As the Pushtimarg tells it
Govardhan and Nathdwara · 3 min read
Long after Krishna lifted Govardhan hill on one finger to shelter Braj from Indra's rain, the cowherds who lived around its foot noticed something new on its slope.
A stone arm was coming out of the hill. It came up raised, the hand above the head, as if it were holding something up.
They did not know what it was. But it was on Govardhan, so they gave it milk, as they gave milk to everything holy, and they hung flowers on it, and worshipped it on the festival days.
Many years passed, more than seventy, the tradition says. Then one day the hill gave up a face below the arm, dark and smiling, with wide eyes.
A cow belonging to a man called Saddu Pande had taken to wandering off every afternoon, and coming home dry. One day he followed her, and found her standing over the face in the hill, letting her milk run down into its mouth.
"So it is you who has been drinking it," he said.
That night, the story says, the god spoke to him in a dream.
"I am the one who held up this hill. Bring me milk every day, and wait. A teacher is coming who will know me."
The teacher came at the end of the fifteenth century. He was Vallabhacharya, a Telugu Brahmin who had walked all over India teaching that the way to Krishna is grace and love, not effort, and he came to Govardhan and saw the arm and the face.
"This is Govardhanadhari," he said. "Krishna who lifts the mountain. He has been holding it up all this time."
He built the god a shrine on the hill and gave him a proper service. His son Vitthalnathji ordered the god's day into eight darshans, from waking at dawn to sleep at night, and at each the image is dressed, fed and sung to like a child of the house. The god was called Shrinathji.
Two hundred years later, in 1672, the times were dangerous for images in Braj, and the priests decided to take Shrinathji away to safety. They wrapped him, put him in a covered cart, and set off along the Yamuna and then south and west, looking for a ruler who would take him in.
They wandered for many months. At last, in Mewar, at a village called Sihad, the wheels of the cart sank into the mud and would not come out. They pushed and dug and called for more oxen. The cart did not move.
"He has chosen," said the priests.
The Maharana of Mewar, Raj Singh, gave them the land. A temple went up where the cart had stopped, and a town grew up around the temple, and its name is Nathdwara, the gate of the Lord.
He is still there, with his left arm raised over his head, holding up a hill that is hundreds of miles away. The merchants of Gujarat and Rajasthan come in crowds, and the eight darshans still begin before dawn.