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Note: Kullu, with two l's, is the [https://himachaltourism.gov.in/destination/manali/  official spelling]. 

=History=
== Penelope Chetwode’s 1972 account== 
[https://archive.org/stream/KuluEndOfTheHabitableWorld/Kulu End of the Habitable World_djvu.txt  ''Title - kulu: end of the habitable world; Author - chetwode, penelope; Language - english; Pages - 282; Publication Year - 1972'']


''' The Kulu Dussehra '''


In the autumn of the year following my mule trek I returned to 
the Rupi Palace for the Dussehra. No book about Kulu would 
be complete without a description of this famous festival. The 
Dussehra is among the most popular of India's many festivals and 
is celebrated up and down the country in a variety of ways. I am 
indebted to my learned friend Pandit Balak Ram Gaur of Katrain 
for an explanation of the Kulu ceremonies. He tells me that they 
are held in honour of Rama's victory over Ravana, the demon 
king of Ceylon, and that in the Kulu dialect it is called dushet hera 
which means 'the demon killed*. As Ravana was slain on the 
tenth day of the light half of the month the ceremonies start on 
that day and finish on the night of the full moon. The festival 
is also locally known as the vijey desbmin, the tenth day of victory. 
What is peculiar to Kulu about the Dussehra celebrations is the homage paid to Rama (alias Ragunathji) by the village devatas who come from all over the valley itself, from Inner and Outer Saraj and from the Parbatti valley. This custom was initiated in the seventeenth century as a way of taming the indigenous divinities: nature spirits of caves, trees, springs and mountain passes, the representatives of a more ancient and primitive religion than orthodox Hinduism. The only devatas who are exempt from such homage are deified sages (such as Vashist) who acted as tutors to Rama during their earthly lives; and of course the elusive, imageless Jamlu of Malana who is a law unto himself. 

In a normal year between a hundred and fifty and two hundred 
devatas come to the Kulu Dussehra, but shortly after Independance the government removed their lands and their temple grants so that there was no more grain to fill their granaries and consequently no more money with which to pay their numerous attendants: the members of their private band, the standard bearers, rath bearers, priest and gur. Thus none but the villagers living in the immediate neighbourhood of Kulu town could 
afford to take their gods to the Dussehra. Now this was a serious 
state of affairs, not only spiritually but materially, because the 
festival had long attracted tourists, both Indian and foreign, to 
Kulu, and tourists bring cash. Eventually an excellent solution 
was found: the Indian Tourist Board agreed to pay the gods* 
annual Dussehra expenses so now everybody is happy again. 
Usually all the guest-houses, rest-houses, tourist bungalows, 
tents and aluminium huts up and down the valley are stuffed 
full for the festival, but in 1965, when I was present, only the 
Rai's family gods attended owing to the national emergency. 
The three- week Indo-Pak war had just ended and the govern- 
ment had requested the curtailment of Dussehra celebrations 
throughout the country. I was therefore fortunate in being 
present with less than half the usual crowd mining around and 
not a tripper in sight. 

I was honoured at being invited to the Rupi Palace for the 
opening ceremonies as the arrival of the devatas in the principal 
courtyard and their reception by the Rai is normally never seen 
by English people. On the day before the gods were due to 
arrive, Karan and I were strolling in the orchard where a nice 
dun hill-pony, about twelve hands high, was tethered to graze. 
At that time I was muleless and badly needed an animal to ride 
to outlying temples so I said: 

'Do you think your father would lend me this pony to ride to 
the top of Bijli Mahadev?' 

'No, I am afraid not. You see that is Narsingh's horse and 
only the god is allowed to ride him/ 

On the opening morning of the festival there were great 
preparations at the palace for the arrival of the devatas that 
evening. From Kiran's nursery window I watched her father, 
the Rai, at his devotional ablutions. Wearing a pair of white 
cotton pants he first sat and shaved on the veranda outside his 
mother's apartments, then he poured cold water over his head 
from a brass lota which he refilled repeatedly from a large gal- 
vanised bucket. Then he got up and went inside and reappeared 
ten minutes later dressed in baggy orange trousers with a loose 
tunic of the same colour and a handkerchief tied round his head 
in the gipsy fashion of pabari women. Meanwhile the few decrepit 

old palace menservants appeared in the courtyard dressed in 
clean white cotton jodhpurs and pale blue waisted coats with 
matching pagans. Most of them, Kiran told me, had retired years 
ago but returned each autumn to serve their master and their 
gods ; and during Dussehra the two are closely identified. Kiran 
herself changed into a long flounced mauve taffeta dress which she 
proudly told me she had had copied from photographs in a film 
magazine illustrating Gone with the Wind. 

I had always heard that the Kulu Dussehra cannot start without 
Hidimba, the royal family's demon goddess 'grandmother* 
about whom Kiran had told me. The idol has to be carried on a 
rath twenty-four miles down the valley from the Dunghri temple 
above Manali and spends the night beside the Ramshila bridge 
at the far end of the long Akhara bazaar. On the opening day 
itself the Raja sends messengers down from Sultanpur to pay 
his respects to the goddess and invite her up to his palace. 
Hindu festivals, however, are invariably conducted in a hap- 
hazard manner, and on this occasion the first devata to enter 
the courtyard was Tripura Sundari of Nagar. She was preceeded 
by her private band, and her rath t stuck with metal masks, decked 
with flowers, and hung with brilliant draperies, was carried to 
the back entrance of the Kali temple where it was received and 
saluted by the orange-clad Rai. The men bearing her litter there- 
upon began to shake it up and down on their shoulders and tilt 
it over from one side to the other to show that it was indeed 
animated by the spirit of the goddess. She was then carried up the 
steep stone steps leading to the high veranda where I stood, 
and into the drawing-room where she was set down on the 
tiger-woven rug. 

Next came Devi Hidimba, who by rights should have been first 
on the scene, with her band and her gur naked to the waist with 
long grey-black greasy curls falling to well below his shoulders. 
He shook violently, denoting divine possession, but smiled at 
the same time and appeared to be enjoying his festival duties 
immensely. While the rath of the demon goddess was oscillated 
in the customary fashion to the blare of her trumpets and the 
rhythmic beating of her drums, a live lamb was thrown up into 
the air and caught again by some of her devotees. This ceremony, 
Kiran told known as ivarna and on the last evening of 

Dussehra the lamb would be one of the five creatures to be 
offered up in sacrifice beside the river bank. After Hidimba 
had been received by the Rai she too was carried upstairs into the 
drawing-room and set down beside Tripura Sundari. 

For the next hour or so other devis and devatas continued to 
arrive and the same ritual was enacted, except that no more 
raths were taken up to the blue drawing-room, but were set 
down in the courtyard instead, and none but Hidimba's followers- 
threw up a live lamb. When the last of the devatas had been 
received by the Rai, all of the .raths were lifted up on to the 
shoulders of their attendants and carried to the temple of 
Ragunath to do homage to the presiding deity of Kulu who would 
then himself be carried on a litter down to Dhalpur at the 
northern end of the great maidan. 

After a seemingly interminable time in the temple during which 
I remained outside under a sacred peepul tree, the devatas at last 
emerged, their metal masks glinting in the setting sun. They were 
carried past me with their sovereign, Ragunath ji, the great Rama 
himself, in their midst, incongruously represented by a tiny 
bronze image only a few inches high seated on a dark red velvet 
cushion in a gilt palanquin. He was preceeded by his vice-regent, 
the Rai, who had made another quick change, this time into the 
traditional ceremonial dress of the Indian princes: white cotton 
jodhpurs, a beautiful apricot brocade waisted coat, glistening 
with gold thread, and a pagari of the same delicate shade with a 
diamond cockade in front. For this short space of a few days 
every autumn the Rai of Rupi comes into his own again, for he 
is looked upon as the deified descendant of the Rajput kings 
of Kulu and entitled to veneration because of the ancient Hindu 
belief in the divinity of kings. 

In the days of its greatness this Western Himalayan kingdom 
was no petty state. According to Hutchison and Vogel the total 
area was 6,607 square miles which was sometimes increased to as 
much as 10,000 by temporary acquisitions from neighbouring 
states. The last ruling Raja was Ajit Singh who ascended the 
gaddi in 1816, was deposed by the famous Sikh conqueror Ranjit 
Singh in 1 8 3 9, and died under British protection in the small state 
of Shangri across the Sutlej in 1 841 . Four years later, at the end 
of the first Sikh war in 1 846, large tracts of the Western Himalaya
were ceded to the British, including the whole of Kulu and 
Saraj, and in 1852 the then Raja Gyan Singh was demoted to the 
lower rank of Rai because of his illegitimate birth. He was, how- 
ever, allowed to live on — without sovereign powers — in the 
family palace at Sultanpur and to enjoy the jagir of Waziri Rupi, 
the tract of land between the Parbatti and Sainj rivers and bounded 
to the west by the B6as. Thus his descendant today is still known 
as the Rai of Rupi, his residence is the Rupi Palace, and he is the 
true representative of the old line of Kulu Kings and revered by 
the people as such, especially during Dussehra. 

In front of the Rai walked his eighteen-year-old son, the 
tikka sahib, a medical student of Chandigarh University, but 
today a near-god, dressed in the same splendid style as his father. 

Behind the palanquin of Ragunath pranced the pretty pony 
believed to be carrying god Narsingh, though not having the 
eyes of Hindu faith I was unable to see him. His miniature 
charger was led by a uniformed attendant who had considerable 
difficulty in controlling the animal which was overfed and under 
exercised, and matters were not helped by the fact that he was 
almost completely enveloped in a mulberry velvet rug, several 
sizes too big for him, with gold trappings trailing on the ground, 
because as Kiran explained later, the god's last mount had been 
an Arab, a considerably larger horse, which had unfortunately 
died. 

The procession of gods crossed the flat maidan in front of 
the Rupi Palace, then wound its way down the steep paved 
stepped path through the narrow upper bazaar of Sultanpur to 
the motor road below, and from there through the beautiful 
alder groves criss-crossed with streams and over the wooden 
bridge which spans the Sarvari torrent near its confluence with 
the Beas. Meanwhile I was skipping along in front talcing photo- 
graphs at strategic points along the route which finally led up 
the hill through the Dhalpur bazaar to the northern end of the 
maidan where the large wooden rath of Ragunath, all hung with 
coloured draperies, was waiting to receive the chief god of the 
valley. 

The word rath is really Sanskrit for a chariot, but in the India 
of today the term is chiefly used for the huge elaborately-carved 
wooden carriages of the Gods which are pulled along proces- 

sional routes near the great temples of the plains by hundreds of 
youths at special festivals. In Kulu the word is confusing because 
it is used indiscriminately for both the carriages on wheels and 
the wooden palanquins of the village devatas to which the metal 
masks are fixed for melas and which have no wheels but are 
carried about on long poles. The wheeled rath of Ragunath is 
by far the largest one in the valley and is roughly made with 
no carving to decorate it. There are a few smaller versions of this 
rath in some of the bigger villages, but on the whole the wheel- 
less raths are far more practical in a mountain region and the 
vast majority of hill gods always travel in them. 

Ragunath' s great clumsy chariot runs on six solid little 
wheels and lies neglected and unprotected from the weather 
throughout the year, apart from the few days of Dussehra each 
autumn. As soon as the tiny image of the god was transferred 
to it, the bands of the devatas all blared forth together — the noise 
was terrific and thrilling — while the Rai and his son, led by the 
chief Brahmin priest from the temple, walked three times round 
the rath followed by crowds of devotees. The priest, together 
with several more Brahmins, then clambered with difficulty into 
the vehicle and sat cross-legged round a small wooden sanctuary 
in which the little image had been placed. Long thick ropes had 
already been attached to the front of the carriage and these were 
now picked up by some two hundred young men who started 
to pull the god with great glee across the huge maidan. But, alas, 
they were all too soon frustrated for the small metal umbrella 
protruding from the wooden spire of the rath roof became 
entangled in telegraph wires and for the next twenty minutes 
the boys pushed and pulled and shouted in their unsuccessful 
efforts to free it. At last one of their number, brighter than the 
rest, had the sense to climb up the nearest telegraph pole and 
carefully detach each wire one by one until the god was able to 
proceed. When the rath finally reached the high bank of the Beas 
at the far end of the maidan it was halted and remained there 
until the last day of Dussehra when the customary five-fold 
sacrifice was offered in honour of Durga and in the presence of 
the royal family. The victims all have to be provided by the Rai 
and consist of a buffalo, a goat, a cock, a fish and a fresh-water 
crab. 


Nothing is more confusing to the uninitiated than Hindu 
ritual observance. Why should the Goddess Durga, who is the 
Shakti (female power) of Shiva, not Vishnu, be propitiated in a 
ceremony which is essentially Vaishnavite? Especially as the 
devotees of Vishnu (of whom both Rama and Krishna are 
avatars) hate blood sacrifice. But I was told that as the Dmsehra 
celebrates the victory of Rama over Ravana, the demon king, 
offerings are made to Durga because she is the Goddess of 
Victory, having, with the aid of her faithful lion, slain so many 
enemies of the gods.

=The procession and  palanquins=
==The Shringa Rishi  controversy, c.2009 onwards==
[https://epaper.timesgroup.com/olive/ODN/TimesOfIndia/shared/ShowArticle.aspx?doc=TOIDEL/2019/10/12&entity=Ar03002&sk=1E75385E&mode=text  Oct 12, 2019: ''The Times of India'']

[[File: The two deities have been put under a ‘house arrest’ after followers of both brought their palanquins for Dussehra without an invitation.jpg|The two deities have been put under a ‘house arrest’ after followers of both brought their palanquins for Dussehra without an invitation <br/> From: [https://epaper.timesgroup.com/olive/ODN/TimesOfIndia/shared/ShowArticle.aspx?doc=TOIDEL/2019/10/12&entity=Ar03002&sk=1E75385E&mode=text  Oct 12, 2019: ''The Times of India'']|frame|500px]]

Two influential deities of Kullu district — Shringa Rishi and Balu Nag — have been put under a ‘house arrest’ under tight police security in Kullu Dussehra after the deities reached there without any formal invitation.

Both the deities, who used to play a special role in Dussehra, are not being invited by the Kullu Dussehra committee for last 10 years as their followers are fighting over supremacy of their deities. The matter had reached the HC but the dispute remained unresolved. Despite no invitation from the Kullu administration, followers of both the deities brought their palanquins for Dussehra.

Despite no formal invitation, both the deities mostly join Dussehra festivities and the cops put them under ‘house arrest’ at their camp to avoid any mishap. This year too, both the deities joined the Dussehra festivities.

According to tradition, idol of superior deity walks to the right side of chariot of Lord Raghunath, the presiding deity in Kullu Dussehra, during the rath yatra. This place was occupied by Shringa Rishi for many decades but when he stopped participating in Dussehra in 1970s, Balu Nag occupied this place. After 11 years, Shringa Rishi again started participating in Dussehra, but the followers of the two deities started quarrelling for prime spot during the yatra. A few years ago, many people were injured when the followers of the two deities pelted stones on each other. Since then, both the deities are put under ‘house arrest’ and cops do not allow them to take part in the rath yatra.

Followers of Balu Nag, who is considered an incarnation of Lakshman, younger brother of Lord Rama, say nobody can separate a brother from his elder brother and they have right to stay together. On the other side, the followers of Shringa Rishi say the place of guru is always higher than any relation, so they will not let anybody to occupy their place.

[[Category:Festivals|D DUSSEHRA: KULLU
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[[Category:India|K DUSSEHRA: KULLU
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[[Category:Places|K DUSSEHRA: KULLU
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[[Category:Religion|D DUSSEHRA: KULLU
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