Chamba: Temples With Umbrellas On Them

The chhatri roofs over the Chamba shikharas are the group's signature and are worth understanding properly.

What they are:

• Wooden canopies, in the shape of an umbrella or a conical hat
• Built over the stone shikhara, supported on a frame
• Covered in slate or in wooden shingles
• Not structural to the temple below; they sit on top of it

What they do:

• Shed snow, so it does not accumulate on the stonework
• Protect the amalaka and finial, the most vulnerable and exposed part of a shikhara
• Keep water off the joints, preventing freeze thaw damage
• Extend the life of the masonry very considerably

Why this is clever. Consider the alternative approaches.

• They could have abandoned the shikhara form and built in the local pent roof or pagoda style, which is what many Himachali temples do
• They could have modified the shikhara, flattening or steepening it, which would have compromised its meaning
• Instead they built the correct form, in the prestigious idiom, and then added a removable, replaceable, locally made protective layer on top

That is a solution that keeps the theological and stylistic correctness of the building while solving a purely practical problem with local materials and local skills.

The maintenance logic. This is the part that makes it genuinely elegant.

• A stone shikhara is very hard to repair. Damage is permanent and correcting it means dismantling
• A wooden chhatri is easy to repair, and can be replaced entirely when it decays
• So the sacrificial element is the cheap one, and the expensive one is protected

That principle, protecting a permanent structure with a replaceable outer layer, is standard in modern conservation and the Chamba builders were using it a thousand years ago.

Where else you see it:

• Across Chamba and parts of Kangra and Mandi
• At Baijnath, in a related form
• In the wooden roofs over stone shrines throughout the western Himalaya
• The same logic in a different form produces the wooden roofs over the Kashmiri stone temples and the tiered roofs at Kullu

A comparison worth making. In Kerala, described elsewhere in this series, very high rainfall produced a temple architecture that abandoned the tower entirely and built steeply pitched tiled roofs.

In Chamba, snow produced a solution that kept the tower and put a roof on top of it.

Both are responses to precipitation. Kerala redesigned the building. Chamba added a hat. Which is the better answer depends on what you are willing to give up, and the two together are a good illustration of how Indian architecture adapts a shared vocabulary to wildly different conditions.

Look up when you visit. The umbrellas are the thing to photograph and the thing most visitors do not notice because they are looking at the doorways.

Chamba has a founding story that is among the most disturbing in the Himalayan repertoire, and it should be told accurately rather than sentimentally.

As it is told:

• Sahil Varman moved his capital to Chamba and needed water brought to the new town
• A channel was dug from a spring to bring water down
• The water would not flow
• A prescription was given, in a dream or by a priest, that a human sacrifice was required
• The king's queen, Sunayana, or in other tellings his son, offered themselves
• The queen was buried at the site, in some tellings alive
• The water then flowed
• The Suhi Mata temple was built in her memory above the town
• The Suhi Mata mela is held annually in her honour, principally by women and children

How to hold this. Directly and without softening it.

• Foundation sacrifice stories are attached to bridges, dams, forts, tanks and temples across India and across the world
• Some are certainly legend, accounting for a structure's success or a death by other causes
• Some may reflect a practice that genuinely occurred in some periods and places
• Archaeological evidence for foundation burials exists in various cultures, though its interpretation is contested
• Whether anything of the kind happened at Chamba is not established

What is not in doubt is that the story is told, that a temple was built, and that a fair is held every year in which women and children walk to a shrine to honour a woman who is remembered as having died so that the town could drink.

The uncomfortable part. It is worth naming what such stories usually have in common.

• The person sacrificed is very frequently a woman or a child
• The person who benefits is very frequently a king
• The decision is usually made by somebody other than the person who dies
• The commemoration is genuine, prolonged and affectionate

That pattern is not confined to India and it recurs wherever such stories are told. A community remembers with real tenderness the person whose death it required, and the tenderness does not undo the requirement.

The Suhi Mata mela:

• Held in March or April, over several days
• Observed principally by women and children
• Involving a procession to the Suhi Mata temple above the town
• Songs specific to the occasion are sung, remembering the queen

That the fair belongs to women and children specifically, in memory of a queen who died for the town's water, gives it a character quite unlike a general temple festival.

Water in the hills. The practical background is worth stating.

Bringing water to a hill settlement is genuinely difficult. Springs are at particular elevations, channels must be cut across contours, and a town's viability depends entirely on getting it right.

Chamba's water channel worked, the town has been continuously inhabited since the tenth century, and the story explaining why the water flows is the town's account of the most important engineering problem it ever solved.

Minjar is Chamba's principal festival and one of the more distinctive fairs in the Himalaya.

When. Held in Shravana, generally late July or August, over a week, beginning on the second Sunday of Shravana.

What a minjar is. The word refers to the silk tassel worn during the festival, which represents the flowering of the maize or paddy crop.

• Made of silk threads, in gold, red and other colours
• Worn by participants throughout the week
• At the end of the festival, the minjar is cast into the Ravi river

The sequence:

• The festival opens with the raising of a flag at the Lakshmi Narayan temple
• Minjars are distributed and worn
• A week of fair, with markets, competitions, cultural performances and a great deal of activity in the town
• On the final day a procession goes from the palace to the river
• The minjar, along with a coconut, a rupee and seasonal offerings, is immersed in the Ravi

What it is about. Two explanations are given and both are traditional.

The agricultural reading:

• The minjar is the crop in flower
• The festival marks the point in the monsoon when the crop is set
• Casting it into the river is an offering for a good harvest

The historical reading:

• The festival commemorates a victory of the Chamba ruler over the raja of Trigarta, that is Kangra
• Or, in another account, the diversion of the Ravi river, which had flowed differently and was persuaded by a sadhu to change course past the town

Why the immersion matters. Casting the tassel into the Ravi is the point of the whole week, and it belongs to the family of Indian practices in which something made is deliberately given to water.

• Ganesh visarjan, in which an image is made and immersed
• Durga immersion at the end of Navratri
• Bathukamma in Telangana, where floral stacks are floated
• The kalamezhuthu erasure in Kerala
• Chhath offerings made standing in water

The underlying idea is consistent across all of them. What is offered is released rather than kept, and the river carries it away.

Minjar today. The fair is now a state supported event, drawing visitors from across Himachal and beyond, with a full programme of cultural performances alongside the traditional observances.

That has changed its character, as official patronage changes every festival it touches, and there is the usual tension between the fair as a local observance and the fair as a tourism product.

What has not changed is that at the end of the week, the town walks to the river and throws something in.

Attending. Minjar is a good festival to attend as an outsider because it is a public fair rather than a temple ritual, the town is accustomed to visitors, and there is a week of it, so there is no single moment you have to catch.

Accommodation in Chamba during Minjar should be booked well in advance.

Chamba's other great cultural product is a textile, and it belongs in any account of the town.

What a Chamba rumal is:

• An embroidered coverlet or square cloth, historically used to cover gifts, offerings and ceremonial objects
• Made on fine handspun muslin or khaddar
• Embroidered in untwisted silk floss in bright colours
• Worked in do rukha, double satin stitch, which produces an identical image on both sides with no reverse
• Given a GI tag

The do rukha stitch. This is the technical achievement and it deserves attention.

A rumal embroidered in do rukha looks the same from the front and the back. There is no wrong side. Every stitch is worked so that the thread lies correctly on both faces.

That is very difficult and it is the reason these pieces are important. It also has a practical origin: a coverlet laid over a gift is seen from both sides as it is placed and lifted.

The subjects:

• Krishna and the gopis, particularly the rasamandala, the circle dance, which is the classic subject
• Scenes from the Bhagavata Purana and the Gita Govinda
• The Ramayana
• Court scenes, hunts and processions
• Marriage scenes

The connection to Kangra painting. This is the crucial point and it is what makes the rumals historically important.

• The designs were frequently drawn by painters of the Pahari schools
• The embroiderers, who were women of the court and of the town, then worked the design in silk
• So a Chamba rumal is a Pahari painting executed in thread
• The compositions, the figures, the landscape conventions and the faces are those of the painting tradition

That means the rumals give us the Pahari idiom in a medium made by women, in households, over a period when the paintings themselves were made by men in workshops.

The Raja Sansar Chand rumal and other documented pieces are in museum collections and are studied alongside the paintings.

The decline and revival:

• Production declined sharply from the late nineteenth century as court patronage ended
• The skill nearly disappeared
• Revival efforts from the mid twentieth century, including through the Bhuri Singh Museum and later through craft organisations and a GI registration, have brought production back
• Contemporary rumals are made in Chamba and can be bought there

The Bhuri Singh Museum. The town's museum, founded in 1908 and named for the then raja, holds:

• A significant collection of Pahari paintings, including Chamba, Guler, Basohli and Kangra works
• Chamba rumals
• Inscriptions, including copper plate grants and stone inscriptions from the region
• Carved wood, metalwork and coins
• Material relating to the region's dynastic history

It is a small museum and it is among the best regional museums in India for its subject. Two hours there before or after the temples changes how you see everything else in Chamba.

Getting there

• Chamba town, Chamba district, Himachal Pradesh, on the Ravi
• About 120 km from Pathankot, which is the nearest major railhead
• About 50 km from Dalhousie
• Gaggal and Amritsar for air
• Buses run from Pathankot, Dalhousie, Dharamshala and Chandigarh

Timings

• The Lakshmi Narayan complex opens early and runs through the day. Check locally

When to go

• Minjar, in Shravana, late July or August, for the fair
• Suhi Mata mela, in March or April
• March to June and September to November for weather
• Winter is cold and can bring snow, and Chamba is at about 1,000 metres so it is milder than Bharmour

What to see in the town

• The Lakshmi Narayan temple group, and look up at the umbrella roofs
• The Bhuri Singh Museum, which should not be skipped
• The Chamunda Devi temple of Chamba, a wooden temple on a hill above the town, with a good view, which is a different shrine from the Kangra one described elsewhere
• The Champavati temple
• The Hari Rai temple, with a fine bronze Vishnu
• The Chaugan, the town's grassy central maidan, where Minjar is held
• The Rang Mahal, the old palace, which houses a craft centre

Shopping

• Chamba rumals, from the Himachal Emporium, the craft centre at the Rang Mahal, or from producers directly
• Chamba chappals, embroidered leather footwear, which are also a local product
• Chamba metal ware and thali sets

Combining the visit

• Bharmour and the Chaurasi temples, about 65 km
• Chhatrari and the Shakti Devi temple
• Khajjiar, about 25 km, a meadow ringed by deodar, heavily visited
• Dalhousie, about 50 km
• Manimahesh, in season
• Pangi valley, beyond Bharmour, remote and difficult and open only in summer

A route through Chamba district. Pathankot to Dalhousie and Khajjiar, then Chamba for two nights covering the temples and the museum, then Chhatrari, then Bharmour, then Manimahesh if in season.

That covers one of the more rewarding districts in the western Himalaya and one that most visitors to Himachal skip entirely in favour of Shimla, Manali and Dharamshala.

On the district generally. Chamba is less developed for tourism than the Kullu and Kangra valleys, which is both its difficulty and its attraction.

Facilities are more limited, roads are slower, and there is correspondingly less of the infrastructure that has changed the character of Himachal's better known valleys.

What there is, is a thousand year old town with six temples in a walled compound, a museum with a first rate painting collection, an embroidery tradition that is a painting school in thread, a week long fair that ends with the town throwing silk tassels into a river, and a road running up the valley to a courtyard with eighty four shrines in it.

A closing thought. Somebody in the tenth century wanted a proper north Indian temple, of the kind built in the plains, in a town where it snows.

They built it, saw what winter did to it, and put an umbrella on top. It is still there, and the umbrella has been replaced many times, and the temple underneath has not.