Yamuna Ji

Yamuna, goddess of the river of the same name, is the second of Hinduism's great river-deities after Ganga and is inseparable from the Krishna devotion of the Braj region, where her banks are the setting for his childhood play. She is revered as a gentle, loving mother whose waters are especially dear to Krishna.

Yami is her Vedic name as the twin of Yama. Kalindi ("daughter of Mount Kalinda," her source) is the name by which she is often known in the Krishna tradition, and also the name of one of Krishna's queens identified with her. Yamuna Maiya is her affectionate address.

She is depicted as a beautiful woman, often dark-complexioned in keeping with her river's darker waters (a contrast the tradition deliberately draws with the fair Ganga), holding a water-pot and lotus and riding a kurma (tortoise), her mount. Her dark colour and her tortoise distinguish her at a glance from Ganga on her makara.

As the daughter of the sun-god Surya and twin sister of Yama, the god of death, tradition holds that bathing in her waters frees one from the fear of death, a boon tied to her brother's realm. Her deepest associations are with Krishna: the infant Krishna is carried across the flooded Yamuna on the night of his birth; as a boy he subdues the serpent Kaliya in her waters and dances on its hoods; and her banks at Vrindavan and Mathura are the stage for the raslila. She is counted among Krishna's consorts as Kalindi.

Daughter of Surya (the Sun) and Sanjna, and twin sister of Yama, lord of death. In the Krishna tradition she is drawn into his circle as the queen Kalindi. These two families, the solar and the Braj, together define her.

She is worshipped throughout Braj and along her course, with Yamuna aartis and the festival of Yamuna Chhath (Yamuna Jayanti) marking her descent to earth; bathing in her is held to remove the fear of death and to purify. Like Ganga, she faces acute modern pollution, sharpening the tension between her sacred status and the river's physical condition.

Her cult is most intense in Braj (Mathura, Vrindavan) and in the Pushtimarg (Vallabha) sampradaya, where she is a supremely important goddess and an object of loving devotion in her own right, not merely a sacred river. Her prominence is markedly higher in these Krishna-centred communities than in regions without the Braj connection.