The Yamuna and the sacred urban landscape of Vrindavan, India

Abstract

Vrindavan holds a special place in the Hindu cultural imagination as a sylvan landscape associated with Krishna's childhood and adolescence. This vivid cultural image has guided place-making in claiming sites as Krishna's lila-sthals (merrymaking sites), finding and reclaiming them as his eternal abode. This chapter describes the centuries-long transformation in the making of Vrindavan's historic landscape by tracing the evolution of the riverfront ancient pastoral landscape to the dense urban core of a pilgrim town. The continuing mnemonic role of the urbanized landscape is interpreted by linking place stories, place toponymy, and place-making. Urban form and structure evolved to respond to the river and support a way of life centred on the Krishna and Radha worship and the River Yamuna. The local hamlets started to coalesce into a urban settlement in the sixteenth century with the building of temple precincts comprising shrines, gardens, memorials, and wells around them. The archetypal image of a kunj (bower) guided the built form and urban development on the riverfront, transforming the natural edge into a built one by the eighteenth century. An urban conservation model based upon the Historic Urban Landscape approach is outlined for Vrindavan's riverfront as a sacred landscape of pilgrimage and a historic landscape of immense heritage value. © 2026 Amita Sinha, Nidhi Kapri, Neha Goyal Tater. All rights reserved.