Shri Govind Dev Ji, Jaipur

Jai Singh did not keep a family deity; he surrendered a throne. The rulers of Jaipur State regarded Govind Dev Ji Maharaj as their King — the temple trust states it exactly so — and the state's Devasthan record adds that Jaipurites regard him as their real ruler still. The Maharaja ruled as the Lord's servant; and the Chandra Mahal, the palace he took instead, stands so placed that from it the king looked straight upon his Lord — so Jaipur tells it.

The day here is a court calendar. Seven times the doors part for jhanki — Mangla, Dhoop, Shringar, Rajbhog, Gwal, Sandhya, Shayan — and between them the curtain closes and the Thakur's shringar is changed; the Devasthan record counts some ten thousand poshaks in his wardrobe. The temple is counted among the seven temples of the Thakur of Vrindavan, beside Banke Bihari and Radha Vallabh of Braj.

Janmashtami, on the Ashtami of Bhadrapada's dark fortnight, is the great day. The temple holds the largest gathering in Jaipur — devotees in their lakhs stream through the jhankis from before dawn, and at midnight, at the moment of the birth, the whole garden answers with one cry of Govind. Radha Ashtami follows on the bright Ashtami of the same month, kept with abhishek of the divine couple; through Shravan the Thakur takes to the swing — the jhulan jhankis of the rains, loveliest on Hariyali Teej — and Phagotsava fills the court with colour before Holi.

Tradition carries this image back beyond every temple that has held it. Bajranabh, great-grandson of Shri Krishna, is said to have fashioned the Lord's likeness to his grandmother's telling of the Lord's form; it came so true that the image is called Bajrakrit — made by Bajranabh. Lost to sight over the centuries, it was found again at Goma Tila in Vrindavan — government records give the year 1525 — by Rupa Goswami, whom Chaitanya Mahaprabhu had sent into Braj; and for this Govinda, in Akbar's reign, Raja Man Singh of Amber raised at Vrindavan a seven-storeyed temple of red stone.

Then came the Aurangzeb era, and devastation fell upon the temples of Braj. Govind Dev left Vrindavan in the care of his Goswami sevaits, and the Devasthan Department's account follows the journey by its halts — Radha Kund, Barsana, Kaman, Govindpura — until the Lord came down the Amer valley to the land of the Kachwahas, whose kings had served him since Man Singh's day, and rested in the Kanak Vrindavan garden while a new city was being drawn on the plain.

That city was Jaipur, and its founder gave it to him. Sawai Jai Singh II had built the Suraj Mahal in his Jai Niwas garden for his own residence; he dreamed, the account says, that the place belonged to Thakur Shriji, left it, and installed Govind Dev there. The words he took for himself are still remembered — Shri Govind Dev charan, Sawai Jai Singh sharan: at Govind's feet, Jai Singh's refuge. The seva stays with the Goswami line descending from Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's circle, unbroken today.

This is not a shikhara temple but a garden court — an open pavilion in the Jai Niwas garden, set between the Badal Mahal and the Chandra Mahal, so that the sanctum closes the axis of the palace itself. The hall stands open on carved pillars and the deity is visible across the garden; the ceiling above him is cased in gold, and chandeliers hang between the paintings.

The newest wing holds a record of its own kind: the Satsang Hall, whose flat concrete roof spans 119 feet without a single supporting column — entered in the Guinness records as the widest such span — seating some five thousand devotees with no pillar between them and the jhanki.