KRISHNA

Sanskrit Krsna one of the most widely revered and most popular of all Indian divinities, worshipped as the eighth incarnation (avatar, or avatara) of the Hindu god Vishnu and also as a supreme god in his own right. Krishna became the focus of numerous bhakti (devotional) cults, which over the centuries have produced a wealth of religious poetry, music, and painting. The basic sources of Krishna's mythology are the epic Mahabharata and its 5th-century-AD appendix, the Harivamsa, and the Puranas, particularly Books 10 and 11 of the Bhagavata-Purana. They relate how Krishna (literally black, or dark as a cloud) was born into the Yadava clan, the son of Vasudeva and Devaki, sister of Kamsa, the wicked king of Mathura (in modern Uttar Pradesh). Kamsa, hearing a prophecy that he should be destroyed by Devaki's child, tried to slay her children; but Krishna was smuggled across the Yamuna River to Gokula (or Vraja, modern Gokul), where he was raised by the leader of the cowherds, Nanda, and his wife Yasoda. The child Krishna was adored for his mischievous pranks; he also performed many miracles and slew demons. As a youth, the cowherd Krishna became renowned as a lover, the sound of his flute prompting the gopis (wives and daughters of the cowherds) to leave their homes to dance ecstatically with him in the forests. His favourite among them was the beautiful Radha. At length Krishna and his brother Balarama returned to Mathura to slay the wicked Kamsa. Afterward, finding the kingdom unsafe, he led the Yadavas to the western coast of Kathiawar and established his court at Dvaraka (modern Dwarka, Gujarat). He married the princess Rukmini and took other wives as well. Krishna refused to bear arms in the great war between the Kauravas and the Pandavas but offered a choice of his personal attendance to one side and the loan of his army to the other. The Pandavas chose the former, and Krishna thus served as charioteer for Arjuna. On his return to Dvaraka, a brawl broke out one day among the Yadava chiefs in which Krishna's brother and son were slain. As the god sat in the forest lamenting, a huntsman, mistaking him for a deer, shot him in his one vulnerable spot, the heel, killing him. Krishna's personality is clearly a syncretic one, though the different elements are not easily separated. Vasudeva-Krsna, a Vrsni prince who was presumably also a religious leader, was elevated to the godhead by the 5th century BC; the cowherd Krishna is obviously the god of a pastoral community that turned away from the Indra-dominated Vedic religion. The Krishna who emerged from the blending of these ideologies was ultimately identified with the supreme god Visnu-Narayana and, hence, considered his avatar. His cult preserved distinctive traits, chief among them an exploration of the analogies between divine love and human love. Thus, Krishna's youthful dalliances with the gopis are interpreted as symbolic of the loving interplay between God and the human soul. The rich variety of legends associated with Krishna's life led to an abundance of representation in painting and sculpture. The child Krishna (Balakrsna) is depicted crawling on his hands and knees or dancing with joy, a ball of butter held in his hands. The divine lover (the most common representation) is shown playing the flute, surrounded by adoring gopis. In 17th- and 18th-century Rajasthani and Pahari painting, Krishna is characteristically depicted with blue-black skin, wearing a yellow dhoti (loincloth) and a crown of peacock feathers. district, northeastern Andhra Pradesh state, southern India, having an area of 3,372 sq mi (8,734 sq km). Known as a delta district, Krishna has irrigational canals that connect the backwaters of the Krishna and Godavari rivers. Rice, millet, pulses, oilseeds, cotton, and tobacco are grown on its well-watered bottomlands. The district has many factories (sugar, cement, and soap) and commercial and scientific establishments. Vijayawada (Bezwada), Masulipatam (q.v.; the district headquarters), and Nizampatam are important towns. Pop. (1991 prelim.) 3,695,712.