Village deities in the West Indian Himalayas, who manifest in temples, in possessed oracles, and in moving vehicles, intervene in various aspects of the private and public lives of their devotees. As such, these devis and devtas (goddesses and gods) emerge, from both indigenous theologies and scholarly theories, as complex agents whose cognition is distributed among community members and whose agency is articulated and enacted in public rituals. After presenting the body of theory to which I have just referred, I argue in this article that the institution of the moving rath--literally a 'chariot', but in reality a palanquin carried on devotees' shoulders--is a major ritual arena where the deities are established as such complex agents. I do so by documenting in detail and analysing the ritual handling of the shared rath of the goddess Hadimba and the god Manu Rsi, two well-known village deities in the Kullu Valley (Himachal Pradesh), otherwise known as 'The Valley of Gods'.
This chapter provides a broad historical, cultural, and sociopolitical background on the goddess Haḍimbā, her community, and the region. It begins by describing a typical bus journey from Delhi to Manali, which introduces the reader to the area experientially and reproduces the point of view of visiting tourists and scholars alike. This is followed by a description of the “devtā system,” the indigenous religious tradition of this area, which is known as the Land of the Gods (Dev Bhūmi). There is an overview of the available sources for our knowledge about the Kullu Valley’s past and a brief history of its ruling dynasty. The chapter ends with a description of the recent introduction of modernity, capitalism, and tourism to the region and of how these have affected the local economy, sociopolitics, and religion, as well as the goddess Haḍimbā and her cult.
Haḍimbā is a major village goddess in the Kullu Valley of the West Indian Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh, a mountainous, rural area known as the Land of Gods. This book is an ethnographic study of Haḍimbā and her dynamic, mutually formative relationship with her community of followers. It explores the part played by the goddess in her devotees’ lives, particularly in their encounters with players, powers, and ideas both local and external, such as invading royal forces, colonial forms of knowledge, and, more recently, modernity, capitalism, tourism, and ecological change. Haḍimbā is revealed as a complex social agent, a dynamic ritual and conceptual compound, which both mirrors her devotees and serves as a platform for them to reflect on, debate, give meaning to, and sometimes resist their changing realities. The goddess herself, it emerges, also changes in the process. Drawing on diverse ethnographic and textual materials gathered during periods of extensive fieldwork from 2009 to 2017, this study is rich with myths, accounts of dramatic rituals, and descriptions of everyday life in the region. The book employs an interdisciplinary approach to tell the story of Haḍimbā from the ground up, or rather from the center out, portraying the goddess in varying contexts that radiate outward from her temple to local, regional, national, and indeed global spheres. The resulting account makes an important contribution to the study of Indian village goddesses, lived Hinduism, Himalayan Hinduism, and the rapidly growing field of religion and ecology.
This chapter continues to explore the local web of associations in which Haḍimbā is embedded and through which she and her community are constituted. Turning from the world of ritual to that of narrative, the chapter critically introduces five major stories about Haḍimbā, showing how each of them sheds a different light on the goddess’s character, biography, and social roles. It becomes clear that, while Haḍimbā is explicitly presented by her devotees as a single, unitary being, the narratives reveal a persona who is multilayered, multifaceted, and continuously changing. Haḍimbā emerges as a storehouse of fragmented memories of multiple origins and events, as well as a product of interactions among deities, people, interests, and ideals. It is evident that all the stories contain elements of power and reflect Haḍimbā’s involvement in the local web of sociopolitical relations and the developments she has undergone as a result.
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