Yashoda and Gopal

Following the infant Krishna being delivered for safety with foster parents in the village of Vrindavan, he was raised by Yashoda as if her own child. In this tender image, we see the infant Krishna (Bala-Krishna), crawling playfully, his foster mother offering a ball of butter to him to attract his attention. This scene plays on the often-depicted subject of Krishna using his superior intellect to mischievously steal butter and buttermilk, even when placed out of a child’s reach. Despite Krishna having been placed with a humble village family of cowherders in order to avoid his vengeful uncle the tyrant Kansa, usurper of the throne at nearby Mathura, the setting is not that of village India. Rather, the setting is palatial, the figure portrayed in an interior with Indo-Islamic architectural elements, with baluster columns, cusped arches and a richly curtained doorway. Similarly, both Yashoda and the infant Krishna are richly bejeweled, with Krishna wearing a pearled hairband with three peacock feathers. His foster mother wears colorful garments enriched with woven gold borders. Here Krishna has been given the epithet ‘Gopal,’ an abbreviation of Gopala-Krishna, the “cow-protector” and by inference the “protector of the World.” The bond between Yashoda and Krishna is celebrated in Hindu devotional poetry and art as a model of maternal love and, by analogy, as an exemplar of the devotion that a devotee may experience toward one’s God.