The butter thief
Reading time aloud: about four minutes.
One of the very few religious traditions where a god is adored specifically for being naughty.
In Gokul the women churned butter every morning, and every morning some of it went missing.
They knew perfectly well who. A small blue-skinned boy with his friends, going house to house while the mothers were at the river, climbing on each other's shoulders to reach the pots hung from the rafters, eating the butter with both hands and feeding it to the monkeys.
They hung the pots higher. He built taller towers of boys.
They complained to Yashoda, his mother, in a long delegation. She was mortified, and she promised to deal with it, and she went and found him with butter around his mouth.
"Did you steal butter?"
"No," said Krishna. "How could I reach? And anyway the monkeys took it. And anyway" — opening his mouth to show her he had eaten nothing — "look."
And in his mouth, the story says, she saw the whole universe: stars and oceans and every world there is and herself standing in it looking in.
She fainted. And when she came round she decided to forget the whole thing, because a mother cannot raise a universe, and she wanted to raise a boy.
Once she did manage to tie him to a heavy grinding mortar to keep him still. He dragged it between two trees, and the trees came down, and two spirits trapped in them for a century walked free — so even the punishment turned into a rescue.
Underneath the comedy: the divine choosing to be small, and reachable, and a nuisance. Bhakti traditions love these stories precisely because you cannot be frightened of a god who steals butter. The universe in the mouth is the moment the two things sit together — he really is everything, and he really is four years old.
Maharashtra turns it into sport: dahi handi at Janmashtami, where teams build human pyramids to break a pot of curd hung high above a street. In Braj the same stories are sung rather than told, and there are hundreds of them.
Last updated: 2026-08-11
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