Shri Rangji (Ranganatha), Vrindavan

At Srirangam, first of the 108 Divya Desams, Ranganatha lies full length asleep upon Adishesha. Here he stands: the mool-vigraha is Rangamannar the bridegroom, a walking stick in his hand as a South Indian groom carries at his wedding, Goda at his right and Garuda at his left — the marriage that closes Andal's story, set up at last in the country she sang of. The lineage is Srirangam's; the form in the sanctum is its own.

What came north with the stone was a whole calendar. Through Dhanurmas, from 16 December to 14 January, the thirty pasurams of the Tiruppavai are recited before dawn as in the Vishnu temples of the Tamil country. Vaikunth Ekadasi opens the Vaikunth Dwar, unbarred once a year and no more. Goda's own ten-day utsav falls in the monsoon, and each morning the water for the deity's bath is drawn from the temple tank, honoured here as a form of the Yamuna.

Greatest of all is the Brahmotsav, ten days of Chaitra in March or April, close on the heels of Holi, which all Braj calls the Rath ka Mela, the fair of the chariot. Morning and evening the utsava-vigrahas go out on a different vahana: lion, sun, Garuda, Sesha, elephant, the golden palanquin. On the great day the wooden rath is brought out, the one day it moves, and thousands take the ropes and draw it to the garden; before the ten days end the Lord plays Holi from a palanquin of mirrors.

Vrindavan holds thousands of temples and only one of them looks like this. On the Mathura road, behind a stone gate carved in the Jaipur manner, a seven-storeyed gopuram rises over five walled enclosures — the largest South-Indian-style temple in North India, to all Braj simply Rangji. The deity is Sri Goda-Rangamannar: Ranganatha with Goda beside him, the eighth-century Tamil saint the South calls Andal.

Andal was the foster-daughter of Periyalvar of Srivilliputtur, and the thirty verses of her Tiruppavai are a girl's vow to reach Krishna in the pastures of Braj. Tradition gives her three wishes, one of them to live out her life at Krishna's feet in Vrindavan; it is that wish this temple was raised to keep. Two brothers of Mathura, Seth Radha Krishna Das and Seth Govind Das, came to their acharya with the means to build it — Sri Rangadeshik Swami (1809–1873), who had carried Ramanuja's Sri Vaishnava lineage north and founded the Goverdhan Peeth.

He went first to Srirangam and asked the leave of the divine couple there before a stone was laid; craftsmen were engaged in that town and brought the length of India. Work began in 1845 and ended in 1851, at a cost of forty-five lakh rupees. The shrine is held by the Sri Rangji Temple Trust, whose managing trustee is still the Goverdhan Peeth's head, Swami Sri Goverdhan Rangacharya, fifth in the founder's line.

Five concentric rectangular enclosures stand one inside the next with the sanctum at the centre — Srirangam's scheme, reduced and rebuilt by northern hands. Both chief entrances are stone gates cut in the Jaipur style, and that meeting is the character of the building: Rajput gateways opening on Dravidian towers. Behind the western gate rises a gopuram of seven storeys, the eastern has five, and between them lie the Pushkarni, the temple's tank, and a formal garden to which the weekly sawari goes out.

Past the clock tower and another gate stands the dhwaja-stambha, fifty feet of flagstaff under gold plate. Around the inner circuit, clockwise, are the sannidhis of Sudarshana, Narasimha, Venkateswara, Venugopal, the Alvars, Ramanuja and the founder himself. Outside the western gate waits the wooden rath that moves once a year and no oftener.