Someśvar Mahādev

Someśvar Mahādev of Almora

A Pahari Shiva and the singers who hold him

The Someśvar Mahādev temple at Someshwar, in the Almora district of Kumaon, is a stone shrine traditionally attributed to the Chand dynasty, which ruled Kumaon from around the eleventh century until 1790. It is a Śaiva temple in a region where the Pahari and Kumaoni traditions run strongly alongside the Sanskrit-derived ones, and it is worshipped as the iṣṭa-devī — strictly, the iṣṭa-deva — of many Kumaoni households, not only as a temple deity but as a lineage obligation. The choice of Someshwar as a household's own deity is a decision families make and maintain, and the temple's relationship to the households that hold it is a more interesting fact than its architecture.

The most distinctive element of the Kumaoni religious world in which this shrine sits is the jāgar tradition. Kumaoni folk religion is heavily mediated by professional singer-practitioners, the jāgārīs, who perform all-night musical jāgar sessions in which local deities are invoked and, in the context the tradition describes, possessed. The deities named in these sessions — Nagarāja, Golū Devtā, Haru Devtā, and others — are frequently more directly present in Kumaoni religious life than the great gods of the Sanskrit pantheon, and the jāgar is where they are encountered. The Someshwar festival, the Someśvar Mahotsav, coincides with Mahāśivarātri, and Somvatī Amāvasyā is observed monthly at the new moon.

The offerings recorded for this shrine — rice-beer, eggs, grain, and in some strata animal flesh — reflect a Pahari non-Brahminic practice that differs markedly from the milk-and-ghee norm of a plains temple, and the difference is regional rather than a matter of ritual laxity. Anyone writing about Kumaoni worship who smooths these offerings into a generic list has missed the point of the region.

Sources and what is still unverified

The previous version of this entry carried a boilerplate paragraph about "honouring the self-representation of Hindu tradition" and a list of generalised sources including a study of tribal religions, none of which is specific to Kumaon or to this temple. That has been removed as padding, and the honest position is that this entry rests on regional gazetteer material rather than on Kumaoni ethnography. A guardian should establish: the temple's foundation and the Chand attribution from the Almora gazetteer, which is the only source actually cited; the jāgar tradition and the role of the jāgārīs from a Kumaoni or Garhwali ethnography, since the corpus has none; and the iṣṭa-deva relationship as families actually hold it. The Someshwar temple is also well known for a chaumukha form and associated sculptural material, none of which the previous entry mentioned and all of which a guardian with photographs should verify.