The story

The tenth book opens with Parikshit, fasting even from water as he waits for death, saying he feels no thirst while he drinks in Krishna's story. Shuka begins with the Earth. Weighed down by the armies of demon kings, she went as a cow to Brahma, who led the gods to the milk ocean. There, in meditation, Brahma heard the Lord's word: he would be born in the house of Vasudeva, and the gods were to take birth among the Yadus to be with him.

In Mathura, Vasudeva married Devaki, the cousin of the prince Kamsa, who called her his sister. To please her, Kamsa took the reins of the wedding chariot himself. On the road a bodiless voice spoke out of the sky: fool, the eighth child of the woman you are driving will kill you.

Kamsa seized Devaki by the hair and drew his sword. Vasudeva reasoned with him. Death comes to every embodied being, today or in a hundred years; how could a man praised for his virtues kill his own sister on her wedding day? When that did not move him, Vasudeva made a bargain. You have nothing to fear from her, he said; the danger is from her sons, and I will hand each one to you as it is born. Kamsa knew Vasudeva kept his word, and let them go.

Vasudeva reckoned that fate might yet change before any son was born. It was a hard bargain, and he kept it. When their first son was born he carried him to Kamsa himself. Kamsa, struck by his honesty, gave the boy back: only the eighth was a danger, he said. But then Narada came and told Kamsa that the Yadus were gods born on earth and that Vishnu meant to destroy him. Kamsa threw Vasudeva and Devaki into prison in chains and killed each son as it was born, fearing any of them might be Vishnu.

Six sons died this way. The seventh child was the Lord's own portion, Ananta. The Lord told Yogamaya, his own power, to draw that child from Devaki's womb into that of Rohini, another wife of Vasudeva, sheltering from Kamsa in Nanda's Gokula, and then to be born herself to Nanda's wife Yashoda. People said Devaki had miscarried. The child drawn from one womb to another would be called Sankarshana, and Balarama.

Then the Lord entered Vasudeva's mind, and through him came into Devaki. She began to shine, and Kamsa saw it and understood. He thought of killing her, but held back, fearing for his name. Instead he sat, ate, walked and lay down thinking of nothing but Hari, until the whole world seemed to him filled with the one he feared.

The birth came in the dead of night, under the star Rohini, with the rivers clear and the sky at peace, and what Vasudeva saw was no ordinary infant. The child had four arms bearing conch, discus, club and lotus, the Shrivatsa mark on his chest, the Kaustubha jewel at his throat, yellow silk, and a body dark as a rain cloud. Vasudeva and Devaki praised him, and Devaki, afraid of Kamsa, begged him to withdraw that form. The Lord told them they had wanted him as a son in two earlier lives, once as Prishni and Sutapa and once as Aditi and Kashyapa, when he came as Vamana, and that he had now come a third time. Then, before their eyes, he became an ordinary baby.

At the Lord's prompting, in the same hour that Yogamaya was born to Yashoda, Vasudeva took him up. The guards fell asleep and the barred doors opened by themselves. Rain fell, and Shesha followed with his hoods spread over the child. The Yamuna, swollen and churning, made way, the text says, as the ocean once made way for Rama. Vasudeva laid his son beside Yashoda, took her baby girl, came back, placed her on Devaki's bed, and fastened the chains on his own feet again.

The girl cried, the guards ran to Kamsa, and Devaki begged him to spare this one, a girl, the last. He tore the child from her and swung her against a stone. She slipped from his grasp, rose into the sky and appeared as the goddess, eight-armed and bearing weapons. What use is killing me, fool? she said. The one who will kill you, your old enemy, has been born somewhere else. Do not kill innocent children. Kamsa, shaken, freed Vasudeva and Devaki and asked their pardon; but his ministers urged him to hunt down every newborn in the land.

This is where the whole Bhagavatam has been heading. Nine books of creation, ages and dynasties lead to a prison in Mathura, and the text does not hide its darkness: six children die before the story properly begins. Much later the book returns to them and to Kamsa, whose ceaseless fearful thought of Hari the text counts as a strange kind of remembrance. For now there is a father wading the Yamuna at midnight, and a child who has consented to be small.

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.
• Kamsa — Krishna's uncle, warned at his sister's wedding that her eighth child would kill him, who thought of Krishna every waking hour.
• Theme: The descents of the Lord
• Theme: Divine play

Keep reading

• Rama's life in two chapters — Skandha 9, adhyayas 10-11 — The whole Ramayana told in two chapters — and what the Bhagavatam chooses to stress when it has room for so little.
• Yashoda sees the universe in his mouth — Skandha 10, adhyaya 8 — Told her toddler ate mud, a mother opens his mouth to check — and sees the whole universe, herself and her village inside it.

Questions to explore

• Why did Kamsa let Devaki live but kill her children?
• In what form did Krishna first appear to Vasudeva and Devaki?
• What did the infant girl Yogamaya tell Kamsa?