Subhadra

Subhadra has no Vedic past, but the goddess who stands between Balarama and Krishna is among the oldest images of the Krishna cult. Carvings from Mathura of the Kushana age, about the second century CE, show two Vrishni heroes with a goddess between them, read as Samkarshana, Ekanamsha and Vasudeva, and later examples come from Etah and Ellora. Varahamihira's Brihat Samhita, of the sixth century, says the goddess Ekanamsha should be made between Baladeva and Krishna, one hand on her hip and a lotus in the other. Many scholars identify Ekanamsha with Subhadra.

Who that goddess was is argued. S. C. Mukherji reads the Harivamsa's Ekanamsha as the goddess born to Nanda and Yashoda and exchanged for the baby Krishna; Lavanya Vemsani holds that Yogamaya becomes Ekanamsha and is reborn as Subhadra; Devdutt Pattanaik notes that the scriptures leave it open but Puri treats the names as one.

The Mahabharata gives her story. Its Adi Parva tells the carrying off and the wedding, its Drona Parva her lament for Abhimanyu, its Ashvamedhika Parva her plea for Parikshit, and its Mahaprasthanika Parva the last charge Yudhishthira gives her, to watch over Krishna's great-grandson Vajra. The texts disagree about her mother: the Mahabharata calls her Sarana's own sister, making her Rohini's daughter, while the Bhagavata Purana, as Vettam Mani reads it, makes her Devaki's. The Bhagavata adds that Balarama had meant her for Duryodhana and that she wanted Arjuna herself.

Her marriage was staged early. Kulasekhara Varman's Sanskrit play Subhadradhananjaya, of about the tenth century, is one of the two oldest plays of Kerala's Kutiyattam temple theatre, and is still performed.

At Puri the Skanda Purana has her painted the colour of saffron beside her dark and white brothers, and her chariot, the Darpadalana, follows Balabhadra's on the road to the Gundicha temple. When the images are renewed in the Nabakalebara, her tree is chosen by the sign of a lotus.