Shri Dwarkadhish, Mathura

Vallabhacharya (1478–1530) taught that the Lord is won not by knowledge or austerity but by pushti — grace — and that the devotee's whole work is seva, service offered as a household offers it to one it loves. Pushtimarg shrines are therefore havelis, mansions rather than temples, and the Lord within is master of the house: woken, dressed, fed, fanned, sung to and put to bed. Vitthalnathji, his son, divided that service among seven houses; the third — Balkrishnalalji's, at Kankroli — holds Dwarkadhish as its own swaroop, and Mathura's haveli belongs to it.

The day is therefore a sequence of eight darshans, and the doors part only for them. Mangala wakes the Lord at dawn; Shringar dresses and ornaments him; Gwal sends him out with the cows; Rajbhog, the midday offering, closes the house until afternoon. Utthapan rouses him from rest, Bhog brings the evening food, the Sandhya aarti follows, and Shayan puts him to sleep.

Out of the gate the bazaar runs down to Vishram Ghat, most revered of Mathura's twenty-five ghats, where Krishna is said to have rested after killing Kansa and freeing his parents — vishram is simply 'rest'. The fifteen-kilometre Mathura parikrama, five kos in all, is by custom begun and closed here with a bath in the Yamuna, and at dusk the lamps go down the stone steps for the Yamuna aarti.

The temple stands in the Rajadhiraj Bazaar of old Mathura, between Vishram Ghat and Asikunda Ghat on the Yamuna — a young shrine in a very old city. Its Krishna is not the flute-player of the Braj woods but the sovereign: Dwarkadhish, lord of Dwarka, the son Mathura remembers leaving for the western sea. He stands in black marble with a white marble Radharani beside him: a wholly separate shrine from the Jagat Mandir on the Arabian Sea, and named for it.

Seth Gokul Das Parikh, treasurer of the Gwalior state under Shrimant Daulatrao Scindia, began the building in 1814 with his Maharaja's approval and a donation towards it; he died before it was finished, and his heir Seth Lakshmi Chandra completed it. Gokul Das was a Vaishnava of the Pushtimarg and a devotee of the sampradaya's third gaddi, whose own Dwarkadhish is enshrined at Kankroli in Mewar — which is how a Gwalior treasurer's temple in Mathura came to carry a Saurashtra name.

In 1930 the seva of the shrine was made over to Acharya Giridharlalji of Kankroli, and has followed Pushtimarg usage exactly ever since. The gateway still announces it: a peeth of the Shuddhadvaita path of Jagadguru Shri Vallabhacharya, the deity styled Shri Rajadhiraj Thakur Shri Dwarkadhishji Maharaj — king of kings.

From the lane the haveli shows only a tall carved gateway of Rajasthani work — cusped arches, deep foliate borders, jharokhas above — set flush in a wall of shops, with nothing of a spire about it.

Within, it is a rich merchant's courtyard house turned to worship, and that courtyard is its fame: a wide flagged court open to the sky, arcaded on all sides in two storeys. Five rows of carved pillars divide it into three lanes — one for women, one for men, the centre kept clear — and above them the galleries, brackets and ceilings are painted in the bright palette of Rajasthan with the life of Krishna, from the birth to the leelas of Braj. Through Shravan the swings hang in this same court for the thirteen days of the Hindola Utsav, when Dwarkadhish and Radharani leave the sanctum for jhoolas of gold and silver; and on Janmashtami, while the whole city keeps vigil for the midnight birth, the Lord here is bathed in water, milk and curd and laid in a cradle.