Following the tyrant’s death, then, a train of complicated adjustments are set in motion.  The first step is to re-establish Krishna with his true parents who are still in jail where the tyrant has confined them.  Krishna accordingly goes to visit them, frees them from their shackles and stands before them with folded hands.  For an instant Vasudeva and Devaki know that Krishna is God and that in order to destroy demons he has come on earth.  They are about to worship him when Krishna dispels this knowledge and they look on him and Balarama as their sons.  Then Krishna addresses them.  For all these long years Vasudeva and Devaki have known that Krishna and Balarama were their children and have suffered accordingly.  It was not Krishna’s fault that he and Balarama were placed in Nanda’s charge.  Yet although parted from their mother, they have never forgotten her.  It pains them to think that they have done so little to make her happy, that they have never had her society and have wasted their time with strangers.  And he reminds them that in the world only those who serve their fathers and mothers obtain power.  Vasudeva and Devaki are greatly touched by Krishna’s words.  Their former woe vanishes and they embrace Krishna and Balarama fondly.

Having acknowledged Vasudeva and Devaki as his true parents, Krishna has now to adjust his social position.  Since Nanda and the cowherds belong to a lower caste than that of Vasudeva and the other Yadavas, Krishna and Balarama, who have eaten and drunk with the cowherds and have been brought up with them, are not true members of the Yadava community.  The family priest is accordingly consulted and it is decided that a ceremony for admitting them into caste must be performed.  This is done and Krishna and Balarama are given the customary sacred threads.  They are now no longer cowherds but true Yadavas.  At the same time they are given a spiritual preceptor who instructs them in the sacred texts and manuals of learning.  When they have finished the course, they express their gratitude by restoring to him his dead son who has been drowned in the sea.

One further obligation springs from their new position.  We have seen how in the epic, the Mahabharata, Krishna stands in a special relation to the Pandavas, the faction which emerges victorious from the great feud.  The mother of the Pandavas is called Kunti and it is Kunti who is the sister of Krishna’s father, Vasudeva.  Since he is now with his true father, rumours concerning Kunti reach Krishna and he learns that along with her sons, the five Pandavas, she is being harassed by the Kaurava king, the blind Dhritarashtra, egged on by his son, the evil Duryodhana.  Being now a part of his father’s family, Krishna can hardly be indifferent to the fate of so intimate a relative.  Akrura, the leading Yadava diplomat, whom the tyrant had employed to bring Krishna to Mathura, is accordingly despatched on yet another mission.  He is to visit the Kauravas and Pandavas, ascertain