Krishna lifts Govardhan hill and shelters all of Vrindavan

The season of the great offering

It was the end of the rains in Vrindavan, and the men of the cowherd settlement were busy in a way Krishna had not seen before. Carts were coming in loaded. Rice was being heaped, milk set aside in great pots, ghee measured out, sweets shaped by the women through the long afternoons. The whole village smelled of cooking and preparation.

Krishna was a boy then, out among the herds every day, and he watched all this with a boy's directness. He went to his father, Nanda, who was the headman, and asked him plainly what the festival was for and whom it honoured. There was no rudeness in the asking. He simply wanted to know, the way a child wants to know, and he kept asking until he had the whole of it.

Nanda told him. The offering was for Indra, lord of the clouds and the rains. Every year at this season the cowherds gave him the best of what they had, because rain was the life of the grass, and grass was the life of the cattle, and the cattle were the life of the people. Withhold the sacrifice, and Indra might withhold the water. So it had been done in Nanda's time, and his father's time, and back beyond any name anyone could remember.

The boy's question

Krishna listened to all of it, and then he said something that a careful child does not usually say to his father in front of the elders.

He asked what, exactly, Indra had to do with them.

The clouds gave rain, yes. But the clouds, he said, followed their own nature, moving over the whole earth, over forest and desert and sea alike, wetting places where no one had ever offered Indra a grain of rice. The rain did not fall on Vrindavan because Vrindavan had paid for it. It fell because that was the season, and the wind carried the clouds, and water did what water does. A merchant who is paid does his work; a man who is not paid does not. But rain was not a merchant. It came to the wicked and the faithful without counting.

Then he pointed at what was actually in front of them.

We are cowherds, he said. Our work is with cattle and with the hills and forests where they graze. Our lives do not turn on some far throne in the sky. They turn on this. He meant Govardhan, the long green hill that rose above their pastures. Its slopes gave the cattle grass all year. Its springs gave them water. Its caves gave them shelter in bad weather. Its trees gave fruit and fuel and shade. The hill fed them every day of their lives, and the cows fed the village, and no one had ever thought to thank either.

Let us take the food already cooked, Krishna said, and the wealth already gathered, and give it not to a god we have never seen but to the hill that keeps us and the cows that carry us. Feed the brahmins. Feed the cattle. Circle the hill and bow to it. Honour what is near and known, not what is far and unproven.

Vrindavan turns to the hill

It was an unusual thing to propose, and Nanda and the elders talked it over. But there was a plain sense in the boy's words that they could not argue away, and there was something in the boy himself, a certainty older than his years, that made men agree with him without quite knowing why. So they agreed.

The great feast prepared for Indra was carried out to the foot of Govardhan instead. Mountains of rice were set out. Every kind of cooked dish, sweet and savoury, was laid in ranks. The brahmins were fed and given gifts. The cattle, washed and garlanded, their horns painted, were driven around the hill in a slow, lowing procession, and behind them walked the whole village, singing, circling Govardhan from left to right the way one circles a shrine.

Krishna did one more thing. To show the cowherds that their offering was received, he took an enormous form upon the summit of the hill and declared, in a voice that seemed to come out of the mountain itself, I am Govardhan, and with that mouth he ate the heaped food they had brought. The people bowed to the hill and to the boy standing among them at the same time, and did not fully understand that the two were one, and went home content.

The god who was not asked

High above, Indra learned that his sacrifice had not been made. For the first time in the memory of that village, the offering that had gone up to him every year had been turned aside, and turned aside on the advice of a cowherd child.

He was a great god, and greatness had made him proud. That his portion had been given to a hill, a mere heap of rock and grass, and given at the urging of a boy, struck him as an insult he could not let stand. If the cowherds thought a mountain would keep them, he would show them what the lord of the clouds could do when he was not honoured.

He called the Samvartaka clouds, the clouds that gather at the end of an age to dissolve the world in water. He ordered them down onto Vrindavan.

The sky comes down

The storm that broke over the cowherd settlement was not an ordinary storm. The clouds massed until day was as dark as night. Wind came first, tearing at the trees. Then rain, but rain like nothing the village had known, falling not in drops but in ropes and columns, hail mixed through it striking hard enough to bruise. Lightning walked across the pastures. Thunder came without pause, so that the ground itself seemed to shake.

The water rose fast. The pastures flooded. The cattle, drenched and freezing, lowed in terror and pressed together, calves going under. The people could not stand against the wind. Their houses gave them nothing. There was no high ground left, and the rain kept on as though it meant to go until there was only water where Vrindavan had been. This was the flood that ends worlds, aimed at one small village of herders because their boy had asked a question.

They came to Krishna. They had followed his counsel, and now the sky was falling on them, and they had nowhere else to turn. Save us, they said, cattle and children and all. You brought us to this, and only you can carry us out of it.

The hill on one finger

Krishna went to Govardhan. He reached under the western edge of the great hill and lifted it clean off the earth, the whole mass of rock and forest and spring, and held it up on the little finger of his left hand as easily as a child holds a mushroom by its stem.

Then he called to the village. Come under, all of you. Bring the cattle, bring the carts, bring everything. Do not be afraid. This hill will not fall.

They came. The whole settlement moved in under the raised hill, people and cattle and dogs and belongings, the herds crowding into the dry space, the children carried, the old helped along, everyone packed beneath a roof of stone a mile wide. And Krishna stood at the centre holding it up, unmoving, his arm not trembling, a slight smile on his face, while above and around them the end of the world came down.

For seven days and seven nights it rained. Indra emptied the Samvartaka clouds onto Vrindavan with everything he had. Not one drop touched the people under the hill. Not one calf was lost. Krishna did not shift his weight or lower his hand or speak of being tired. The cowherds watched him standing there through the days and the nights, holding a mountain over their heads on one finger, and slowly it came to them what kind of being had been living among them as a boy.

Indra bows

On the seventh day the clouds were spent. Indra looked down and saw the village whole, the cattle safe, the boy still holding the hill without effort, and he understood that he had thrown the flood of dissolution at the very Lord he had meant to punish, and it had done nothing at all. His anger left him and shame came in its place. He called back the clouds. The sky cleared. The sun came out over a washed and shining land.

Krishna set Govardhan down exactly where it had stood, gently, so that not a stone was out of place, and told the people to go back to their homes with their cattle. They went out from under the hill into the sunlight, laughing and weeping, telling one another what they had seen.

Then Indra came down. The proud king of the gods, who a week before could not bear to be passed over for a hill, stepped from his elephant and bowed his crowned head to a cowherd child. He asked forgiveness for his anger. He owned that his pride had blinded him, that he had mistaken the Supreme for a boy and a mountain for a rival. Krishna received him without reproach, the way a parent receives a child who has finally understood, and let him return to his heaven wiser than he came.

The village did not forget. In the seasons that followed they honoured Govardhan again, heaping food before the hill and walking round it, and the memory of the week the sky fell and the boy held it off travelled far beyond Vrindavan. It is why, to this day, in the autumn after the rains, people build up a small mountain of cooked food and set it before an image of the hill and go round it in procession, keeping alive the year the cowherds learned where their true shelter lay.

Sources

• Bhagavata Purana, Canto 10, chapters 24-25 (Indra-yaga stopped; the lifting of Govardhan)
• Vishnu Purana, Book 5, chapters 10-11 (the Govardhan episode)
• Harivamsa, Vishnu Parva (parallel account of the Govardhan-dharana)