The God Who Came to Kullu

In the middle of the seventeenth century the valley of Kullu was ruled by Raja Jagat Singh. One day someone told him that a Brahmin named Durgadatt kept a store of fine pearls, and the king sent word that the pearls were to be brought to him.

Durgadatt had no pearls. "I have none," he told the king's men. "I never had any." The king did not believe him. He sent again, and this time he said he would come for them himself.

Durgadatt knew what that meant. When the king's party came, the Brahmin had shut his family in the house and set it alight. He sat beside the fire, and at every leap of the flames he cut his own flesh with a blade. "Have the pearls, Raja!" he cried. Then the fire took him and all his family.

The king went home and could not eat. When he looked at his rice he saw worms crawling in it. When he lifted a cup of water it was full of blood. Physicians and healers and holy men came and went, and nothing helped.

At last a wandering ascetic named Krishnadas, whom the valley called Pahari Baba, came to the palace.

"No medicine will cure this," he said. "Only Rama's grace will. Drink the water that has washed the feet of an image of Rama, and the curse will leave you. But it must be a true image, from Ayodhya."

"Then fetch me one," said the king.

There was such an image in Ayodhya, in the Tretanath temple. The task went to the ascetic's disciple, Damodar Das, who had the power the valley calls gutka siddhi, which carried him from place to place faster than anyone could walk. In July 1651 he came back over the passes with the image of Rama, and with a priest of the Tretanath temple to look after it.

The king drank the water that had washed Rama's feet. The rice in his bowl was rice again, and the water in his cup was water.

Jagat Singh did not go back to his throne. He set the image of Raghunath on it, and called himself only the god's first servant, the one who carries his staff. From then on the rajas of Kullu ruled in Raghunath's name. In 1660 a temple was built for him at Sultanpur, and priests were brought from Ayodhya to serve him. Their descendants serve him still.

Then the king sent word to every god in the valley. They were to come down from their villages at Vijayadashami and pay their respects to the new king of Kullu. They came, carried on palanquins by the people of their villages, and they have come every year since.

Another telling, the one most often heard at the fair, makes the journey a theft and a chase.

In this one the king's own guru, Taranath, sends him to the ascetic, and the ascetic asks for something very particular: the images of Rama and Sita in the Tretanath temple, which were made, people said, for Rama's own horse sacrifice. Nothing else would do.

Damodar Das, it says, went to Ayodhya and stayed a year at the Tretanath temple, sweeping, fetching water and serving the priests, until they trusted him. Then one night he wrapped up the two little images of Rama and Sita, each no bigger than a thumb, and slipped away.

The priests found the shrine empty and went after him. Some say they caught him at Haridwar; others say on the bank of the Saryu, before he had even left Ayodhya behind. Either way they found him with the images and reached to take them back.

They could not lift them. The two small figures, which Damodar Das had carried for days, would not stir in their hands as long as they faced towards Ayodhya. When Damodar Das picked them up, facing the hills, they were as light as before.

The priests understood. "The god wants to go to Kullu," they said, and let him go. Some of the temple's servants went with the god, and the mahants of Kullu count themselves their descendants.

The images rested at Makrahad, on the border with Mandi, then at Manikaran, then at Naggar, until the temple in Sultanpur was ready for them in 1660.