Brajeshwari Devi: The Goddess Who Is Treated for Her Wounds

The temple's distinctive practice is one of the most striking rituals in India and is not widely known outside Himachal.

What happens:

• On Makar Sankranti, in mid January, the image of the goddess is covered in a thick paste
• The paste is made of ghee, curd, sugar and dry fruit, in a preparation called pind
• The image is completely covered, so that its form is entirely obscured
• It remains covered for a week
• At the end of the week the covering is removed, the image is washed and revealed, and the material is distributed as prasadam

Why. The explanation given is direct and is the reason the practice is memorable.

• The goddess fought Mahishasura
• She was wounded in the fighting
• The pind is applied to heal the wounds
• The week under the covering is her recovery

What that assumes. It is worth sitting with what this ritual takes for granted.

• That the fight was real and had physical consequences
• That those consequences persist and require attention, annually
• That the deity can be injured
• That the devotees' role is to look after her

That last point is the substantial one. In the standard relationship, the deity protects the devotee. Here, once a year, it runs the other way. The community treats the goddess's injuries.

Where else this appears. The idea of caring for a deity physically is not unique but it is uncommon, and the parallels are worth knowing.

• At Puri, the deities of the Jagannath temple fall ill after the ceremonial bath at Snana Yatra, are taken into seclusion for a fortnight during Anasara, are treated, and emerge for the Rath Yatra
• At various temples, deities are put to bed at night, woken in the morning, and given rest in the afternoon
• At Simhachalam, the deity is covered in sandalwood all year to keep him cool, and revealed for a single day
• Deities are dressed for the season, given warm clothing in winter at Himalayan temples
• Deities are fed at fixed hours, with a full menu

What this tells you about Indian worship. The deity in a temple is not a symbol being honoured. The deity is a resident being looked after.

That is the underlying logic of the entire apparatus of temple ritual, and it explains practices that otherwise look arbitrary.

• The timings, which are a household schedule
• The food, which is cooked and served, not merely offered
• The clothing, changed daily and seasonally
• The rest periods in the afternoon, when temples close
• The bathing, the oiling, the decorating

The Pind festival is the clearest possible statement of this. The goddess got hurt in a fight and needs treatment, and the town applies it every January.

When to see it. The covering goes on at Makar Sankranti, generally 14 or 15 January, and comes off a week later. Both ends are occasions and the removal draws the larger crowd.

The history of Nagarkot is inseparable from the history of its treasury, and it is worth setting out carefully because this subject is handled badly in most popular accounts.

Why medieval temples were rich:

• They received endowments of land and villages, generating continuous revenue
• They received offerings of gold, silver and jewels from rulers seeking legitimacy
• They functioned as banks and as places of safekeeping in an era with few alternatives
• They lent money and held deposits
• They employed large numbers and ran substantial economies

A major temple was therefore an institution holding a very large quantity of portable wealth, in a fortified but not impregnable location.

Why they were raided. The reasons were multiple and it is dishonest to reduce them to one.

• Wealth, which was the principal and most consistent motive. Raiding a treasury pays for an army
• Iconoclasm, which was a genuine element in some campaigns and was stated as such by the raiders themselves in their own records
• Political humiliation of a defeated ruler, whose legitimacy was tied to his temple
• Precedent, since Indian rulers had also raided each other's temples and removed deities as trophies before the Turkic invasions, which is documented

That last point is uncomfortable and is usually left out. Chola inscriptions record the removal of images from defeated kingdoms. Kashmiri, Paramara and other dynasties are recorded doing similar things. Temple raiding as an assertion of victory has a longer history in India than the eleventh century.

That does not excuse or diminish what was done at Nagarkot, Somnath and elsewhere by external invaders, some of which was on a very large scale and was accompanied by destruction and killing.

It does mean that the honest account is more complicated than either of the two positions usually offered.

What happened here specifically:

• Mahmud of Ghazni raided Nagarkot in 1009 and the wealth taken is described in contemporary sources as enormous
• Subsequent rulers raided or took the fort at intervals across five centuries
• Jahangir took the fort in 1620 after a long siege and recorded the event
• The temple was rebuilt after each occasion, which is itself the significant fact

The pattern of rebuilding. This is what a guide of this kind should emphasise.

After every raid, the temple was rebuilt. After the 1905 earthquake, which did more physical damage than any raid, it was rebuilt again. The Katoch rulers, the local community and later the state each did this in turn.

A site that has been destroyed and rebuilt half a dozen times over a thousand years is not primarily a record of destruction. It is a record of persistence.

And what to do with the history now. The temple stands, the worship continues, and the pind goes on the goddess every January.

That is the outcome. Whatever anybody took from Nagarkot, the thing they were unable to take is still happening there.

The event that did most damage to this temple was not a raid, and it is worth knowing about because it shaped the whole region.

The Kangra earthquake:

• 4 April 1905
• Magnitude estimated around 7.8
• Centred in the Kangra valley
• Around 20,000 deaths, with some estimates higher
• Kangra town, Dharamshala and much of the surrounding country were devastated
• A very large number of temples and historic buildings were destroyed or damaged, including the Brajeshwari temple, structures at Kangra fort and the Masroor rock cut temples

Why the Himalaya shakes. The reason is fundamental and worth understanding for anyone travelling in the region.

• The Indian plate is moving north and colliding with the Eurasian plate
• The collision built the Himalaya and is continuing
• Convergence continues at roughly two centimetres a year
• The strain accumulates on thrust faults along the range and releases in large earthquakes
• The entire Himalayan arc is seismically active, from Kashmir to Arunachal

The record:

• 1905 Kangra
• 1934 Bihar Nepal
• 1950 Assam Tibet, one of the largest continental earthquakes ever recorded
• 1991 Uttarkashi
• 1999 Chamoli
• 2005 Kashmir
• 2011 Sikkim
• 2015 Nepal

The seismic gap. Seismologists have identified stretches of the Himalayan front that have not produced a great earthquake in a long time and where strain is understood to be accumulating.

The implication, widely discussed in the scientific literature, is that a very large Himalayan earthquake affecting a densely populated region is expected at some point, though when cannot be predicted.

What this means practically for travellers and for temples:

• Himalayan building stock includes a great deal of unreinforced masonry, which performs badly in earthquakes
• Traditional kath kuni construction, using alternating courses of timber and stone without mortar, actually performs relatively well because timber gives it flexibility, and this is why so many old Himachali temples survive
• Modern concrete construction on steep slopes, often built without engineering input, performs badly
• If you are in a building during shaking, the guidance is to drop, cover and hold on, and not to run outside where falling masonry is the principal hazard

Kath kuni and the wooden temples. The traditional Himachali technique is worth a note because it explains the survival of buildings described elsewhere in this batch.

• Alternating horizontal courses of dressed stone and deodar timber
• No mortar
• Timber members interlocked at corners
• The result is a structure that can flex and absorb movement without cracking
• Deodar is durable, resists insect attack, and is available locally

The wooden temples at Bharmour and Chhatrari, described in the Chaurasi entry, are among the oldest wooden buildings in India and have stood through the region's earthquakes for around thirteen hundred years.

That is a considerably better performance than the nineteenth and twentieth century masonry that came down in 1905, and it is a point that engineers working on Himalayan reconstruction now take seriously.

The temple sits below one of the most historically significant forts in India, and the two belong together.

Kangra fort:

• On a spur above the confluence of the Banganga and Manjhi rivers
• Among the oldest forts in India with a continuous recorded history
• Among the largest in the Himalaya
• Held by the Katoch dynasty, who claim descent from the ancient Trigarta kingdom
• Besieged and taken repeatedly across a thousand years
• Badly damaged in the 1905 earthquake and now a ruin under the Archaeological Survey

The Katoch. The dynasty is worth knowing about because its claim is unusual.

• They trace descent from Trigarta, a kingdom mentioned in the Mahabharata
• They are one of the oldest ruling lineages in the world by their own account, and while the early portions of that claim cannot be verified, the family's documented history is genuinely very long
• Sansar Chand Katoch, ruling from the late eighteenth century, was the dominant power in the Punjab hills for a period and a great patron of painting
• The Katoch were eventually subordinated by Ranjit Singh and then by the British

Kangra painting. This is the region's most important cultural export and it belongs in any account of the place.

• A school of miniature painting that flourished in the Punjab hills, particularly under Sansar Chand in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
• Part of the wider Pahari tradition, alongside Basohli, Guler, Chamba, Mandi and others
• Characterised by a lyrical, delicate line, soft colour, and landscape settings drawn from the actual hills
• Principal subjects are the Gita Govinda, the Bhagavata Purana, the Ragamala and the Krishna and Radha cycle
• The Guler family of painters, particularly Nainsukh and his relatives, is central to the tradition's development

Why Kangra painting matters. It is among the great achievements of Indian art and it is intimately connected to devotion.

These are not decorative works. They are visual commentaries on devotional poetry, particularly Jayadeva's Gita Govinda, and they were made for patrons who knew the texts intimately.

A Kangra painting of Radha waiting in a grove in the rain is doing the same thing a bhajan does, in a different medium, for the same audience.

Where to see it:

• The Kangra Art Museum at Dharamshala
• The Bhuri Singh Museum at Chamba
• The National Museum, Delhi
• Major collections in Chandigarh, Mumbai and abroad

Nainsukh. Worth naming specifically. He worked in the mid eighteenth century, principally for Balwant Singh of Jasrota, and his paintings of his patron, doing ordinary things, are among the most acute portraits produced anywhere in that century.

He is one of the very few Indian painters before the modern period whose individual body of work can be identified and studied, which makes him unusually important to the history of Indian art.

Getting there

• Kangra town, Kangra district, Himachal Pradesh
• The temple is in the town, below the fort
• About 18 km from Dharamshala
• Pathankot is the nearest major railhead, about 90 km; the Kangra Valley narrow gauge railway runs to Kangra itself and is a beautiful journey
• Gaggal airport is about 12 km
• Buses run from everywhere in the region

Timings

• The temple opens early and runs through the day with a break. Check locally

When to go

• Makar Sankranti, mid January, for the pind, and the following week for the removal, which is the temple's distinctive occasion
• Navratri, in Chaitra and Ashwin
• March to June and September to November for weather
• Early morning for a quiet darshan

Practicalities

• Traditional dress is appropriate; head covering is customary
• The temple is in a busy town and parking is limited
• Accommodation is better at Dharamshala or Palampur than at Kangra itself

The Kangra Valley railway. Worth building into a trip if you have time.

The narrow gauge line from Pathankot to Joginder Nagar was built in the 1920s, runs through the Kangra valley with the Dhauladhar range alongside, and is one of the most scenic railway journeys in India. It is slow, which is the point.

Combining the visit

• Kangra fort, immediately above, which should be done in the same visit and takes about ninety minutes
• Masroor rock cut temples, about 35 km
• Jwalamukhi, about 35 km
• Chamunda Devi, about 25 km
• Baijnath, with its thirteenth century Shiva temple, about 50 km
• Dharamshala and McLeod Ganj, about 18 km
• Palampur and the tea gardens
• Kangra Art Museum at Dharamshala, for the paintings
• Andretta, near Palampur, the artists' colony associated with Sobha Singh and Norah Richards, with a pottery

A four day Kangra itinerary:

Day one: Kangra fort and Brajeshwari, then Masroor in the afternoon.

Day two: Jwalamukhi and Chintpurni, or Jwalamukhi and back via the Pong dam.

Day three: Chamunda Devi and Baijnath, then on to Palampur.

Day four: Dharamshala, the Kangra Art Museum, and McLeod Ganj.

That covers the Devi shrines, the fort, the rock cut temples, the painting tradition and the Dhauladhar, which is most of what the valley has.

A closing thought. The building you will stand in was finished in 1920, on a site that has been sacked repeatedly across a thousand years and levelled by an earthquake.

And every January somebody covers the goddess in butter and curd because she was hurt in a fight a very long time ago and the town has never stopped looking after her.

The building is not the temple. That is.