Krishna Janam Bhumi

Site in the city of Mathura believed to
mark the spot where the god Krishna
was born. The present temple was completed in the 1960s, but the site itself is
very old. One of the most religiously
volatile sites in all of India, the new temple abuts the Shahi Idgah, a mosque
built on the base of an earlier Krishna
temple. According to one tradition,
Muslim iconoclasts destroyed four successive temples at the spot now occupied by the mosque, marking the exact
location of Krishna’s birth. This claim
seems doubtful since the mosque was
built in 1661, and the temple it is said to
have replaced was destroyed by the
Moghul emperor Aurangzeb in 1669. In
the 1980s the Krishna Janam Bhumi was
one of the three sites selected by the
activist Vishva Hindu Parishad to be
reclaimed as a Hindu holy place, along
with the Vishvanath temple in Benares,
and Ayodhya’s Ram Janam Bhumi. In
all of these places, mosques were
claimed to have been built on the site of
an important Hindu temple, although
only the first two have historical evidence that this occurred. During the
1990s there have been several campaigns to reclaim the Krishna Janam
Bhumi, but to this point the campaigns
have generated little support. Given the
popular backlash after the 1992 destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, the
government has been far more restrictive on the activities it allows at such disputed sites. For further information see
Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu
Nationalist Movement in India, 1996.
See also Moghul dynasty.