Mansā Devī of Haridwar

Mansā Devī of Haridwar

Wish-granting mother on the hill above the river

Mansā Devī stands on the hill above Haridwar, on the top of what the locals call Bilwa Parvata, and she is one of the cluster of hill-top goddesses that overlook the town — with Chaṇḍī Devī and Māyā Devī. Haridwar is one of the sapta-puṛ of Kīrti Vañca, the seven sacred cities, and the hill shrines belong to the pilgrimage as much as the ghāṭs do. Mansā is a word for mind and intention, and also for wish; a wish-granting shrine built above a river that people already come to wash their sins away is a very natural piece of religious engineering.

The distinctive ritual is the thread. A pilgrim comes up with a wish and ties a thread to a tree on the hill, or marks something; if the wish is granted, the pilgrim returns and unties it. The returning is the point — the shrine is not a place that is visited once and finished with, but a relationship that has to be maintained, and the untying is the receipt. Anyone describing the practice should say that the return is the marked half of it, and that the threads accumulate visibly on the trees as a record of pending petitions.

The image is described as eight-armed, which is a common form for a hill goddess who is being given the powers of a Śakti shrine, and the daily round is the ordinary one for this type: lamps, flowers, the morning and evening ārtī. The temple can be reached on foot by a climb, or by a cable car, and the presence of the cable car should be mentioned as the thing it is — a twentieth-century addition to an eighteenth-century-looking pilgrimage, which tells you something about modern accessibility that no amount of architectural description does.

Two cautions. The pilgrim figure in the frontmatter came from an older draft of this file and has not been verified against any gazetteer; large numbers are quoted for this mela and large numbers are quoted for most melas. And the name Mansā is extremely widespread: there is a Mansā Devī at Panchkula in Haryana, and shrines and villages called Mansā Devi across the north. They are related in the sense that the name and the thread-ritual recur; they are not one goddess, and a corpus entry should not let the popularity of one site flatten the others.

Sources and what is still unverified

Haridwar District Gazetteer first. L. P. Vidyarthi and S. C. Sinha's The Tribal Religions of India is a legitimate place to look at how the local shrines of the north are described, though the previous revision of this file credited the work to Sarat Chandra Roy, which is a misattribution and has been corrected here. Still unverified: the date and fabric of the present building, the cable car, the pilgrim numbers, and the origin of the thread practice. Left .