06
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
ing home of Vaishnava Hinduism, that forms the subject of the present papers. It is about 42 miles in length, with an average breadth of 30 miles, and is intersected throughout by the river
Jamunā.
On the right bank
of
the stream are the parganas of Kosi " and Chh a tâ,t so named after their principal towns, with the home pargana below them to the south ; and on the left bank the united parganas of No h-jhil; and Mā tS with half the pargana of M a h a b an as far east as the town of B al
de va.
This extent of country is almost abso
lutely identical with the Braj-m and a l of Hindu topography, the circuit of 84 kos" in the neighbourhood of Goku l and B r in dá-ban, where the divine brothers Krishna and Balaram grazed their herds. On the west a low range of sandstone hills forms a barrier between Eng lish territory and the independent state of B h a rat pur; and one of the twelve sacred
[MARch 1, 1872.
and in the contiguous villages of P is a yo” and Kar he la f the rakhyā and kadamb-khandi together
amount to nearly as much. The year
of the great famine Samvat 1894, that is, 1838 A. D., is invariably given as the date when the land began to be largely reclaimed ; the im mediate cause being the number of new roads
then opened out for the purpose of affording employment to the starving population. Al most every spot is traditionally connected with some event in the life of Krishna or of his my thical mistress Radha, sometimes to the pre
judice of an earlier divinity. Thus two pro minent peaks in the B h a rat pur range are crowned with the villages of N a n d g a ſi w and B a r s an a, of which, the former is vene rated as the home of Krishna's foster-father
Nanda, and the latter as the residence of Rādhā’s parents Brikhabhān and Kirat.: Both legends are now as implicitly credited as the
woods, viz., Kä m b a n, is beyond the border.
fact that Krishna was born at M at hur à ;
To a very recent period almost the whole of this large area was pasture and woodland, and to the
while in reality the name N and g a fi w, the
present day many of the villages are environed by broad belts of trees variously designated as ghaná, jhāţi, rakhyā, ban, or khandi. These tracts are often of considerable extent; thus the Ko kila-b an at Great B at h a n covers 723 acres;
the r a k h y á at Kām a r | more than 1000,
- Kosi is a populous and thriving municipal town on
the high road to IDelhi, with the largest cattle market in
sole foundation for the belief, is an ingenious substitution for Nandish war, a title of Mahā deva, and B a r s an a is a corruption of Brahma
sdnu, the hill of Brahma. Only the Girir à j at Gobardhan was according to the original distribution, dedicated to Vishnu, the second person of the trimurti, who is now recognised days in the week. Its connection with the Braj-mandal is
that part of the cºuntry. The name is said to be a corrup
therefore peculiarly appropriate, if Krishna be regarded as the Indian Apollo. Thus the magnificent temple in Kash
tion of K us as th a li; though it may be surmised to have
mir dedicated to the sun under the title of Martand has a
rather some connection with the sacred grove of Kotban
colonnade of exactly 84 pillars.
which is close by. + The local pandits, who are determined to find a refer ence to Krishna in every name throughout the whole of
Braiderive Chhātā from the Chhattra dhāranalila, which they say the god celebrated there. But the town has no genuine tradition nor reputed sanctity, nor appearance of antiquity, and more probably derives its name from the stone Chhatt, is which surmount the lofty gateway of the Imperial Sarai, and form prominent objects from a very considerable dis
|| K film a r in the Kosi pargana is still a populous Jät town, but in the early part of last century was a place o much greater wealth and importance, when a daughter of one of the principal families was taken in marriage by Thakur Badan Sinha of Sahar, the father of the famous
Suraj Mal, the first of the Bharatpur Rajas. On the out skirts of the town is a large walled garden with some monu ments to his mother's relations, and in connection with it
have been given to the place with a reference to its flooded appearance. There is a ruinous Fort with high and massive
a spacious masonry tank filled with water brought by aque ducts from the surrounding rakhyā. At a little distance is an artificial lake with unfinished stone ghats, the work of the Rājā ; this is called Durvasas-kund, after the irascible saint of that name, but there is no tradition to connect him with the locality.
- B h a k h o p is a y o is, in the local patois, a common
expression for hungry and thirsty ; and Pisayo is said to be so called because Radha one day met Krishna there
earthen ramparts constructed by the Jats, and also a Muham madan dargah which includes in its precincts a covered
Water.
tance.
t Noh - jhil is a decayed town about 30 miles from Mathura, situate on the borders of a very large jhil, some 6 miles in length, which is said to have been the original bed of the Jamunā.
The banks of the river are now some
4 or 5 miles distant.
The name of the patriarch Noh may
colonnade, consisting of some 20 or 30 Hindu pillars, the spoils of an older temple. § M a t, though the head of a parganà, is merely a small and meanly-built village on the left bank of the Jamunā, a little above Brinda-ban.
It is one of the stations in the
ban-jitra, and is the reputed scene of Krishna's childish
frolic in upsetting Jasoda's milk-pails (mát).
Close by are
the more famous tirthas—Bhandir-ban and Bhadra-ban : both mentioned in all the Vaishnava Purānas.
- The number 84 seems originally to have been selected
as a sacred number in consequence of its being the multiple of the number of months in the year with the number of
fainting with thirst, and relieved him with a draught of + K a rhel a is locally derived from kar hilna, the movements of the hands in the Rås lila. At the village of Little Bharna a pond bears the same name—Karhela kund —which is there explained as karm hiſna equivalent to pºp mochan. But in the Mainpuri district is a large town called Karhal—the same name in a slightly modified form —where neither of the above etymologies could hold. In each case the name is probably connected with a simple natural feature, there being at all these places dense thickets of the karil plant.
t Kirat is the only name popularly known in the locality, but in the Brahma Vaivarta Purana it is given as Kalāvati.
