tradition 1 HistoricityNot a historical person: a divine or other-than-human being 2 Position Profile
Key TextThe Bhagavata Purana closely associates the river goddess Yamuna with Krishna's youth in Vrindavan, recounting how he subdued the venomous serpent Kaliya who had poisoned her waters by dancing upon its many hoods until it fled, an episode that made the Yamuna's banks at Vrindavan one of the most sacred pilgrimage landscapes in Krishna devotion. 5 Practice
LineageDaughter of the sun Surya and twin sister of Yama, lord of the dead; she rides a tortoise. 1 Learn More
The Dark River of Krishna's Country
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.
A River Declared a Legal Person, Briefly
In 2017 the Yamuna's sacred and legal standing collided directly with Indian law. The High Court of Uttarakhand, ruling in March of that year on a case concerning pollution and encroachment, declared the Ganga and the Yamuna to be living entities possessing the status of legal persons, with the same rights, duties and liabilities as a human being, appointing named government officials as the rivers' legal custodians responsible for their protection and, implicitly, liable on their behalf. The ruling drew directly on the rivers' religious standing as goddesses, treating their sanctity in Hindu tradition as a reason for, rather than a barrier to, formal legal personhood, and it followed a wave of comparable rulings internationally granting legal rights to rivers and ecosystems.
The decision proved unworkable in practice and was stayed by the Supreme Court of India later the same year, after the state government argued that a river could not sensibly be sued or held liable in the way a legal person can, and no comparable personhood status has since been finalized for the Yamuna. The episode nonetheless remains a striking instance of a modern secular court reaching for the language of an ancient goddess and its own doctrine of legal personhood at the same time, treating Yamuna's sacred character as directly relevant to an argument about environmental law rather than a separate, merely symbolic matter.
Correspondences & Relations
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
This source names Yamuna directly: "Triveni Sangam site where the Ganges, Yamuna and the mythical Sarasvati are held to meet, and the festival's twelve year cycle among Hinduism's four Kumbh Mela sites."
This source names Yamuna directly: "Sangam, the confluence of the Ganges, Yamuna and the mythical Sarasvati rivers that Hindu tradition holds as one of the faith's four Kumbh Mela sites, rotating to Prayagraj once every twelve years."
Child Of
Surya, Deities Yamuna's own description: "daughter of the sun Surya." Source already cited on the entity.
Related To
Ganga, Deities Yamuna is dark where her sister river Ganga is white, and from the Gupta period the two river goddesses stand carved on the two jambs of temple doorways, guarding the threshold.
Sibling Of
Yamuna, daughter of the sun Surya, is twin sister of Yama the lord of the dead, and bathing in her is held to remove the fear of death on the strength of her brother's office.
Worshipped In
Sources
1. Encyclopedia of Hinduism
Denise Cush, Catherine Robinson and Michael York (eds.), Routledge, 2008s.v. YamunaView the Source 2. An Introduction to Hinduism
3. The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India
Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton, Oxford University Press, 2014View the Source 4. India: A Sacred Geography
Diana L. Eck, Harmony Books, 2012On the Yamuna and its sacred geographyView the Source 5. Krishna: The Beautiful Legend of God (Srimad Bhagavata Purana, Book X)
Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition
David R. Kinsley, University of California Press, 1988On the river goddessesView the Source Bhagavata Purana
AnonymousThe Bhagavata Purana: Krishna, the Yamuna, and the serpent KaliyaView the Source Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005s.v. Yamuna; the river goddess of Krishna's countryView the Source Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.