Krishna Sanskrit Krishna one of the most widely revered and most popular of all Indian divinities worshipped as the eighth incarnation avatar or avatara of the Hindu god Vishnu and also as a supreme god in his own right. Krishna became the focus of numerous bhakti devotional cults which have over the centuries produced a wealth of religious poetry music and painting. The basic sources of Krishnas mythology are the epic Mahabharata and its 5th century CE appendix the Harivamsha and the Puranas particularly Books X and XI of the Bhagavata purana. They relate how Krishna literally black or dark as a cloud was born into the Yadava clan the son of Vasudeva and Devaki who was the sister of Kamsa the wicked king of Mathura in modern Uttar Pradesh. Kamsa hearing a prophecy that he would be destroyed by Devakis child tried to slay her children but Krishna was smuggled across the Yamuna River to Gokula or Vraja modern Gokul where he was raised by the leader of the cowherds Nanda and his wife Yashoda.