The story

Every year the cowherds of Vraja held a sacrifice to Indra, king of the gods and lord of the rain clouds. One year Krishna, still a boy, saw the preparations under way and asked his father what they were for. Nanda explained patiently. Indra sends the rain, the rain grows the grass and the crops, and the cowherds live on what the rain gives. So they worship him with the things the rain itself produces. It was their family custom, and to drop it out of desire, fear or hatred would bring no good.

Krishna argued with him, and the argument is worth hearing because of whose terms it uses. A creature is born by its own karma and dies by it, he said; happiness, sorrow, fear and safety all follow from what it has done. If even a god only hands out the results of actions, what is Indra to do about what is already set? Each of us acts according to his own nature. The cowherds' work is with cows, their home is the forest and the hills, not cities or kingdoms. Clouds are driven by rajas, the quality of restless activity, and pour their rain everywhere; what has Indra to do with it? So let the materials gathered for Indra go to worship of the cows, the brahmanas and the hill Govardhana.

He was precise about what that worship should look like. Cook rich food of every kind, sweet rice and cakes and soups. Feed the brahmanas and give them cows. Give food to everyone, down to dogs and the outcastes. Give the cows good grass. Then dress well, put on garlands, and walk around the hill. This, he said, would please the cows, the brahmanas, the hill, and him.

The cowherds agreed. They did everything he had described, and then Krishna took on a vast form, declared, I am the hill, and ate the offerings, while his own human form bowed with the villagers to the hill that was also himself.

Indra was enraged. That a village of forest cowherds should drop his worship on the word of a talkative child struck him as intolerable arrogance, and he sent the clouds of dissolution, the Samvartaka, against Vraja. Rain came down in columns, with hail and lightning and gales, until the whole land was under water and the cattle shivered and the people came running to Krishna for shelter.

Krishna saw what Indra was doing and why: a god intoxicated with his own power. He lifted the hill of Govardhana with one hand, the text says, as easily as a child picks up a mushroom, and held it up like an umbrella. He called the cowherds to come under it with their families and their herds, and told them not to fear that the mountain would slip.

They stayed under it for seven days. Krishna did not move from his place, and he paid no attention to hunger or thirst. At the end of the seven days Indra, astonished and his resolve broken, called back his clouds. The sky cleared, the sun came out, and Krishna told the villagers to go out with their things. When they had all gone, he set the hill down where it had stood.

Afterwards the cowherds could not stop talking about it. They went over everything he had done since infancy and asked Nanda how such a boy could be one of them. Nanda repeated what Garga had told him at the naming: that this child was the equal of Narayana in his qualities, and would carry them through every trouble.

Then Indra came down from heaven, privately and ashamed. He bowed his crowned head at Krishna's feet and admitted his offence. He had thought himself the master of the world, he said, and the Lord's punishment was meant for the good of the one punished. Krishna answered that he had broken up the sacrifice as a kindness, so that Indra, drunk on the wealth of heaven, would remember him. Then the wish-granting cow Surabhi came too. She bathed Krishna with her own milk, Indra bathed him with water from the heavenly Ganga brought by his elephant Airavata, and they gave him the name Govinda, the Indra of the cows.

The Bhagavatam does not say on what day of the year this happened. The custom of Govardhan Puja on the day after Diwali, with its mountain of cooked food, keeps Krishna's own instructions alive: cook everything, feed everyone, and walk around the hill.

The episode closes the cycle of Krishna's protection of Vraja that began with the demons sent by Kamsa. This time the threat is not a demon but a god, and the point is not that the gods are false. Indra is humbled, forgiven and sent home still Indra. What the cowherds learn is that the being they worship already lives among them, and that a hill, a herd of cows and a village meal can be the right place to worship him.

Who appears, and what it shows

• Krishna — Not one avatar among many but 'the Lord himself' (1.3.28) — and the tenth book spends ninety chapters on his single life.
• The gopis of Vraja — The cowherd women whose love for Krishna the Bhagavatam holds up as the highest devotion — and who taught the wise Uddhava.
• Theme: Pride humbled
• Theme: Divine play

Keep reading

• Krishna dances on Kaliya — Skandha 10, adhyayas 16-17 — A many-headed serpent poisons a lake of the Yamuna, and a boy jumps in and dances on its hoods until it yields.
• The Rasa dance — Skandha 10, adhyayas 29-33 — On an autumn night the flute calls and the gopis leave everything; then Krishna vanishes, and their song of longing is the Gopi Gita.

Questions to explore

• Why did Krishna stop the sacrifice to Indra?
• How long did Krishna hold up Govardhana?
• Why is Govardhan Puja celebrated the day after Diwali?