The Authentic Orthography
Sacred River, Twin of Yama · Sacred River, Twin of Yama · N. of a river commonly called the Jumnā (in Hariv. & MārkP. identified with Yamī q.v.; it rises in the Himālaya mountains among the Jumnotri peaks at an elevation of 10,849 feet
Unicode restoration and ASCII comparison
यमुना
The name in its original Sanskrit form. Yamunā (यमुना) is attested in the source tradition — “N. of a river commonly called the Jumnā (in Hariv. & MārkP. identified with Yamī q.v.; it rises in the Himālaya mountains among the Jumnotri peaks at an elevation of 10,849 feet”. Its macron-length vowels carry the full phonetic and orthographic weight of the source tradition.
yamuna
Reduced to plain yamuna, the name loses everything that made it specific: macron-length vowels. What remains is an ASCII string that machines can parse but that no longer speaks with its original voice.
Yamunā
The Unicode restoration recovers what ASCII flattened. Yamunā restores macron-length vowels, returning the name to its original written dignity. The domain encodes to Punycode, but the browser displays the truth.
Yamunā.com → xn--yamun-jwa.com
The non-ASCII characters in Yamunā are encoded while the ASCII remains visible. To the DNS, it is Punycode. To humanity, it is Yamunā.
How Yamunā travels from ancient script to the modern URL
How Yamunā was spoken
Devotion, the Sangam, and Kṛṣṇa's Own Water
Yamunā is the second of India's great river-goddesses and the first of Kṛṣṇa's loves: daughter of the sun-god, sister of death, the dark-blue water on whose banks the cowherd god danced, battled the serpent, and made an entire land his memory.
Her meeting with Gaṅgā at Prayāgrāj — the trivenī, the holiest confluence in India.
The poison-serpent she hosted until the child-god danced on its heads — the river cleansed by dance.
The sun's daughter, Yama's twin — light and death sharing one water.
The pastoral heartland where Kṛṣṇa's līlā plays out on her banks.
Stories of Yamunā
Yamunā's myths bind the solar and the pastoral: the sun's daughter flowing through the cowherd's land, purifying and purified by the god who plays in her.
Born of Sūrya and Saṃjñā, twin sister of Yama — death and the river as siblings, the tradition's quiet pairing. The Purāṇas rank her beside Gaṅgā in holiness and ahead in intimacy: if Gaṅgā is the mother, Yamunā is the beloved — the river whose water Kṛṣṇa drank as a child and blessed as a god, making her, alone of rivers, "the co-wife of the Lord."
The serpent Kāliya poisoned her water at Vṛndāvana until the child Kṛṣṇa dived in, wrestled him, and danced on his hundred heads — the serpent's wives begging mercy for their husband. He spared it and banished it to the sea, and her water ran clean: the myth every pilgrim to Kāliya-ghāṭa hears, and the river's own story of being made pure.
At Prayāgrāj she meets Gaṅgā — and the hidden Sarasvatī beneath — forming the trivenī, the triple confluence where the Kumbh Mela gathers the largest crowds on earth. The texts are precise: bathing at her meeting-point equals a thousand sacrifices. The dark river and the white river run visibly side by side for miles before mixing — the most photographed hydrology in India.
The Bhāgavata makes her a devotee herself: the gopīs' rāsa dance happens on her sands, Kāliya's cleansing happens in her current, and when Kṛṣṇa leaves Vṛndāvana, the river slows in grief. The poets say she alone of goddesses is both worshipped and loved — prayed to like a river, wept for like a widow.
Yamunā is the river of the second place — never the first river, always the beloved one. She hosts the serpent and the dance, the sun and the shadow, Gaṅgā beside her in every hymn. She asks the confluence's question, which is every collaborator's question: what do you become when you stop insisting on being the only water?
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