Binsar Mahadev: A Temple a Son Built for His Father

The setting is the reason to come, and the forest deserves attention on its own account.

Cedrus deodara:

• The Himalayan cedar, growing from about 1,500 to 3,200 metres across the western Himalaya
• The name is from devadaru, the timber of the gods
• Grows very large, to over 50 metres, and lives for centuries
• Naturally resistant to rot and insect attack
• One of the finest structural timbers in the world

Why deodar forests and temples go together. The association is not coincidental.

• The tree's name places it in a religious category before anything else happens
• Deodar groves attached to temples are protected and therefore hold old trees, as described at Haat Kalika
• The wood is what Himalayan temples are built from, as set out in the Chaurasi entry
• Deodar forest is dark, quiet and cool, which is atmospherically appropriate and was presumably noticed

The Kumaon forests generally:

• Deodar and blue pine at higher elevations
• Banj oak, the Himalayan evergreen oak, in the middle belt, which is the ecologically critical species
• Chir pine on drier and lower slopes
• Rhododendron, the burans, flowering red in spring, which is the state tree of Uttarakhand

The oak and pine question. This matters and is not well known outside the region.

• Banj oak forest holds water, builds soil, supports springs and provides fodder and leaf litter that the local agricultural system depends on
• Chir pine does none of these things well. Its needles acidify the soil, suppress undergrowth, hold little water and burn readily
• Colonial and later forestry favoured chir pine because it produces resin and timber commercially
• Large areas of oak forest were converted to pine
• The consequence is drying springs, reduced fodder, and a very greatly increased fire risk

Forest fires. Uttarakhand has severe forest fire seasons, generally in the pre monsoon months of April to June, and pine forest is the principal fuel.

That is a directly human caused problem with a directly human cause, and it is the subject of substantial local activism and of restoration efforts aimed at bringing oak back.

The Chipko movement. Since this is Uttarakhand and the subject is forests, it should be stated.

• Beginning in 1973 at Mandal in Chamoli district and spreading through the hills
• Villagers, and particularly women, prevented commercial felling by placing themselves between the trees and the axes
• Gaura Devi at Reni village in 1974 led the action for which the movement is best remembered
• Figures associated with it include Chandi Prasad Bhatt and Sunderlal Bahuguna
• It resulted in a ban on green felling above certain altitudes in the region and became internationally known

Why it happened here. The Uttarakhand hills depend on forest for fodder, fuel, leaf litter for fields and water.

A village losing its forest loses its agriculture. That is why the movement was led by the people whose daily work is collecting fodder and firewood, which in these hills is women's work, and why they were the ones who stopped it.

What to notice at Binsar Mahadev. Walk into the forest around the temple and look at the trees.

They are old, they are large, and they are there because a temple is there. That is the sacred grove mechanism working, and there is a great deal less of it than there was.

Binsar Mahadev, like a great many Indian temples, is associated with petitions for children, and this needs handling carefully.

What happens:

• Couples who have not been able to have children come to the temple
• They make a vow, perform the prescribed observance and ask
• Some stay for a period
• If a child is born, they return to fulfil the vow and to give thanks

Where else this is done. Very widely. Fertility petitions are among the most common reasons people visit temples in India.

• At Shiva temples generally, since Shiva is the deity of generation
• At Devi shrines, particularly local goddesses
• At Hanuman and at Santoshi Ma shrines
• At Nagas, snake deities, which have a specific and widespread association with fertility across south India
• At trees, where cradles are tied, as at many shrines in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka
• At dargahs, extensively, by people of every community

How to write about this responsibly. There are three things a guide of this kind owes the reader.

First, take the practice seriously. Infertility is one of the most painful things people experience, it is frequently invisible, and in India it carries stigma that falls very heavily and very unfairly on women.

A couple who come to Binsar Mahadev are dealing with real grief, in a social environment that frequently blames the wife, and they are doing something about it in the way available to them.

Nobody writing about a temple should be dismissive of that.

Second, be clear about medicine. Infertility is a medical condition with medical causes and, in a substantial proportion of cases, medical treatment.

• Causes lie with the male partner in roughly the same proportion as with the female, which is not what most Indian families assume
• Evaluation is straightforward and starts with a semen analysis and basic tests for the woman, in that order because the male test is simpler and cheaper
• Treatments range from ordinary interventions to IVF, with varying success rates and considerable cost
• Many causes are treatable, and many couples who cannot conceive for a period do so later without any intervention

A temple visit is not a substitute for a medical evaluation. Doing both is entirely reasonable. Doing only the first, for years, is a loss of time that in fertility terms cannot be recovered.

Third, name the harm. The pressure that produces these visits also produces real damage.

• Women are blamed, abandoned, subjected to second marriages by their husbands, and abused, on the assumption that infertility is theirs
• Enormous sums are spent on unregulated clinics and on treatments with no evidence base
• Sex selection and the abortion of female foetuses persist despite being illegal, and pressure for a son is a driver of it
• The adverse child sex ratio in parts of India is the measurable result

A guide to a temple where people come asking for children should say plainly that a daughter is a child, that the pressure for a son has killed a very large number of girls in this country, and that the deity is not asked for a boy.

What the tradition itself says. It is worth noting that the great devotional literature is not on the side of the pressure.

The stories of longed for children in the tradition, including Rama's birth, Krishna's, and the countless local kathas, are about the arrival of a child, and the tradition's stories about daughters, including Sita, Parvati and Nanda Devi, are among the most tenderly told in it.

A family that worships Nanda Devi as a daughter of the region and then wants only a son has not understood the tradition it is practising.

Uttarakhand has a distinctive tradition of possession ritual and it is worth understanding because it is the region's living religious practice.

What a jagar is:

• A night long ritual in which a deity is invoked to possess a human medium
• The word comes from jagarna, to wake, so a jagar is a waking of the deity
• Performed by a jagariya, a specialist singer and drummer
• The deity possesses the dangariya, the medium, who then speaks and acts as the deity

How it works:

• The jagariya sings the deity's jagar, the narrative of who they are and what they did, accompanied by the hurka or dhol drum and the thali, a metal plate struck as a percussion instrument
• The narrative is long and is sung through the night
• At the appropriate point the deity arrives and possesses the dangariya
• The dangariya's behaviour changes, sometimes dramatically, and they are now addressed as the deity
• Petitioners put questions and receive answers
• Disputes are settled, illnesses diagnosed, wrongs identified and remedies prescribed
• At the end the deity is respectfully dismissed

Who is invoked:

• Golu Devta, the deity of justice described at Patal Bhuvaneshwar
• Bhairav in his local forms
• Nanda Devi and local goddesses
• Local devtas and masans
• The spirits of the recently dead in some contexts

Why it is held. Jagars are performed for reasons.

• Persistent illness in a family that has not responded to other means
• Recurring misfortune
• A dispute that needs settling
• Fulfilment of a vow
• At fixed points in the year, as a regular observance

How to think about possession ritual. This appears across India and worldwide and it deserves a serious treatment.

• It is not unusual. Possession traditions exist across South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and elsewhere, and they are among the most widespread religious practices in the world
• The mediums are frequently from lower caste or otherwise marginal positions, and possession gives them, for the duration, an authority they do not otherwise hold
• The ritual serves an identifiable social function: it brings a family's problem into the open, in front of the community, and produces a resolution everybody has witnessed
• It is a form of arbitration as much as of religion

A note on the medium. The dangariya is not performing in the sense of pretending. Whatever is happening in that state, and there is a substantial anthropological literature on the question, the participants do not experience it as theatre and it should not be described as such.

Where you might encounter it. Jagars are family and village occasions, not public events.

If you are invited to one, that is a considerable courtesy. Behave accordingly: do not photograph without explicit permission, do not put questions to the deity unless invited to, sit where you are placed, and stay until it is finished or leave discreetly.

If you are not invited, do not seek one out as a spectacle.

The related traditions elsewhere in this series:

• The theyyam of north Kerala
• The bhutaradhane of Tulu Nadu
• The gur of the Himachali devta system
• The Rangam at Bonalu in Telangana
• The oracle traditions of Kerala's Devi temples

These are all versions of the same thing: a deity speaking through a person, to a community, about that community's problems, in the presence of witnesses.

It is arguably the oldest form of religious practice there is, and in a great deal of India it is still the version most people actually use.

Binsar Mahadev is a Chand foundation, and the dynasty is the second half of Kumaon's medieval history, after the Katyuris described at Katarmal.

Who they were:

• Rulers of Kumaon from roughly the eleventh to the eighteenth centuries
• Initially at Champawat, later moving the capital to Almora
• Claiming descent from a Chandravanshi line from the plains, which is the standard legitimising claim for a hill dynasty
• Ruling through a long period of consolidation, expansion and conflict with Garhwal, Rohilla and other powers

What they built:

• The Baleshwar temple at Champawat, among the finest stone temples in Kumaon
• Temples at Almora, including the Nanda Devi temple
• Binsar Mahadev, this one
• The Chitai Golu Devta shrine has associations with the period
• Fortifications, the Almora bazaar and the town's layout

Almora. Their capital from the sixteenth century and still the cultural centre of Kumaon.

• The Lal Bazaar with its paved stone street and old shopfronts
• The Nanda Devi temple and its September fair
• The Chitai Golu Devta temple
• The Kasar Devi ridge above the town

Kasar Devi deserves a note. The ridge above Almora has a small Devi temple and a substantial twentieth century history.

• Swami Vivekananda meditated there
• Lama Anagarika Govinda, Walter Evans Wentz and other figures of the western encounter with Buddhism lived on the ridge
• Uday Shankar established his dance centre at Almora
• Writers, artists and, in the 1960s and 1970s, a substantial counterculture presence followed

That concentration is a real feature of the place and it has changed the character of the ridge, for better and worse, in ways local people have views about.

The end of the Chands:

• Weakened by succession disputes and by conflict
• Invaded by the Gorkhas from Nepal in the 1790s
• Kumaon under Gorkha rule until the Anglo Nepalese war of 1814 to 1816
• Ceded to the British by the Treaty of Sugauli, after which Kumaon was administered as a Non Regulation province

The Gorkha period. Worth a note because it is remembered locally.

The roughly twenty five years of Gorkha rule in Kumaon and Garhwal is remembered in the region as a harsh period, and local accounts of it are severe.

That should be held alongside the fact that Gorkha soldiers subsequently served in Indian and British regiments alongside Kumaonis and Garhwalis for two centuries, and that the Nepali and Uttarakhandi hill cultures are closely related.

History in the hills is like that everywhere: the people who fought each other were also each other's neighbours, and frequently each other's relatives.

What survives of the Chand period for a visitor:

• Champawat and the Baleshwar temple, which is very fine and very little visited
• Almora town
• Binsar Mahadev, in its forest
• The Nanda Devi temple at Almora and its fair
• Numerous smaller temples across the district

Champawat is out of the way, on the road toward Tanakpur and the plains, and the Baleshwar temple there is among the best pieces of stone carving in Uttarakhand.

Getting there

• Binsar Mahadev, Almora district, Uttarakhand, at about 2,480 metres
• About 35 km from Ranikhet, in the direction of Thalisain
• The road is a hill road through forest and is slow
• Kathgodam is the nearest railhead, about 110 km
• Pantnagar is the nearest airport
• A vehicle is the practical option; there is limited public transport

Do not confuse it with Binsar Wildlife Sanctuary, which is near Almora and is a different place about 50 km away.

Timings

• Generally open through the day. It is a remote temple with informal timings
• Check locally before making a long drive

When to go

• March to June and September to November for the best conditions
• Baikunth Chaturdashi, in Kartika, generally November, when a fair is held at the temple and it is at its busiest
• Maha Shivaratri
• Winter brings snow at this altitude and access can be difficult
• Avoid the peak monsoon for road conditions

What to expect

• A quiet stone temple in forest with almost nobody there on an ordinary day
• Very large deodars
• Cool conditions even in summer
• Almost no facilities

Practicalities

• Carry water and food. There is little or nothing at the site
• Warm clothing, even in summer, since it is cool at 2,480 metres in forest
• Cash
• Mobile coverage is unreliable
• Take everything out with you

Combining the visit

• Ranikhet, about 35 km, with the Kumaon Regiment centre, the golf course and the Jhula Devi temple
• Jhula Devi, near Ranikhet, where the temple is hung with thousands of bells offered by devotees whose petitions were granted, in the same pattern as Chitai Golu Devta
• Almora, Chitai, Kasar Devi and Jageshwar
• Katarmal, the sun temple
• Kausani, with its Himalayan view and the Anasakti Ashram where Gandhi stayed
• Baijnath and Bageshwar, further north
• Corbett national park, to the south west

Jhula Devi deserves a paragraph. The temple near Ranikhet is covered in bells, offered in the thousands by people whose requests were fulfilled.

The local story is that the deity protected villagers and their livestock from leopards and tigers in the forest, and the bells accumulated from that.

What it produces now is a small temple in the pines so densely hung with brass bells that the structure is barely visible, which is one of the more photographed things in Kumaon and, like Chitai, is a physical record of a very large number of individual answered requests.

A closing thought. A man built this temple a thousand years ago for his father, in a forest, and named it after him.

The father is otherwise unknown. There is no other record of him. What exists is a stone building in the deodars with his name on it, which has outlasted the dynasty, the kingdom, the empire that followed and everything else that was happening in the tenth century.

That is what a memorial is supposed to do, and this one has done it better than almost any.