Living tradition, India
Vrindavan
Krishna's town in Braj, where Vaishnava devotees wear the vertical urdhva pundra tilak of clay.
Vrindavan, in the Braj region of Uttar Pradesh near Mathura, is where Hindu tradition places Krishna's childhood. It has thousands of temples and is the main centre of Gaudiya Vaishnavism. Devotees, monks and widows living in the town's ashrams wear the urdhva pundra, the vertical Vaishnava tilak, drawn in clay from the bridge of the nose up the forehead.
The Vaishnava tilak
The urdhva pundra, "upward mark", is drawn as two vertical lines joined near the nose. In the Gaudiya tradition of Vrindavan it is made with gopi chandan, a pale clay, and ends in a leaf shape on the bridge of the nose, a form said by tradition to represent the tulsi leaf. Sri Vaishnavas of South India wear a broader white namam with a red or yellow line between, and other communities have their own forms.
Temples and colour
The ISKCON temple in Vrindavan, opened in 1975, drew devotees from around the world, who adopted the tilak. The Banke Bihari temple is the town's most visited. At Holi, which in Braj is celebrated over several days, faces are smeared with coloured powder, gulal, and the town's temples and lanes fill with colour.
Guides of Vrindavan
Photo credits on this page
The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Tilaka: Robert Vane Russell (1873-1915), Public domain, source
- Urdhva Pundra: Abhisek Sarda, CC BY 2.0, source