Our fires are lit in two places. One is Vrindavan, Krishna’s own town on the plains. The other is the Kangra Valley of the Himalayas, which India has called the Land of the Gods for longer than any record we have. This page is about the second one.
Dev Bhoomi means Land of the Gods. It is the old name for Himachal Pradesh, the mountain state in the far north of India, and our fires there are lit in the Kangra Valley at the foot of the Himalayas.
The valley floor lies about two thousand feet above sea level, in farmland and tea gardens. Along its whole northern edge stands the Dhauladhar, the White Range, a single wall of rock that climbs from the valley to peaks of fifteen to nineteen thousand feet. Seen from below, the mountains rise almost straight up, and the snow along the crest stays in view all year.
A ceremony morning there begins cold and clear. October has the driest skies of the valley’s year. The sun comes over the ridge, the temple bells ring for the dawn service, and the priests build the fire and feed it while they speak the names. Behind the smoke stands the White Range.
The oldest Indian lists of holy places are older than most countries. One of them, written in the eighth century, names four great seats of the Mother Goddess in the whole of the subcontinent, and this valley is one of the four. The texts call it Jalandhara. Later lists name its individual shrines, and the name of the flame temple, Jvalamukhi, appears among them by the eleventh century.
Five goddess temples here are counted as Shakti Peethas, the places where the tradition holds that parts of the goddess Sati came to rest. Hundreds of thousands of people visit them every spring and autumn. In the 1590s the emperor Akbar’s chronicler wrote of the shrine at Nagarkot, which is Kangra town, that pilgrims came from distant parts to visit it.
Jwalamukhi. The goddess here is a flame. It burns from a fissure in the rock inside the shrine, and it has burned for as long as anyone has written about the place. There is no image in the sanctum: the flame itself is what people come to see. It is a natural flame, and the tradition worships it as the goddess. For a house that performs fire ceremonies, this is the oldest fire we know of that is still attended daily.
Baijnath. A stone temple on the Binwa river, dated by its own inscriptions to the year 1204, where Shiva is worshipped as Vaidyanath, the Lord of Physicians. This is where a fire for health belongs, and it is the reason the Maha Mrityunjaya, the mantra the tradition keeps for illness and for long life, is recited in this valley rather than anywhere else.
Chintpurni. A goddess temple in the hills to the south whose name means the one who ends worry. The priests there perform the Saptashati havan, the fire ceremony built around the seven hundred verses of the Durga text, and it takes between two and three hours from the first offering to the last.
Chamunda Devi. On the bank of the Baner river directly under the Dhauladhar, with a cave shrine to Shiva inside the same walls. Chamunda is the form of the goddess who goes out to meet what is coming.
Bajreshwari. In Kangra town itself, the ancient Nagarkot. It was plundered by Mahmud of Ghazni from 1009 onward, brought down by the earthquake of 1905, and rebuilt by the people of the town in the 1920s. It has a yagya shala, a hall built for fire ceremonies.
Baglamukhi at Bankhandi. One of three principal shrines to this goddess in all of India, and the valley’s place for fires that are lit after dark. Her rite is performed in the evening, and this temple is built for it.
Something happens in these hills that happens almost nowhere else in India. Every village keeps its own deity, and the deity is treated as a living authority rather than an image in a room. Villagers bring disputes to him. His permission is asked before something in the village changes. On festival days he is carried out in a wooden palanquin, on the shoulders of men from his own village, to visit the gods of the neighbouring villages, and in October more than two hundred of them are carried into Kullu at once.
That is the texture of the place. The mountains are the scenery. The gods are the neighbours.
Each ceremony is performed where the tradition puts it, and the page for each fire names its own town.
The rites for the people of your family who have passed away belong on the Yamuna at Vrindavan, where they have been performed for centuries. So do the fires for Krishna and for Radha, because Vrindavan is their own ground and no other place stands in for it.
The fires for the Mother Goddess belong in Kangra, among her five seats. The fire for health belongs at the Lord of Physicians. The fire that is lit after dark belongs where there is a temple built to receive it.
Everything above is either a date, a place, or something the tradition holds, and we have said which is which. The flame at Jwalamukhi is a natural one and the tradition worships it as the goddess; both halves of that sentence are true and we keep them together. We tell you which fire is lit in which town, on which date, by whom, and we send you the recording so that you can see the place for yourself.