One of Vrindavan's oldest temples

At the lower end of Vrindavan, where the lanes come down to the Yamuna at Kesi Ghat, stands one of the town's oldest and most historic temples - the Shri Jugal Kishore Temple.  Built of the same warm red sandstone as Vrindavan's other great Mughal-era shrines, it is counted among the four temples raised with the permission of Emperor Akbar and it carries a history of some four centuries.

It is a temple of two glories: the divine couple Jugal Kishore within and the sacred Kesi Ghat without - the very spot where, in the leela, Krishna slew a demon and bathed in the holy river. For the pilgrim who loves Vrindavan's deep history and its riverside, it is a treasure - though, as I will tell you honestly, one whose story has a poignant turn. Radhe Radhe. 

The four temples of Akbar's permission

When Emperor Akbar visited Vrindavan in 1570, he granted the Gaudiya Vaishnavas permission to build a set of four great temples - and the Jugal Kishore Temple is one of them.  The four are traditionally given as:

• Govind Dev - the grand seven-storey temple

• Madan Mohan - on the hill by the Yamuna

• Gopinath - the temple of the gopis' beloved

• Jugal Kishore - at Kesi Ghat

All four share the red sandstone, Mughal-Rajput architecture of that golden age of Vrindavan temple-building and all four suffered in the later iconoclasm. Jugal Kishore's spire (shikhar), it is often noted, resembles that of Madan Mohan - so to see one is to glimpse the family likeness of these four ancient sisters.

Jugal Kishore - the divine couple

The deity is Radha and Krishna together as "Jugal Kishore."  The word jugal means "pair" or "couple," and kishore means "youthful" - so Jugal Kishore is the eternal youthful divine couple, Radha and Krishna worshipped as one inseparable whole, the very heart of Vrindavan's devotion.

The name itself comes from a leela: in the telling, after Krishna vanished from the gopis and reappeared, Radha and Krishna came to Jugal Ghat on the Yamuna and bathed together there - and from this it is said the Lord here earned the name Jugal Kishore, the divine couple of the sacred bath. To worship Jugal Kishore is to honour Radha and Krishna not separately but as the single, perfect unity of divine love. 

Kesi Ghat - the slaying of the horse-demon

The temple stands at Kesi Ghat, one of Vrindavan's most beautiful and sacred riverfronts - and the ghat's name carries its own leela.  Here, by tradition, the tyrant Kamsa sent the demon Kesi in the form of a monstrous horse to kill the young Krishna; Krishna fought and slew the horse-demon and then bathed in the Yamuna at this spot, which has been called Kesi Ghat ever since.

Kesi Ghat is today one of the loveliest places in all Vrindavan - its grand stone steps descending to the river, its evening Yamuna aarti famous and moving. (The ghat and its leelas are covered more fully in the Yamuna Ghats & Leela-Sites guide.) The Jugal Kishore Temple rises right beside it, its history and the river's intertwined. 

How the deity was found

The deity has a discovery-story dear to devotees.  By one account, the sacred image of Jugal Kishore was found by the saint Hariram Vyas, on Magh Shukla Ekadashi (around 1620), at a place called Kishorevan; and King Madhukar Shah of Orchha - a great Bundela patron of Krishna-devotion - built a temple for the deity. This Orchha-Bundela connection matters, for it threads through the temple's later, poignant history: the Bundela kings of Orchha and Panna would become the deity's protectors.

An honest note - the deity at Panna & the locked temple

Now I must tell you the honest, bittersweet truth that many a glossy listing omits.  Like Govind Dev, Madan Mohan and Gopinath, the Jugal Kishore Temple suffered in the iconoclasm of Aurangzeb's reign. By the well-documented accounts, the original deity was carried away to safety - to Panna, in Madhya Pradesh (Bundela territory, near Orchha), where, decades later (by one account in 1758), Raja Hindupat Singh Bundela built a new temple for the Lord. To this day, Jugal Kishore Ji is said to grace devotees at Panna.

And so the old red-sandstone temple at Kesi Ghat is, by these accounts, a protected monument under the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and may be locked or closed to regular darshan - its deity having long departed. Here the sources differ: some popular listings claim the original deity remained in Vrindavan and give active darshan timings; the scholarly and ASI-based accounts say the deity is at Panna and the old temple is locked. I will not pretend to certainty I don't have. So: revere this as one of Vrindavan's four great ancient temples, come to admire its architecture and the glorious Kesi Ghat - but verify whether it is open for darshan before you go and do not be surprised to find the ancient shrine itself closed. 

The architecture & the Govardhan carving

Whether or not you can enter, the temple's exterior is a marvel worth seeing.  Built of red sandstone in the Mughal-Rajput style of Vrindavan's golden age, it rises tall enough, it is said, to be seen from across the Yamuna. Its shikhar (spire) echoes that of the Madan Mohan temple, marking it as one of that ancient family of four.