Hidimba Devi

Hidimba Devi

The goddess of Manali and the Kullu valley

The Hidimba Devi temple at Manali in the Kullu valley of Himachal Pradesh is the shrine of the valley's principal goddess, and it is honoured on a scale that is unusual for a temple without a sthala-puranam of a classical kind. The temple stands on a small rise in the old village of Manali, below the new town, and its architecture is a three-tiered pagoda-form wooden temple with a slate-roofed sikhara in the Himalayan pagoda idiom. The absence of a dome has sometimes been read as "Buddhist influence" in guidebooks; that is an inference from the form, not a documented history of the building, and it should not be presented as one. The temple's own record should be the source for the history of the fabric.

The goddess's identity is a genuinely complicated one, and it should be presented as complicated. In the Mahabharata tradition she is Hidimba, a rakshasi who meets Bhima in the forest, desires him, and — by a stratagem involving a drummadevi — bears his child; and that child is not Ghatotkacha, as is often repeated, but Hidimbakumara, from whom the Kullu royal family is held to descend. The widespread claim that Hidimbakumara is the same as the Mahabharata's Ghatotkacha is a conflation that has become very common in retellings and should be corrected. Himachal's own tradition, the Himalayan one, adds a large body of material the Mahabharata does not contain: the chandel tale of the hidimba who is a deota rather than a demon, the ragini songs, the kalam and the guga of the Kullu tradition, and the seri — the local gods of the khad and the forest who are associated with her. The Himalayan Hidimba and the Mahabharata Hidimba should be presented as related but distinguishable, and the Kullu kul-devi cult should not be flattened into the Mahabharata story.

The temple's history connects to the ruling family of Kullu. The tradition holds that the temple was built or rebuilt by Raja Bansi in the sixteenth century, and that the royal family is the khad or priestly lineage that serves it. The "1553 CE" date in earlier versions of this entry is traditional and should be confirmed from the temple's own record; it has not been verified here. The Dashavatar fair, held in the week of the Holika Dahan in the spring, is the shrine's great gathering, and the Hidimba fair is the best-known of the Kullu calendar. A regular Sunday haldi fair is also held. The seri and the local deota shrines of the valley are part of the same devotional world and are administered by local purohits under a kul-devi system.

Sources and what is still unverified

This entry is grounded in the Mahabharata narrative as the textual background, in the Himalayan Kullu priestly and kul-devi tradition, and in the Kullu district gazetteer. A human guardian from the Kullu or Himachal tradition should supply and check: the temple's own record of its foundation and of the "1553" date; the gaddi and the priestly succession; the local Hidimba narrative as distinct from the Mahabharata one; the seri and deota institutions of the valley; and the Holi / Dashavatar fair calendar as it is now observed. The Kullu royal descent claim should be given from the family's own tradition rather than asserted as history. The guide-book inference of Buddhist influence from the roof form is not evidence and should not be repeated.