Braji

The Braji are the people of Braj, the pastoral country on both banks of the Yamuna around Mathura and Vrindavan, south of Delhi, whose name derives from a Sanskrit word for a cattle pasture. Largely Hindu, they hold their country to be the legendary childhood land of Krishna, dotted with pilgrimage sites such as Mathura and Gokul.

Their tongue, Braj Bhasha, is a conservative central Indo-Aryan language and was one of the two predominant literary languages of north-central India, above all through the blind sixteenth-century poet Surdas, whose Sur Sagar raised it from a village speech into a literary medium for Krishna devotion.

In 1337 Braj lay under the Delhi Sultanate, and Timur slaughtered its Jat clansmen on his march of 1397. Under Mughal rule heavy taxation drove Mathura's Jats to revolt under Gokula in 1669; their uprisings issued in the Jat kingdom of Bharatpur, founded by Badan Singh in 1722 and enlarged by Suraj Mal between 1755 and 1763.