Radha Madan Mohan Temple

One of the oldest and most architecturally significant of Vrindavan’s Goswami temples, Radha Madan Mohan Temple traces its founding deity to a discovery by Advaita Acharya, a senior associate of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, who found the Madan Mohan image at the base of a banyan tree and passed it, through his disciple Purushottama Chaube, to Sanatana Goswami. Under Sanatana Goswami’s guidance, the wealthy Multani trader Krishnadasa Kapur (also recorded as Kapur Ram Das) built a temple for the deity around 1580 CE on a bluff above the Yamuna near Kaliya Ghat — one of the earliest of the “Seven Goswami Temples.” Local tradition also holds that an even older shrine once stood on the same site, said to date back to the era of Krishna’s descendant Vajranabha, though this earlier claim is legendary rather than historically documented.

The original Madan Mohan deity did not remain at Vrindavan permanently: ahead of Aurangzeb’s 1670 campaign against the temples of Braj, Raja Jai Singh had it secretly carried to Jaipur for safekeeping, and it was later moved on to Karauli in Rajasthan, where it remains enshrined to this day as the presiding deity of that town’s own Madan Mohan Temple. A replica deity was installed at the Vrindavan temple in 1748, and the standing structure was rebuilt and expanded in 1819 by the zamindar Nanda Kumar Basu, giving the temple its current Nagara-style red-sandstone form. Sanatana Goswami’s own samadhi stands adjacent to the temple, and the site is also remembered for its association with the poet-saint Mirabai, who is said to have worshipped here during her time in Vrindavan.