Govardhan Puja and Annakut -- The Day After Diwali

In the cowherd village of Vraja, every year after the rains, the people prepared a great sacrifice to Indra, king of the gods and giver of rain. One year the boy Krishna asked his father Nanda why. Their living came from their cows, he said, and their cows lived on the grass of Govardhan, the hill beside the village; it was the hill and the cows that sustained them, and these were what they should honour. Persuaded, the villagers cooked the food meant for Indra, offered it to Govardhan, fed the brahmins and the cows, and walked around the hill in procession.

Indra was enraged. He sent a storm on Vraja -- rain, hail and wind for seven days -- to drown it. The people and their cattle ran to Krishna, and Krishna lifted Govardhan with one hand, as easily as a child lifts a mushroom, and held it over them as an umbrella. For seven days he stood without moving while all of Vraja sheltered beneath the hill.

When the storm ended and the sky cleared, Indra came, his pride broken, and asked forgiveness -- the hymn he offered is preserved in the Garga Samhita -- and the divine cow Surabhi bathed Krishna in milk, naming him Govinda. That is the story Govardhan Puja remembers. It falls on Kartik Shukla Pratipada, the first day of the bright fortnight of Kartik, the day after Diwali.

The festival's other name is Annakut, "mountain of food". Temples, above all the Krishna temples of Braj and the Pushtimarg shrine of Shrinathji at Nathdwara -- whose deity is Krishna with his arm raised to hold the hill -- prepare dozens or even hundreds of dishes and arrange them in a heap before the deity, re-enacting the feast once offered to the hill. Afterwards the food is shared out as prasad, often to whole neighbourhoods.

The story has a sharp point. Krishna does not reject worship; he redirects it -- from a distant god honoured out of fear to the hill, the cows and the people that actually sustain the village. Many readers have found in it a theology of gratitude for the land and its creatures. And Indra's place in the story is instructive too: the king of the gods is not destroyed but humbled, and his apology is accepted. The festival keeps both lessons. The mountain of food is offered and then shared, and the hill that sheltered Vraja is still walked around barefoot by the people who come to thank it.