Dussehra: Kullu
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Note: Kullu, with two l's, is the official spelling.
Contents |
History
Penelope Chetwode’s 1972 account
The Kulu Dussehra
In the autumn of the year following my mule trek I returned to
the Rupi Palace for the Dussehra. No book about Kulu would
be complete without a description of this famous festival. The
Dussehra is among the most popular of India's many festivals and
is celebrated up and down the country in a variety of ways. I am
indebted to my learned friend Pandit Balak Ram Gaur of Katrain
for an explanation of the Kulu ceremonies. He tells me that they
are held in honour of Rama's victory over Ravana, the demon
king of Ceylon, and that in the Kulu dialect it is called dushet hera
which means 'the demon killed*. As Ravana was slain on the
tenth day of the light half of the month the ceremonies start on
that day and finish on the night of the full moon. The festival
is also locally known as the vijey desbmin, the tenth day of victory.
What is peculiar to Kulu about the Dussehra celebrations is the homage paid to Rama (alias Ragunathji) by the village devatas who come from all over the valley itself, from Inner and Outer Saraj and from the Parbatti valley. This custom was initiated in the seventeenth century as a way of taming the indigenous divinities: nature spirits of caves, trees, springs and mountain passes, the representatives of a more ancient and primitive religion than orthodox Hinduism. The only devatas who are exempt from such homage are deified sages (such as Vashist) who acted as tutors to Rama during their earthly lives; and of course the elusive, imageless Jamlu of Malana who is a law unto himself.
In a normal year between a hundred and fifty and two hundred devatas come to the Kulu Dussehra, but shortly after Independance the government removed their lands and their temple grants so that there was no more grain to fill their granaries and consequently no more money with which to pay their numerous attendants: the members of their private band, the standard bearers, rath bearers, priest and gur. Thus none but the villagers living in the immediate neighbourhood of Kulu town could afford to take their gods to the Dussehra. Now this was a serious state of affairs, not only spiritually but materially, because the festival had long attracted tourists, both Indian and foreign, to Kulu, and tourists bring cash. Eventually an excellent solution was found: the Indian Tourist Board agreed to pay the gods* annual Dussehra expenses so now everybody is happy again. Usually all the guest-houses, rest-houses, tourist bungalows, tents and aluminium huts up and down the valley are stuffed full for the festival, but in 1965, when I was present, only the Rai's family gods attended owing to the national emergency. The three- week Indo-Pak war had just ended and the govern- ment had requested the curtailment of Dussehra celebrations throughout the country. I was therefore fortunate in being present with less than half the usual crowd mining around and not a tripper in sight.
I was honoured at being invited to the Rupi Palace for the opening ceremonies as the arrival of the devatas in the principal courtyard and their reception by the Rai is normally never seen by English people. On the day before the gods were due to arrive, Karan and I were strolling in the orchard where a nice dun hill-pony, about twelve hands high, was tethered to graze. At that time I was muleless and badly needed an animal to ride to outlying temples so I said:
'Do you think your father would lend me this pony to ride to the top of Bijli Mahadev?'
'No, I am afraid not. You see that is Narsingh's horse and only the god is allowed to ride him/
On the opening morning of the festival there were great preparations at the palace for the arrival of the devatas that evening. From Kiran's nursery window I watched her father, the Rai, at his devotional ablutions. Wearing a pair of white cotton pants he first sat and shaved on the veranda outside his mother's apartments, then he poured cold water over his head from a brass lota which he refilled repeatedly from a large gal- vanised bucket. Then he got up and went inside and reappeared ten minutes later dressed in baggy orange trousers with a loose tunic of the same colour and a handkerchief tied round his head in the gipsy fashion of pabari women. Meanwhile the few decrepit
old palace menservants appeared in the courtyard dressed in clean white cotton jodhpurs and pale blue waisted coats with matching pagans. Most of them, Kiran told me, had retired years ago but returned each autumn to serve their master and their gods ; and during Dussehra the two are closely identified. Kiran herself changed into a long flounced mauve taffeta dress which she proudly told me she had had copied from photographs in a film magazine illustrating Gone with the Wind.
I had always heard that the Kulu Dussehra cannot start without Hidimba, the royal family's demon goddess 'grandmother* about whom Kiran had told me. The idol has to be carried on a rath twenty-four miles down the valley from the Dunghri temple above Manali and spends the night beside the Ramshila bridge at the far end of the long Akhara bazaar. On the opening day itself the Raja sends messengers down from Sultanpur to pay his respects to the goddess and invite her up to his palace. Hindu festivals, however, are invariably conducted in a hap- hazard manner, and on this occasion the first devata to enter the courtyard was Tripura Sundari of Nagar. She was preceeded by her private band, and her rath t stuck with metal masks, decked with flowers, and hung with brilliant draperies, was carried to the back entrance of the Kali temple where it was received and saluted by the orange-clad Rai. The men bearing her litter there- upon began to shake it up and down on their shoulders and tilt it over from one side to the other to show that it was indeed animated by the spirit of the goddess. She was then carried up the steep stone steps leading to the high veranda where I stood, and into the drawing-room where she was set down on the tiger-woven rug.
Next came Devi Hidimba, who by rights should have been first on the scene, with her band and her gur naked to the waist with long grey-black greasy curls falling to well below his shoulders. He shook violently, denoting divine possession, but smiled at the same time and appeared to be enjoying his festival duties immensely. While the rath of the demon goddess was oscillated in the customary fashion to the blare of her trumpets and the rhythmic beating of her drums, a live lamb was thrown up into the air and caught again by some of her devotees. This ceremony, Kiran told known as ivarna and on the last evening of
Dussehra the lamb would be one of the five creatures to be offered up in sacrifice beside the river bank. After Hidimba had been received by the Rai she too was carried upstairs into the drawing-room and set down beside Tripura Sundari.
For the next hour or so other devis and devatas continued to arrive and the same ritual was enacted, except that no more raths were taken up to the blue drawing-room, but were set down in the courtyard instead, and none but Hidimba's followers- threw up a live lamb. When the last of the devatas had been received by the Rai, all of the .raths were lifted up on to the shoulders of their attendants and carried to the temple of Ragunath to do homage to the presiding deity of Kulu who would then himself be carried on a litter down to Dhalpur at the northern end of the great maidan.
After a seemingly interminable time in the temple during which I remained outside under a sacred peepul tree, the devatas at last emerged, their metal masks glinting in the setting sun. They were carried past me with their sovereign, Ragunath ji, the great Rama himself, in their midst, incongruously represented by a tiny bronze image only a few inches high seated on a dark red velvet cushion in a gilt palanquin. He was preceeded by his vice-regent, the Rai, who had made another quick change, this time into the traditional ceremonial dress of the Indian princes: white cotton jodhpurs, a beautiful apricot brocade waisted coat, glistening with gold thread, and a pagari of the same delicate shade with a diamond cockade in front. For this short space of a few days every autumn the Rai of Rupi comes into his own again, for he is looked upon as the deified descendant of the Rajput kings of Kulu and entitled to veneration because of the ancient Hindu belief in the divinity of kings.
In the days of its greatness this Western Himalayan kingdom was no petty state. According to Hutchison and Vogel the total area was 6,607 square miles which was sometimes increased to as much as 10,000 by temporary acquisitions from neighbouring states. The last ruling Raja was Ajit Singh who ascended the gaddi in 1816, was deposed by the famous Sikh conqueror Ranjit Singh in 1 8 3 9, and died under British protection in the small state of Shangri across the Sutlej in 1 841 . Four years later, at the end of the first Sikh war in 1 846, large tracts of the Western Himalaya were ceded to the British, including the whole of Kulu and Saraj, and in 1852 the then Raja Gyan Singh was demoted to the lower rank of Rai because of his illegitimate birth. He was, how- ever, allowed to live on — without sovereign powers — in the family palace at Sultanpur and to enjoy the jagir of Waziri Rupi, the tract of land between the Parbatti and Sainj rivers and bounded to the west by the B6as. Thus his descendant today is still known as the Rai of Rupi, his residence is the Rupi Palace, and he is the true representative of the old line of Kulu Kings and revered by the people as such, especially during Dussehra.
In front of the Rai walked his eighteen-year-old son, the tikka sahib, a medical student of Chandigarh University, but today a near-god, dressed in the same splendid style as his father.
Behind the palanquin of Ragunath pranced the pretty pony believed to be carrying god Narsingh, though not having the eyes of Hindu faith I was unable to see him. His miniature charger was led by a uniformed attendant who had considerable difficulty in controlling the animal which was overfed and under exercised, and matters were not helped by the fact that he was almost completely enveloped in a mulberry velvet rug, several sizes too big for him, with gold trappings trailing on the ground, because as Kiran explained later, the god's last mount had been an Arab, a considerably larger horse, which had unfortunately died.
The procession of gods crossed the flat maidan in front of the Rupi Palace, then wound its way down the steep paved stepped path through the narrow upper bazaar of Sultanpur to the motor road below, and from there through the beautiful alder groves criss-crossed with streams and over the wooden bridge which spans the Sarvari torrent near its confluence with the Beas. Meanwhile I was skipping along in front talcing photo- graphs at strategic points along the route which finally led up the hill through the Dhalpur bazaar to the northern end of the maidan where the large wooden rath of Ragunath, all hung with coloured draperies, was waiting to receive the chief god of the valley.
The word rath is really Sanskrit for a chariot, but in the India of today the term is chiefly used for the huge elaborately-carved wooden carriages of the Gods which are pulled along proces-
sional routes near the great temples of the plains by hundreds of youths at special festivals. In Kulu the word is confusing because it is used indiscriminately for both the carriages on wheels and the wooden palanquins of the village devatas to which the metal masks are fixed for melas and which have no wheels but are carried about on long poles. The wheeled rath of Ragunath is by far the largest one in the valley and is roughly made with no carving to decorate it. There are a few smaller versions of this rath in some of the bigger villages, but on the whole the wheel- less raths are far more practical in a mountain region and the vast majority of hill gods always travel in them.
Ragunath' s great clumsy chariot runs on six solid little wheels and lies neglected and unprotected from the weather throughout the year, apart from the few days of Dussehra each autumn. As soon as the tiny image of the god was transferred to it, the bands of the devatas all blared forth together — the noise was terrific and thrilling — while the Rai and his son, led by the chief Brahmin priest from the temple, walked three times round the rath followed by crowds of devotees. The priest, together with several more Brahmins, then clambered with difficulty into the vehicle and sat cross-legged round a small wooden sanctuary in which the little image had been placed. Long thick ropes had already been attached to the front of the carriage and these were now picked up by some two hundred young men who started to pull the god with great glee across the huge maidan. But, alas, they were all too soon frustrated for the small metal umbrella protruding from the wooden spire of the rath roof became entangled in telegraph wires and for the next twenty minutes the boys pushed and pulled and shouted in their unsuccessful efforts to free it. At last one of their number, brighter than the rest, had the sense to climb up the nearest telegraph pole and carefully detach each wire one by one until the god was able to proceed. When the rath finally reached the high bank of the Beas at the far end of the maidan it was halted and remained there until the last day of Dussehra when the customary five-fold sacrifice was offered in honour of Durga and in the presence of the royal family. The victims all have to be provided by the Rai and consist of a buffalo, a goat, a cock, a fish and a fresh-water crab.
Nothing is more confusing to the uninitiated than Hindu
ritual observance. Why should the Goddess Durga, who is the
Shakti (female power) of Shiva, not Vishnu, be propitiated in a
ceremony which is essentially Vaishnavite? Especially as the
devotees of Vishnu (of whom both Rama and Krishna are
avatars) hate blood sacrifice. But I was told that as the Dmsehra
celebrates the victory of Rama over Ravana, the demon king,
offerings are made to Durga because she is the Goddess of
Victory, having, with the aid of her faithful lion, slain so many
enemies of the gods.
The procession and palanquins
The Shringa Rishi controversy, c.2009 onwards
Oct 12, 2019: The Times of India
From: Oct 12, 2019: The Times of India
Two influential deities of Kullu district — Shringa Rishi and Balu Nag — have been put under a ‘house arrest’ under tight police security in Kullu Dussehra after the deities reached there without any formal invitation.
Both the deities, who used to play a special role in Dussehra, are not being invited by the Kullu Dussehra committee for last 10 years as their followers are fighting over supremacy of their deities. The matter had reached the HC but the dispute remained unresolved. Despite no invitation from the Kullu administration, followers of both the deities brought their palanquins for Dussehra.
Despite no formal invitation, both the deities mostly join Dussehra festivities and the cops put them under ‘house arrest’ at their camp to avoid any mishap. This year too, both the deities joined the Dussehra festivities.
According to tradition, idol of superior deity walks to the right side of chariot of Lord Raghunath, the presiding deity in Kullu Dussehra, during the rath yatra. This place was occupied by Shringa Rishi for many decades but when he stopped participating in Dussehra in 1970s, Balu Nag occupied this place. After 11 years, Shringa Rishi again started participating in Dussehra, but the followers of the two deities started quarrelling for prime spot during the yatra. A few years ago, many people were injured when the followers of the two deities pelted stones on each other. Since then, both the deities are put under ‘house arrest’ and cops do not allow them to take part in the rath yatra.
Followers of Balu Nag, who is considered an incarnation of Lakshman, younger brother of Lord Rama, say nobody can separate a brother from his elder brother and they have right to stay together. On the other side, the followers of Shringa Rishi say the place of guru is always higher than any relation, so they will not let anybody to occupy their place.
