The Hundred Years of Karavira

She had left Vaikuntha. The day she left her husband's chest, and why, is told in Bhrigu's Kick; the town she came to keeps a book of its own about her, the Karavira Mahatmya, and that book does not begin with her at all. It begins with three brothers.

Brahma made three sons out of his own mind and named them Gaya, Lavana and Kolha. He blessed them, and Shiva blessed them, and the blessings made them strong, and the strength made them cruel. When they would not stop, Vishnu went against them with the gods behind him and killed Gaya and Lavana. Kolha, the youngest, was left alive, and he was king of Kolhapur.

He went up the mountain called Kolhagiri to do penance for his brothers' sake, and Brahma, who could not refuse a son, blessed him again. While he sat there a demon called Sukeshi walked into the empty capital, took the throne, and began pulling down temples and hermitages one by one. The gods did nothing. They waited for Kolhasura to come home and deal with it.

He came home. He killed Sukeshi. And he set his eldest son, Karaveera, on the throne.

Karaveera had grown up on the story of his dead uncles, and he made the sages and the brahmins of the city pay for them. The sages ran to the three gods, and it was Shiva who met the boy in battle and killed him. Karaveera, dying, asked for one thing.

"Let the city carry my name."

It was given. Karavira Nagar, the city was called, before it was called anything else.

Kolhasura buried his son and sat down to think, and what he arrived at was true. The gods had not beaten his brothers and his boy on their own strength. Their strength was borrowed. It came from the goddess who lived in his own capital, Mahalakshmi, and while she lived there nothing of his could stand.

He did not go to war with her. He did penance to her. He fasted and called her name and went on calling, season after season, until she came and stood in front of him herself.

"You have called long enough," she said. "What is it?"

"Leave Kolhapur," said Kolhasura. "Not for ever. For a hundred years."

She looked at him for a long moment. Then she gave him her word, and went north, towards the Himalaya, and the city was his.

They were bad years. With the goddess gone there was nothing to hold him, and he broke whatever was left to break; the rites stopped, the right order of things was pulled up by the root, and the gods found no strength in their arms. They went to Brahma and Vishnu and Shiva, and the three went up into the mountains to find her.

"Come back," they said. "He is burning everything. Nobody can stop him but you."

"I gave him my word," said the goddess. "A hundred years. Count them."

"He is a demon."

"He asked, and I said yes. If I break it for you today, what is my yes worth to anyone tomorrow?"

They went down without her. She stayed in the mountains and waited, and did nothing, and the book does not pretend it was easy.

When the last of the hundred years had run out she came down from the north with an army of gods behind her, and she came in the form the Mahatmya calls terrible, with eighteen arms. Kolhasura met her outside his city, and the battle was long, and at the end of it she killed him.

He lay on the field and she stood over him, and he had three things left to ask.

"Let the ground I die on be a place of pilgrimage. Let you live here, and let the city be called after me, Kolhapur. And once a year, in my name, let the Kohala fruit be cut."

"All three," said the goddess, and she gave him release.

So the town has a demon's name, and the goddess has lived in it since; and every year an ash gourd is cut in memory of the man who sent her away.

The people who climb the temple steps do not start with Gaya and Lavana. They start where Bhrigu's Kick stops, with a sage's foot on Vishnu's chest and Vishnu rubbing the foot.

"That was her home he kicked," a priest will tell you, "and her husband thanked him for it. So she left."

She came down from Vaikuntha to Karavira, the pilgrims say, and she is here still. The thousand names of her in the Skanda Purana call her Karaveera Nivasini, the one who lives at Karavira, and the town takes the name as a plain statement of fact.

The image she lives in is black stone, about three feet high. She holds a citron, a mace, a shield and a drinking bowl; a snake with five heads rises out of her crown, and a stone lion stands behind her. And unlike almost every other image in the country, she faces west.

That is why the sun can reach her. Twice a year, at the end of January and the beginning of November, the setting sun comes in through a small window in the west wall and lies on her feet. On the days that follow it climbs higher. The town calls it Kirnotsav, the festival of rays, and fills the courtyard to watch the light move.

The temple is old. It was built in the seventh century, and it has been hidden and brought back since: during the invasions the goddess was carried out and kept in a priest's house, and the Marathas set her back in her place in the eighteenth century and hung in the temple a bell they had taken at Goa.

The pilgrims who come furthest come from Tirupati. They have been up the seven hills to Balaji, who is Vishnu, and now they have come to his wife, and they say why without being asked.

"Balaji will not smile unless she does. You go to him, and then you come to her, or the journey is not finished."

A train runs between the two towns every day. And the pilgrims from the south carry a story of their own about where she went after Vaikuntha: a pool on the Swarnamukhi river, and a golden lotus that opened on the fifth day of Karthika. That is The Lotus at Tiruchanur.