Govardhan Hill

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.

The parikrama around Govardhan runs about twenty one kilometres and is done barefoot. It passes ponds, shrines and villages attached to episodes of Krishna's childhood, and most pilgrims complete it in a day. A smaller number perform it by dandavat pranam, prostrating full length, marking the ground at the fingertips, standing, walking to the mark and lying down again, which turns the circuit into a matter of weeks.

Diana Eck's work on Indian sacred geography sets Govardhan inside the wider Braj pilgrimage, in which a whole district is treated as one landscape corresponding to the events of Krishna's life, so that walking round the hill is a movement inside a larger circuit taking in Vrindavan, Mathura, Barsana and Gokul. The circumambulation of a natural feature is a very old and very widespread Indian form, applied to hills, rivers, groves and whole regions, and it does not require a building. That is worth stating plainly, because a reference work organised around temples can leave the impression that Hindu practice is temple centred. At Govardhan the object of worship is the hill itself, the rite is a walk, and the temples along the route are incidents on the way rather than the destination.