CHAPTER 56. Govardhan, the Scene of Krishna's Dalliance With the Milkmaids.

Govardhan, the Scene of Krishna's Dalliance with the Milkmaids.

On the 10th we came on ten miles over a plain to Govardhan, a place celebrated in ancient history as the birthplace of Krishna, the seventh incarnation of the Hindoo god of preservation, Vishnu, and the scene of his dalliance with the milkmaids (gôpîs); and, in modern days, as the burial--or burning-place of the Jât chiefs of Bharatpur and Dîg, by whose tombs, with their endowments, this once favourite abode of the god is prevented from being entirely deserted. The town stands upon a narrow ridge of sandstone hills, about ten miles long, rising suddenly out of an alluvial plain and running north-east and south-west. The population is now very small, and composed chiefly of Brahmans, who are supported by the endowments of these tombs, and the contributions of a few pilgrims. All our Hindoo followers were much gratified as we happened to arrive on a day of peculiar sanctity; and they were enabled to bathe and perform their devotions to the different shrines with the prospect of great advantage. This range of hills is believed by Hindoos to be part of a fragment of the Himâlaya mountains which Hanumân, the monkey general of Râma, the sixth incarnation of Vishnu, was taking down to aid his master in the formation of his bridge from the continent to the island of Ceylon, when engaged in the war with the demon king of that island for the recovery of his wife Sîtâ. He made a false step by some accident in passing Govardhan, and this small bit of his load fell off. The rocks begged either to be taken on to the god Râma, or back to their old place; but Hanumân was hard pressed for time, and told them not to be uneasy, as they would have a comfortable resting- place, and be worshipped by millions in future ages--thus, according to popular belief, foretelling that it would become the residence of a future incarnation, and the scene of Krishna's miracles. The range was then about twenty miles long, ten having since disappeared under the ground. It was of full length during Krishna's days; and, on one occasion, he took up the whole upon his little finger to defend his favourite town and its milkmaids from the wrath of Indra, who got angry with the people, and poured down upon them a shower of burning ashes.

As I rode along this range, which rises gently from the plains at both ends and abruptly from the sides, with my groom by my side, I asked him what made Hanumân drop all his burthen here.

'All his burthen!' exclaimed he with a smile; 'had it been all, would it not have been an immense mountain, with all its towns and villages? while this is but an insignificant belt of rock. A mountain upon the back of men of former days, sir, was no more than a bundle of grass upon the back of one of your grass-cutters in the present day.'

Nathû, whose mind had been full of the wonders of this place from his infancy, happened to be with us, and he now chimed in.

'It was night when Hanumân passed this place, and the lamps were seen burning in a hundred towns upon the mountain he had upon his back-- the people were all at their usual occupations, quite undisturbed; this is a mere fragment of his great burthen.'

'And how was it that the men of those towns should have been so much smaller than the men who carried them?' 'God only knew; but the fact of the men of the plains having been so large was undisputed--their beards were as many miles long as those of the present day are inches. Did not Bhîm throw the forty-cubit stone pillar, that now stands at Eran, a distance of thirty miles, after the man who was running away with his cattle?'

I thought of poor Father Gregory at Agra, and the heavy sigh he gave when asked by Godby what progress he was making among the people in the way of conversion. The faith of these people is certainly larger than all the mustard-seeds in the world.

I told a very opulent and respectable Hindoo banker one day that it seemed to us very strange that Vishnu should come upon the earth merely to sport with milkmaids, and to hold up an umbrella, however large, to defend them from a shower. 'The earth, sir,' said he, 'was at that time infested with innumerable demons and giants, who swallowed up men and women as bears swallow white ants; and his highness, Krishna, came down to destroy them. His own mother's brother, Kans, who then reigned at Mathurâ over Govardhan, was one of these horrible demons. Hearing that his sister would give birth to a son that was to destroy him, he put to death several of her progeny as soon as they were born. When Krishna was seven days old, he sent a nurse, with poison on her nipple, to destroy him likewise; but his highness gave such a pull at it, that the nurse dropped down dead. In falling, she resumed her real shape of a she-demon, and her body covered no less than six square miles, and it took several thousand men to cut her up and burn her, to prevent the pestilence that must have followed. His uncle then sent a crane, which caught up his highness, who always looked very small for his age, and swallowed him as he would swallow a frog. But his highness kicked up such a rumpus in the bird's stomach that he was immediately thrown up again. When he was seven years old his uncle invited him to a feast, and got the largest and most ferocious elephant in India to tread him to death as he alighted at the door. His highness, though then not higher than my waist, took the enormous beast by one tusk, and, after whirling him round in the air with one hand half a dozen times, he dashed him on the ground and killed him. Unable any longer to stand the wickedness of his uncle, he seized him by the beard, dragged him from his throne, and dashed him to the ground in the same manner.'

I thought of poor old Father Gregory and the mustard-seeds again, and told my rich old friend that it all appeared to us indeed passing strange.

The orthodox belief among the Muhammadans is that Moses was sixty yards high; that he carried a mace sixty yards long; and that he sprang sixty yards from the ground when he aimed the fatal blow at the giant Ûj, the son of Anak, who came from the land of Canaan, with a mountain on his back, to crush the army of Israelites. Still, the head of his mace could reach only to the ankle-bone of the giant. This was broken with the blow. The giant fell, and was crushed under the weight of his own mountain. Now a person whose ankle-bone was one hundred and eighty yards high must have been almost as prodigious as he who carried the fragment of the Himâlaya upon his back; and he who believes in the one cannot fairly find fault with his neighbour for believing in the other. I was one day talking with a very sensible and respectable Hindoo gentleman of Bundêlkhand about the accident which made Hanumân drop this fragment of his load at Govardhan. 'All doubts upon that point,' said the old gentleman, 'have been put at rest by holy writ. It is related in our scriptures.

'Bharat, the brother of Râma, was left regent of the kingdom of Ajodhya, during his absence at the conquest of Ceylon. He happened at night to see Hanumân passing with the mountain upon his back, and thinking he might be one of the king of Ceylon's demons about mischief, he let fly one of his blunt arrows at him. It hit him on the leg, and he fell, mountain and all, to the ground. As he fell, he called out in his agony, 'Râm, Râm', from which Bharat discovered his mistake. He went up, raised him in his arms, and with his kind attentions restored him to his senses. Learning from him the object of his journey, and fearing that his wounded brother Lachhman would die before he could get to Ceylon with the requisite remedy, he offered to send Hanumân on upon the barb of one of his arrows, mountain and all. To try him Hanumân took up his mountain and seated himself with it upon the barb of the arrow as desired. Bharat placed the arrow to the string of his bow, and drawing it till the barb touched the bow, asked Hanumân whether he was ready. 'Quite ready,' said Hanumân, 'but I am now satisfied that you really are the brother of our prince, and regent of his kingdom, which was all I desired. Pray let me descend; and be sure that I shall be at Ceylon in time to save your wounded brother.' He got off, knelt down, placed his forehead on Bharat's feet in submission, resumed his load, and was at Ceylon by the time the day broke next morning, leaving behind him the small and insignificant fragment, on which the town and temples of Govardhan now stand.

'While little Krishna was frisking about among the milkmaids of Govardhan,' continued my old friend, 'stealing their milk, cream, and butter, Brahmâ, the creator of the universe, who had heard of his being an incarnation of Vishnu, the great preserver of the universe, visited the place, and had some misgivings, from his size and employment, as to his real character. To try him, he took off through the sky a herd of cattle, on which some of his favourite playmates were attending, old and young, boys and all. Krishna, knowing how much the parents of the boys and owners of the cattle would be distressed, created, in a moment, another herd and other attendants so exactly like those that Brahmâ had taken, that the owners of the one, and the parents of the other, remained ignorant of the change. Even the new creations themselves remained equally ignorant; and the cattle walked into their stalls, and the boys into their houses, where they recognized and were recognized by their parents, as if nothing had happened.

'Brahmâ was now satisfied that Krishna was a true incarnation of Vishnu, and restored to him the real herd and attendants. The others were removed out of the way by Krishna, as soon as he saw the real ones coming back.'

'But,' said I to the good old man, who told me this with a grave face, 'must they not have suffered in passing from the life given to death; and why create them merely to destroy them again?'

'Was he not God the Creator himself?' said the old man; 'does he not send one generation into the world after another to fulfil their destiny, and then to return to the earth from which they came, just as he spreads over the land the grass and corn? All is gathered in its season, or withers as that passes away and dies.' The old gentleman might have quoted Wordsworth:

We die, my friend, Nor we alone, but that which each man loved And prized in his peculiar nook of earth Dies with him, or is changed; and very soon, Even of the good is no memorial left.

I was one day out shooting with my friend, the Râjâ of Maihar, under the Vindhya range, which rises five or six hundred feet, almost perpendicularly. He was an excellent shot with an English double- barrel, and had with him six men just as good. I asked him whether we were likely to fall in with any hares, using the term 'khargosh', or 'ass-eared'.

'Certainly not,' said the Râjâ, 'if you begin by abusing them with such a name; call them "lambkanâs", sir, "long-eared", and we shall get plenty.'

He shot one, and attributed my bad luck to the opprobrious name I had used. While he was reloading, I took occasion to ask him how this range of hills had grown up where it was.

'No one can say,' replied the Râjâ, 'but we believe that when Râma went to recover his wife Sîtâ from the demon king of Ceylon, Râvan, he wanted to throw a bridge across from the continent to the island, and sent some of his followers up to the Himâlaya mountains for stones. He had completed his bridge before they all returned, and a messenger was sent to tell those who had not yet come to throw down their burdens, and rejoin him in all haste. Two long lines of these people had got thus far on their return when the messenger met them. They threw down their loads here, and here they have remained ever since, one forming the Vindhya range to the north of this valley, and the other the Kaimûr range to the south.'

The Vindhya range extends from Mirzapore, on the Ganges, nearly to the Gulf of Cambay, some six or seven hundred miles, so that my sporting friend's faith was as capacious as any priest could well wish it; and those who have it are likely never to die, or suffer much, from an over stretch of the reasoning faculties in a hot climate.

The town stands upon the belt of rocks, about two miles from its north-eastern extremity; and in the midst is the handsome tomb of Ranjit Singh, who defended Bharatpur so bravely against Lord Lake's army. The tomb has on one side a tank filled with water, and, on the other, another much deeper than the first, but without any water at all. We were surprised at this, and asked what the cause could be. The people told us, with the air of men who had never known what it was to feel the uneasy sensation of doubt, that 'Krishna, one hot day, after skying with the milkmaids, had drunk it all dry; and that no water would ever stay in it, lest it might be quaffed by less noble lips'. No orthodox Hindoo would ever for a moment doubt that this was the real cause of the phenomenon. Happy people! How much do they escape of that pain which in hot climates wears us all down in our efforts to trace moral and physical phenomena to their real causes and sources! Mind! mind! mind! without any of it, those Europeans who eat and drink moderately might get on very well in this climate. Much of it weighs them down.

Oh, sir, the good die first, and those whose hearts (brains) Are dry as summer dust burn to the socket.

One is apt sometimes to think that Muhammad, Manu, and Confucius would have been great benefactors in saving so many millions of their species from the pain of thinking too much in hot climates, if they had only written their books in languages less difficult of acquirement. Their works are at once 'the bane and antidote' of despotism--the source whence it comes, and the shield which defends the people from its consuming fire.

The tomb of Sûraj Mall, the great founder of the Jât power at Bharatpur, stands on the north-east extremity of this belt of rocks, about two miles from the town, and is an extremely handsome building, conceived in the very best taste, and executed in the very best style. With its appendages of temples and smaller tombs, it occupies the whole of one side of a magnificent tank full of clear water; and on the other side it looks into a large and beautiful garden. All the buildings and pavements are formed of the fine white sandstone of Rûpbâs, scarcely inferior either in quality or appearance to white marble. The stone is carved in relief with flowers in good taste. In the centre of the tomb is the small marble slab covering the grave, with the two feet of Krishna carved in the centre, and around them the emblems of the god, the discus, the skull, the sword, the rosary. These emblems of the god are put on that people may have something godly to fix their thoughts upon. It is by degrees, and with fear and trembling, that the Hindoos imitate the Muhammadans in the magnificence of their tombs. The object is ostensibly to keep the ground on which the bodies have been burned from being defiled; and generally Hindoos have been content to raise small open terraces of brick and stucco work over the spot, with some image or emblem of the god upon it. The Jâts here, like the princes and Gosâins in Bundêlkhand, have gone a stage beyond this, and raised tombs equal in costliness and beauty to those over Muhammadans of the highest rank; still they do not venture to leave it without a divine image or emblem, lest the gods might become jealous, and revenge themselves upon the souls of the deceased and the bodies of the living. On one side of Sûraj Mall's tomb is that of his wife, or some other female member of his family; and upon the slab over her grave, that is, over the precise spot where she was burned, are the same emblems, except the sword, for which a necklace is substituted. At each end of this range of tombs stands a temple dedicated to Baldêo, the brother of Krishna; and in one of them I found his image, with large eyes, a jet black complexion, and an African countenance. Why is this that Baldêo should be always represented of this countenance and colour, and his brother Krishna, either white, or of an azure colour, and the Caucasian countenance? The inside of the tomb is covered with beautiful snow-white stucco work that resembles the finest marble; but this is disfigured by wretched paintings, representing, on one side of the dome, Sûraj Mall in 'darbâr', smoking his hookah, and giving orders to his ministers; in another, he is at his devotions; on the third, at his sports, shooting hogs and deer; and on the fourth, at war, with some French officers of distinction figuring before him. He is distinguished by his portly person in all, and by his favourite light-brown dress in three places. At his devotions he is standing all in white before the tutelary god of his house, Hardêo. In various parts, Krishna is represented at his sports with the milkmaids. The colours are gaudy, and apparently as fresh as when first put on eighty years ago; but the paintings are all in the worst possible taste and style. Inside the dome of Ranjît Singh's tomb the siege of Bharatpur is represented in the same rude taste and style. Lord Lake is dismounted, and standing before his white horse giving orders to his soldiers. On the opposite side of the dome, Ranjît Singh, in a plain white dress, is standing erect before his idol at his devotions, with his ministers behind him. On the other two sides he is at his favourite field sports. What strikes one most in all this is the entire absence of priestcraft. He wanted all his revenue for his soldiers; and his tutelary god seems, in consequence, to have been well pleased to dispense with the mediatory services of priests. There are few temples anywhere to be seen in the territories of these Jât chiefs; and, as few of their subjects have yet ventured to follow them in this innovation upon the old Hindoo usages of building tombs, the countries under their dominion are less richly ornamented than those of their neighbours. Those who build tombs or temples generally surround them with groves of mango and other fine fruit-trees, with good wells to supply water for them, and, if they have the means, they add tanks, so that every religions edifice, or work of ornament, leads to one or more of utility. So it was in Europe; often the Northern hordes swept away all that had grown up under the institution of the Romans and the Saracens; for almost all the great works of ornament and utility, by which these countries became first adorned and enriched, had their origin in church establishments. That portion of India, where the greater part of the revenue goes to the priesthood, will generally be much more studded with works of ornament and utility than that in which the greater part goes to the soldiery. I once asked a Hindoo gentleman, who had travelled all over India, what part of it he thought most happy and beautiful. He mentioned some part of Southern India, about Tanjore, I think, where you could hardly go a mile without meeting some happy procession, or coming to a temple full of priests, or find an acre of land uncultivated.

The countries under the Marâthâ Government improved much in appearance, and in happiness, I believe, after the mayors of the palace, who were Brahmans, assumed the Government, and put aside the Sâtârâ Rajas, the descendants of the great Sivâjî. Wherever they could, they conferred the Government of their distant territories upon Brahmans, who filled all the high offices under them with men of the same caste, who spent the greater part of their incomes in tombs, temples, groves, and tanks, that embellished and enriched the face of the country, and thereby diffused a taste for such works generally among the people they governed. The appearance of those parts of the Marâthâ dominion so governed is infinitely superior to that of the countries governed by the leaders of the military class, such as Sindhia, Holkâr, and the Bhonslâ, whose capitals are still mere standing camps--a collection of hovels, and whose countries are almost entirely devoid of all those works of ornament and utility that enrich and adorn those of their neighbours. They destroyed all they found in those countries when they conquered them; and they have had neither the wisdom nor the taste to raise others to supply their places. The Sikh Government is of exactly the same character; and the countries they governed have, I believe, the same wretched appearance--they are swarms of human locusts, who prey upon all that is calculated to enrich and embellish the face of the land they infest, and all that can tend to improve men in their social relations, and to link their affection to their soil and their government. A Hindoo prince is always running to the extreme; he can never take and keep a middle course. He is either ambitious, and therefore appropriates all his revenues to the maintenance of soldiers, to pour out in inroads upon his neighbours; or he is superstitions, and devotes all his revenue to his priesthood, who embellish his country at the same time that they weaken it, and invite invasion, as their prince becomes less and less able to repel it.

The more popular belief regarding this range of sandstone hills at Govardhan is that Lachhman, the brother of Râma, having been wounded by Râvan, the demon king of Ceylon, his surgeon declared that his wound could be cured only by a decoction of the leaves of a certain tree, to be found in a certain hill in the Himâlaya mountains. Hanumân volunteered to go for it, but on reaching the place he found that he had entirely forgotten the description of the tree required; and, to prevent mistake, he took up the whole mountain upon his back, and walked off with it to the plains. As he passed Govardhan, where Bharat and Charat, the third and fourth brothers of Râma, then reigned, he was seen by them. It was night; and, thinking him a strange sort of fish, Bharat let fly one of his arrows at him. It hit him in the leg, and the sudden jerk caused this small fragment of his huge burden to fall off. He called out in his agony, 'Râm, Râm', from which they learned that he belonged to the army of their brother, and let him pass on; but he remained lame for life from the wound. This accounts very satisfactorily, according to popular belief, for the halting gait of all the monkeys of that species; those who are descended lineally from the general inherit it, of course; and those who are not, adopt it out of respect for his memory, as all the soldiers of Alexander contrived to make one shoulder higher than the other, because one of his happened to be so. When he passed, thousands and tens of thousands of lamps were burning upon his mountain, as the people remained entirely unconscious of the change, and at their usual occupations. Hanumân reached Ceylon with his mountain, the tree was found upon it, and Lachhman's wound cured.

Govardhan is now within the boundary of our territory, and a native collector resides here from Agra.

Notes:

1. January, 1836.

2. See note on Govardhan, ante, chapter 53, note 1.

3. Ante, chapter 9, note 8.

4. Ante, beginning of chapter 53.

5. This Hindoo version of the Massacre of the Innocents necessarily recalls to mind the story in St. Matthew's Gospel. Numerous incidents of the Gospel narrative, including the birth among the cattle, the stable, the manger, and the imperial census, are repeated in the Indian legends of Krishna. The exact channel of communication is not known, but the intercourse between Alexandria and India is, in general terms, the explanation of the coincidences (Weber, Die Griechen in Indien, 1890, and Abh. über Krishna's Geburtfest, 1868).

6. This story may be an adaptation of the similar Buddhist tale.

7. Ûj is the Og, King of Bashan, of the Hebrew version of the legend. The extravagant stories quoted in the text are not in the Korân, but are the inventions of the commentators. Sale gives references in his notes to chap. 5 of the Korân.

8. The kingdom included the modern Oudh (Awadh). The capital was the ancient city, also named Ajodhya, adjoining Fyzabad, which is still a very sacred place of pilgrimage.

9. It is, I think, absolutely impossible for the most sympathetic European to understand, or enter into, the mental position of the learned and devout Hindoo who implicitly believes the wild myth related in the text, and sees no incongruity in the congeries of inconsistent ideas which are involved in the story. We may dimly apprehend that Brahmâ is conceived as a [Greek text], or Architect of the Universe, working in subordination to an impersonal higher power, and not as the infinite, omniscient, omnipotent Creator whom the Hebrews reverenced, but we shall still be a long way from attaining the Hindoo point of view. The relations of Krishna, Vishnu, Brahma, Râma, Siva, and all the other deities, with one another and with mankind, seem to be conceived by the Hindoo in a manner so confused and contradictory that every attempt at elucidation or explanation must necessarily fail. A Hindoo is born, not made, and the 'inwardness' of Hinduism is not to be penetrated, even by the most learned of 'barbarian' pundits.

10. Ante, chapter 20, note 6.

11. Râjâ of Bharatpur, not to be confounded with the Lion of the Panjâb.

12. Wordsworth, Excursion, Book I.

13. The original edition gives a coloured plate of this tomb, which is not noticed by Fergusson. That author's remarks on the palace at Dîg would apply to this tomb also; the style is good, but not quite the best. Sûraj Mall was killed in a skirmish in 1763.

14. Baldêo, or in Sanskrit Bâladeva, Bâlabhadra, or Bâlarâma, was the elder brother of Krishna. His myth in some respects resembles that of Herakles, as that of Krishna is related to the myths of Apollo. The editor is not able to solve the queries propounded by the author.

15. i.e. Hari deva, a form of Vishnu. The temple of Hari deva at Govardhan was built about A.D. 1560. (N.W.P. Gazetteer, 1st ed., vol. viii, p. 94.)

16. Modern India shows little appreciation of good art, and the paintings ordinarily executed for decorative purposes are as crude as those described by the author. A school of clever artists in Bengal is doing something to raise the public taste. The high merit of the ancient Indian paintings at Ajantâ and elsewhere is now fully recognized. A great revival of pictorial art took place about A.D. 1570 in the reign of Akbar. From that date the Indo-Persian and Indian schools of painting maintained a high standard of excellence, especially in portraiture, for a century approximately. During the eighteenth century marked deterioration may be observed. See A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, Oxford, 1911.

17. The Jâts detest Brahmans. The members of a Jât deputation complained one day to the editor when in the Muzaffarnagar district that they suffered many evils by reason of the Brahmans.

18. The author's meaning seems to be that building tombs is not an old Hindoo usage.

19. Sivâjî, the indomitable opponent of Aurangzêb in the Deccan, belonged to the agricultural Kunbî caste. He was born in May A.D. 1627, and died in April 1680. The Brahman ministers of the Râjâs of Sâtârâ were known by the title of Peshwâ. Bâjî Râo I, who died in 1740, the second Peshwâ, was the first who superseded in actual power his nominal master. The last of the Peshwâs was Bâjî Râo II, who abdicated in 1818, after the termination of the great Marâthâ war, and retired to Bithûr near Cawnpore. His adopted son was the notorious Nânâ Sâhib. The Marquis of Hastings, in 1818, drew the Râjâ of Sâtârâ from captivity, and re-established his dignity and power. In 1839 the Râjâ's treachery compelled the Government of India to depose him. His territory is now a district of the Bombay Presidency. See Mânkar, The Life and Exploits of Shivâji, 2nd ed., Bombay, Nirnayasâgar Press, 1886.

20. The Râjâ of Berâr, also known as the Râjâ of Nâgpur, was called the Bhonslâ. The misrule of Gwâlior has been described ante, in chapters 36 and 49. The condition of Gwâlior and Indore, the capitals of Sindhia and Holkâr respectively, is now very different. The Bhonslâ has vanished.

21. Since the annexation of the Panjâb in 1849, the Sikhs have justly earned so much praise as loyal and gallant soldiers, the flower of the Indian army, that their earlier less honourable reputation has been effaced, Captain Francklin, writing in 1803, and apparently expressing the opinion of George Thomas, declares that 'the Seiks are false, sanguinary, and faithless; they are addicted to plunder and the acquirement of wealth by any means, however nefarious'. (Military Memoirs of Mr. George Thomas, London reprint, p. 112.) The Sikh states of the Panjâb are now sufficiently well governed.

22. I know of no authority for the name Charat (Churut), which seems to be a blunder for Satrughna. The sons of Dasaratha were Râma, by the chief queen; Bharat, by a second; and Lachhman (Lakshmana), and Satrughna by a third consort.

23. The species referred to is the long-tailed monkey called 'Hanumân', and 'langûr' in Hindi, the Presbytis entellus of Jerdon (=P. anchises, Elliot; = Semnopithecus, Cuvier).

24. The author seems to have forgotten that he has already told this story, ante, this chapter following in the text.

25. It is in the Mathurâ district. The town of Mathurâ (Muttra) became the head-quarters of a separate District in 1832. The official at Govardhan in 1836 must, therefore, have been subordinate to Mathurâ, not to Agra.