Kakudmi and Revati: The Short Visit That Lasted Ages
A king and his daughter visit the creator god for a short audience and return to find that ages have passed on earth.
King Kakudmi took his daughter Revati to Brahma to ask whom she should marry. After a short wait, Brahma told them twenty-seven cycles of ages had passed on earth.
Kakudmi was a legendary king of Kushasthali, the city later rebuilt as Dwaraka. His daughter Revati was so accomplished that no man on earth seemed worthy of her, so he took her to Brahmaloka, the realm of the creator god Brahma, to ask advice. She was, the stories say, beautiful and skilled in every art, and her father wanted a husband who matched her.
When they arrived, Brahma was listening to a musical performance, so they waited until it ended. Then Kakudmi asked his question. The Bhagavata Purana (9.3) gives Brahma's answer: 'Twenty-seven catur-yugas have already passed. Those upon whom you may have decided are now gone, and so are their sons, grandsons and other descendants.'
Brahma tells them to return and marry Revati to Balarama, the elder brother of Krishna, who is then living on earth. A later tradition adds that Revati, from an earlier age, was far taller than the people of Balarama's time, so he shortened her with the tip of his plow.
The story is often cited as an ancient description of time dilation: time passing at different rates in different places. It is a striking idea for a pre-modern text. In its own terms, it illustrates Hindu cosmology, where one moment for Brahma equals vast spans of human time. It is also a very human story: a father's errand that cost him his whole world.
By the time the king and his daughter finished waiting through one song in Brahma's hall, twenty-seven cycles of four ages had passed on earth.
Scholars explain the story through Puranic cosmology, which assigns gods enormous time scales, rather than relativity; similar 'time passes faster elsewhere' tales exist in Irish and Japanese folklore.
