Shrinathji Temple, Nathdwara

The Supreme Court's 1963 judgment, drawing on older histories, records that a large temple for the image was built at Govardhan by a merchant named Pooranmal, that Vallabha's son Vitthalnath later moved the image to a temple of his own, and that the Mughal emperor Akbar granted land at Jatipura for the shrine in 1593, followed by a grant from Shah Jahan in 1633. When Aurangzeb's reign brought danger to the temples of Braj, the court notes, quoting James Tod's Annals of Rajasthan, Maharana Raj Singh of Mewar offered the deity protection. The image was taken towards Mewar, and when the wheel of its chariot sank into the ground at the small village of Siarh (Sihad), this was read as a sign that the deity wished to stay there.

According to the judgment, the image reached the site in about 1671, and the earliest document concerning it, an order of the Rana of Udaipur, dates from 1672. The temple's own website gives 1672 as the year the image was installed in a new temple at Sihad, now Nathdwara, after a journey from Govardhan that it says took 32 months, including a stay of about six months at Agra. Wikipedia adds that in 1802, under threat from the forces of Jaswant Rao Holkar, the deity was taken to Udaipur and then for some years to Ghasiyar before returning to Nathdwara.

Administration has changed several times. A 1934 firman of the Udaipur darbar, cited by the Supreme Court, declared the shrine a religious institution whose property belonged to the deity, with the Tilkayat (the head of the Goswami family) acting as its custodian, manager and trustee. Rajasthan's Nathdwara Temple Act of 1959 placed the temple under the Nathdwara Temple Board. In Tilkayat Shri Govindlalji Maharaj v. State of Rajasthan (1963) the Supreme Court held the temple to be a public temple and upheld the Act, apart from one provision on the qualifications of the Goswami.

Architecture and sacred features

Wikipedia describes the complex as modelled on the house of Nanda, Krishna's foster father, in Gokul, which is why it is also called Nanda Bhavan. Like a large household, it includes stores for milk, betel, flowers and other offerings, a kitchen, a jewellery room, a treasury, stables and a sitting room, as well as subsidiary shrines of Madan Mohanji and Navneet Priyaji. A kalasha crowns the shikhara, from which seven flags are flown. Incredible India notes that the temple keeps a gaushala with more than 500 cows.