Shri Gokulnath Ji, Gokul

Pilgrims come to Gokul for the infancy, and the town fixes each episode to a patch of ground. At Brahmand Ghat on the Yamuna, Yashoda scolded the child for eating clay and looked into his open mouth to find the whole brahmanda inside it. At Ukhal Bandhan she bound him to the grinding mortar he then dragged into the twin arjuna trees. The Gokulnath haveli anchors that remembering — principal shrine of the town, gaddi of the fourth peeth.

Gokul's greatest day is not Janmashtami but Nandotsav, the festival of Nanda, kept on the ninth of the waning moon of Bhadrapada — the day after Janmashtami. It honours the cowherd chief who, hearing a son had come, called all Vraja to rejoice: drummers, brahmanas bathing the child, Yashoda showering flowers. Gokul repeats it with panchamrita abhisheka and aarti, with gifts scattered among the crowd and pots of curd slung high to be broken — for Krishna reached this house only the morning after his birth, and the town keeps its rejoicing a day behind Mathura's.

Close by lie the sands of Raman Reti, where, the district administration records, Krishna played — raman — with Balarama and the cowherd boys, and met Radha before they left for Vrindavan. It is a sandy compound with a deer sanctuary; the adjoining Karshni Ashram holds the old Raman Bihariji temple of the eighteenth-century saint Gyandasji. Pilgrims still lie down and roll in the sand.

Gokul stands across the Yamuna, south-east of Mathura. In the Puranas gokula names no place at all but a cattle herd, a cowherd's camp; and it was to such a camp that Vasudeva carried the newborn across the river on the night of the birth in Kamsa's prison. Here Nanda, the cowherd chief, and his wife Yashoda raised him as their own alongside Balarama; and here, the Bhagavata says, he performed most of his childhood leela.

Before the sixteenth century Gokul and Mahavan were one. The vartas of the Pushtimarg tell that when Vallabhacharya reached Braj both had been lost to memory, until Yamuna herself appeared and showed him the site of Gokul beside a shami tree. His son Vitthalnath — Gusainji — settled here and made the town the sampradaya's centre, holding firmans in Akbar's name that left his Gokul lands tax-free and let his cows roam state ground. Gokul was once home to Navanitpriya and to all seven svarups of the Pushtimarg.

The svarup called Gokulnath was served in the family of Vallabhacharya's wife before Vitthalnath bestowed him on his fourth son, Gokulnath (1551–1641), founder of the fourth house and the acharya credited with the sampradaya's Braj Bhasha varta literature. When Braj's deities went into exile under Aurangzeb he was taken to Jaipur and returned later; his descendants keep the haveli still.

Gokulnath Ji is housed as a Pushtimarg deity always is — not under a spire but in a haveli, a mansion where the Lord is a child of the household, woken, bathed, dressed, fed and put to sleep, and shown in the day's fixed jhankis, not continuously. The image is small and of metal, four-armed: two hands play the flute, the third is raised — read as the arm that carried Govardhan — and the fourth holds a conch, with Radha and Chandravali at either side.

Four kilometres off at Mahavan, the old settlement Braj calls Bade Gokul, stands Nand Bhavan, the house of Nanda, known to everyone as Chaurasi Khamba for the eighty-four pillars that carry it. Tradition counts eighty-four lakh species of life in this world, and each pillar is said to stand for a hundred thousand of them. Krishna and Balarama were named in this hall, where the cowherds lived until Krishna was three years and four months old.