Mathura -

From the Paper "The Mastram Emotion and Person Among Mathura's Chaubes" 

Mathura city is on the right bank of the holy river Jamuna and lies about ninety miles south of Delhi and thirty miles north of Agra in the state of Uttar Pradesh. The name itself has been variously derived to mean either city of churns, after its fabled wealth of cows and dairy products, or forest of honey, after a legendary forest of bees that produced honey in lavish abundance (Joshi 1968: 2). Mathura has a long and hallowed history. Painted gray ware found in various archeological sites indicates that it was inhabited at least as far back as early Aryan times, 1500 B.C. Later it was the capital of the legendary Shurasena empire of the Yadavas from whose line Krishna himself is said to have sprung. Various sites in and around the city, as well as textual evidence, show that Mathuts in the pre-Christian and early post-Christian era was the home of flourishing and vigorous Buddhist and Jain cultures. Buddhist artisans hewed the archetypical Asian Buddha in the Mathura style of stone sculpture.

In A.D. 1018 Mathura was sacked by the Muslim invader Mahmud of Ghazni who saw its Hindu idols and opulent temples as an abomination.

Mahmud's desecration was the first of many by Muslims and others, of which the most remembered today are those of the Moghul emperor Aurangzeb (1658-1707). In 1703 Mathura passed under British rule, and since that time it has been administrative headquarters of district Mathura.

Mathura is well known and revered in India as one of the seven great pilgrimage cities. This fame is based on two venerable facts. First, Mathura, the acknowledged birthplace of Lord Krishna, is the symbolic center of Braj, the land of his childhood play and miraculous exploits. Second, it is the religious center for bathing in the river Jamuna, just as Banaras is the center for bathing in the river Ganges. A number of pilgrimage guidebooks depict Mathura as the center of a lotus flower whose petals are the twelve sacred forests (ban) within which are the hallowed bathing tanks and sacred mountains where Krishna grazed his cows, dallied with the milkmaids, and rescued his friends and devotees from wicked demons and angry gods. The sites of these exploits, or lilas (plays or sports), have for centuries inspired the religious imagination of devout pilgrims.

Some pilgrims come to Mathura for only a day or two during which time they bathe in the Jamuna and visit a few other sacred centers, such as Brindaban and Gokul. Other pilgrims, however, come for the Braj Caurasi Kos Parikrama(160-mile circumambulation of Braj), a forty-day journey around Braj, to visit the sites of Krishna's various lilas.^[2] Both types of pilgrim need pilgrimage priests (panda^[*]) to perform various religious obligations and, in the case of the Braj Caurasi Kos Parikrama, to act as guides over the 160 miles of unknown forest, field, and fen. Mathura is almost as well known for its traditional pilgrimage cicerones, the Chaubes, as it is for its sites of Krishna's sports and play.

< Credits: Reproduced from the Book called Divine Passions. The papers in this volume were originally written for a conference on "The Anthropology of Feeling, Experience, and Emotion in India" held at the University of Houston on 1-14 December 1985. The conference was part of the Festival of India held in the United States during 1985-86. Nineteen highly provocative papers were presented; the nine in this volume were selected because they most directly addressed the conference's theme. >