VRINDAVAN, India – Krishna, a skinny 12-year-old, waits near a Hindu temple packed with pilgrims. He hears a yell – that's his cue. He zigzags between motorbikes and honking tuk-tuks, elbows his way through the crowd and finds a man waving wildly at a monkey.
The monkey, perched on a high ledge, has stolen the man's spectacles — by jumping on the man's shoulder and grabbing them. Now it is trying them on.
Krishna knows what that monkey really wants. He swiftly flings a box of mango juice. The monkey catches the box with one hand but goes back to toying with the glasses. Krishna flings up another juice. Satisfied, the monkey flings the stolen glasses back — straight into an open sewer.
Vinod Verma is grateful. "These spectacles were a gift from my kids," he says, as a friend retrieves the glasses from the muck. He tips Krishna about 50 Indian rupees — less than a dollar but twice the price of the mango juice boxes.
Krishna grins. He says he makes between $6 to $12 a day this way: a useful middleman between monkeys who know that they can swap stolen eyeglasses for juice, preferably mango, preferably the extremely sweet local Raskik brand.
"If someone doesn't have money, I do it for free," he says. He knows there'll always be a next time.
Thieving, hostage taking monkeys are as common as pilgrims in Vrindavan, a holy Hindu town by the Yamuna river in northern India. Monkeys are everywhere: hanging by power lines, sliding off sloping temple rooftops — whee! — and rummaging through garbage bins for snacks. Residents say monkeys also sneak into their kitchens or run away with their laundry, drying on the flat rooftops typical of this part of India.
A few years ago, the town's legislator Hema Malini raised the matter of the cheeky monkeys in the Indian Parliament. "Please do not treat the matter lightly," she warned her giggling colleagues. "It is a very, very important matter."
New tricks from longtime residents
Locals say monkeys have always lived in Vrindavan, an ancient city that many Hindus believe is the childhood stomping grounds of the beloved god Krishna. Residents and pilgrims alike feed them.
But the taking of glasses as hostages and other thievery — that's new, say residents. And it's because this town, once dotted with fruit trees and surrounded by forests by the river, has become victim to its own tourist success: to accommodate growing numbers of visitors, investors are hacking down its green cover forests to fling up hotels and highways. Monkeys have lost much of their food resource and native habitat, and moved into the city. Instead of living off charity, like the monkeys of yore, they've turned to crime to get by.
Vrindavan is a dramatic example of wild animals taking root in urban areas after losing their habitat. But it's hardly the only place in India. Vrindavan's nearest neighbor, Mathura, also has predatory, thieving monkeys. And ahead of the G20 international summit in India last year, New Delhi put up posters of grey langur monkeys baring their teeth aggressively. Langurs are believed to be the sworn enemies of the monkeys that inhabit India's urban centers, mostly the native Rhesus macaque breed. The posters were meant to frighten the monkeys so they wouldn't approach visiting delegates. A local officer said they had a "positive effect."
"If we don't become aware that we are all part of a system, that we are all interdependent, we are going to set ourselves forward for huge struggles in the future," says Jaya Dhindaw. She is an urban development expert at the research group, World Resources Institute based in New Delhi.
Dhindaw says India's urban landscape has always seen the coexistence of different species: cats, dogs, cows, pigs, goats, monkeys — alongside humans. "We also have the unique concept of sacred groves — these small, dense forests with a huge amount of biodiversity where people go and pray to those animals and the species that exist there."
Blame it on urbanization
But in recent years, Dhindaw says, India's rapidly expanding urban sprawl has contributed to human-animal conflict. isn't accounting for the needs of the environment. So, across India, there's increasing reports of leopards entering houses, elephants feasting on farms and crocodiles attacking people on beaches.
"Animals are coming out of their habitat because we're entering theirs," says Baiju Raj a conservationist from the New Delhi-based non-profit Wildlife SOS.
India's total green cover is less than a fourth of its total area, well below its target of 33%. In the last five years, India lost an additional 370 square miles of forests, equal to a mid-sized American city like Indianapolis.
A professional herpetologist, Baijuraj has been involved in rescuing reptiles like cobras and monitor lizards for years. "Earlier, we'd see a dip in reports of animals in distress during winter, when these reptiles hibernate. But with increasing urbanization, we see the graph of distress calls is steady — if not rising — through the year."
Even in cities not taken over by monkeys or other wild animals, the environmental damage of rapid, unplanned urban growth is evident across India. As people flock to urban areas for jobs, towns and cities are expanding fast, often at the expense of farmland and forest. Lakes are being depleted. A 2023 study found 60% of Indian birds have declined over the last three decades; in urban areas, species like sparrows and vultures have all but disappeared.
Vrindavan's development has been dramatic, says John Stratton Hawley, professor of religion at Barnard College, Columbia University. When he first visited the town 50 years ago, the countryside was only ever a mile away. Pilgrims often walked on a six-mile dirt path around the town — a Hindu ritual known as parikrama. To do so, they'd sometimes pass thickets with peacocks. Many would also bathe in the Yamuna, hoping the river turtles didn't bite their toes.
Hawley says on return visits since, he's witnessed what he calls Vrindavan's "theme park-fication." New patrons built temples to other Hindu gods, some of their statues towering over roadsides. Real estate companies created luxury housing projects and second homes for frequent visitors. The increased tourism also brought in revenue as locals started working outside their traditional jobs at the farm.
Hawley documented these changes in his book Krishna's Playground: Vrindavan in the 21st Century. That pilgrim-walk around the town — the parikrama — he says, is an entirely different experience today. "You'll be walking on a road," he says, "fighting off lorries and cars. Where this used to be a path that went around Vrindavan, it now goes through some of the central sections because of the population explosion."
That was clear on a visit by NPR this autumn. Hundreds of barefoot pilgrims undertook a parikrama one morning, picking around heaps of cow dung dotting the road. They dodged motorbikes whose drivers were barreling through narrow road — meant to be pedestrian-only zones — kicking up clouds of dust. The trees were few and ornamental; lanes were most often densely packed with dimly-lit houses.
Some still take a dip in the Yamuna river. But a 2023 study by India's water ministry found that the river's murky water isn't fit for drinking or bathing anymore, in part because Vrindavan's drains empty out untreated sewage into the water.
"We've lost the peacocks. We've lost the turtles. What we haven't lost is our closest relative," Hawley says: the monkeys.
A 2022 survey by the local municipality estimated the monkey population at over 18,000. Many of its estimated 800,000 residents say: That's way too many monkeys, even if they're conflicted over what to do with them.
Sending a message to the monkeys
At his three-story home, Hindu priest Dhanajay Goswami shows off the iron mesh on his windows and barbed wires around the rooftop. Goswami's home is built next to a sacred grove of basil bushes. Hundreds of monkeys have taken over the neighborhood.
Goswami sometimes carries a wooden stick when he steps out, to shoo the monkeys away. "It feels like we're living in a cage and monkeys are running free," he says.
Despite their nuisance, monkeys have a sympathetic audience — because they hold religious significance for Hindus. Many consider monkeys an incarnation of Hanuman, a deity from the Hindu pantheon who is part-human and part-monkey.
Govind Sharma is a volunteer with the local animal welfare organization Shree Vrindavan Bihari Sewa Trust. For more than five years, he says, his team has been feeding monkeys every morning.
NPR met him one late fall morning as he was driving along the riverbank on his motorbike. The riverbank across is still open and leafy, a throwback to what the town used to be. Sharma stopped in places he knew monkeys frequented, tossing handfuls of peeled cucumbers, drawing monkeys out from lampposts and drainage pipes. Sometimes, he'd feed them off his palm.
"The monkeys attack people only because they're hungry," says Sharma. In the past, feeding them was a way to keep the relations peaceable.
But Rajnikanth Mittal, who heads the town's forest department, says it's not as simple. "Monkeys are very intelligent, mischievous creatures," he says. "They are among the animals which can do certain things without any provocation."
Mittal spoke at his office in a forested campus with spacious cottages, among the few surviving green spaces near Vrindavan. For years, he says, his team tried to capture urban monkeys and put them back in the remnants of the forest. But, he says, it's too expensive, there are too many monkeys … and they always return.
"Traditional techniques may not work," he says, rubbing his forehead wearily. "They're prolific breeders, and they have no predators in urban areas," he says — and then there's those religious sentiments that say monkeys are a key part of Vrindavan's spiritual identity.
But Mittal's department was handed a lifeline two years ago, when an Indian court downgraded protections for urban monkeys, effectively equating their status to stray animals like dogs and cats. The ruling empowers municipal bodies to oversee the welfare of monkeys and control their numbers.
Local authorities say that's not enough. Ramji Lal, the senior municipal official tasked with trying to solve Vrindavan's monkey problem, says there's no official guidelines on how to sterilize a monkey, so they can't dispatch vets to do it. Lal adds, the municipality doesn't have the social license to do it either. "People would likely oppose it on religious grounds."
Holy monkeys
Because of the belief that monkeys are holy, almost no Vrindavan resident we spoke to wanted them to go away forever. Like Madan Kumar Saini, who runs a sweet shop next to an ancient Hindu temple dedicated to the monkey-god Hanuman. About a decade ago, he says, monkeys attacked a woman nearby while she was on her flat rooftop. She panicked, Saini says, fell off her rooftop and died.
"People here were angry," Saini recalled — and yet, they were conflicted about what to do. Saini says ultimately, most people decided they shouldn't take any action against the monkeys. "People felt that monkeys have always been a part of the town, so we should put up with them." Saini did too. Even when monkeys regularly steal his pedas and rasgullas, two famous regional sweets made of sugar and condensed milk.
Govind Sharma, the volunteer monkey-feeder, says the focus should be on restoring Vrindavan to what it once was: a quiet, green spiritual retreat and not a tourism hub. The proliferation of thieving monkeys, he says, is a problem created by humans. And monkeys shouldn't be paying its price. "Driving monkeys out of Vrindavan will be like kicking a naughty child out of its home," says. "You won't do that — it's still part of your family."
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