Nanda Devī

Nanda Devī

The goddess whose mountain is climbed every twelve years

Nanda Devī is the tutelary goddess of Kumaon and of the neighbouring hill regions, and she has a form that is unusual in the corpus: the goddess is identified with a mountain. Nanda Devī peak in the upper Garhwal Himalaya is her physical abode as well as her name, and the relationship between the shrine and the summit is the organising fact of the tradition rather than a metaphor attached to it. The village shrine in Almora and the high place are the same power seen from two ends of the valley, and pilgrims understand themselves to be travelling towards her the whole time they are climbing.

That is what makes the Rājajāt Yātrā the centre of the calendar. Every twelve years the goddess is carried in a palanquin from the low country up into the high himalaya, over roughly a month, through the villages of the two hill regions. The previous revision gave the route as 280 kilometres through more than thirty villages and named Hom Kund as the destination. Every one of those figures needs checking: the route length, the number of villages and the altitude of the high shrine are all given differently in different accounts, and a corpus that prints one set of numbers as the numbers is manufacturing precision. What is not in doubt is the shape — a processional pilgrimage carried out over several weeks, at long intervals, by a community that treats it as the central act of its religious year.

The lesser observances are the Nanda Devī melā in the autumn month of Bhādra and the ordinary Navrātri rites at the shrine. The festival is a yātrā in the older sense: not a spectator event but a migration of the deity, which is a category with its own logic. A deity who leaves the village and goes up the mountain is doing something different from a deity who is carried around the streets.

Two notes on method. The previous revision's "attested from 10th century CE" is a traditional claim about the antiquity of the pilgrimage, not a documented date, and should be labelled as such. And the gender field in this file was recorded as male for a goddess in an earlier revision and has been corrected; a guardian should confirm the rest of the frontmatter's period fields against the gazetteer at the same time. The Kumaoni and Garhwali material — including the ethnography of the region, of which Mark Engel's work is a well-known example — is the right body of literature, and it is not the same as the Sanskritic temple literature a general reference work draws on.

Sources and what is still unverified

Almora District Gazetteer, and the gazetteers of the old hill states, are the anchor. A named study of the Kumaoni and Garhwali religious tradition should be added. The Encyclopaedia of the Hindu World (ed. Jones and Ryan) is a cross-check. Still unverified: the route length and village count of the Rājajāt Yātrā, the destination and its altitude, the tenth-century attestation, the founding of the Almora shrine, and the current yātrā route, which is affected by road access and has changed in the modern period. Note also that the earlier source list misattributed The Tribal Religions of India to Sarat Chandra Roy, which has been corrected here. Left .