Jwalamukhiज्वालामुखी

Jwalamukhi has no image, and that is the point of going.

In a temple in the Kangra valley of Himachal Pradesh, in a recess in the rock behind the sanctum, nine flames come out of fissures in the stone and burn. They have been burning for as long as anyone has recorded, they are not lit by anyone, and they are not fed.

There is no idol. There is a silver-plated pit, a canopy, a gold-plated spire given by Ranjit Singh — and fire. The goddess is the flame.

She is one of the Shakti Peethas, the places where the pieces of Sati's body came down when Vishnu's discus cut it from Shiva's arms. The Sati page carries that story, including why the lists of peethas disagree with one another. At Jwalamukhi the tradition holds that the tongue fell — and the flames are read as it.

The nine are named for nine goddesses: Mahakali, Annapurna, Chandi, Hinglaj, Vindhyavasini, Mahalakshmi, Saraswati, Ambika and Anjana — so a devotee standing at the rail is looking at nine deities, several of whom have pages in this encyclopedia, in the form of nine small fires.

And there is a story everyone at Kangra will tell you. Akbar, the Mughal emperor, is said to have tried to extinguish the flames — diverting a channel of water over them — and failed; and to have sent a gold parasol in acknowledgement, which turned to a base metal when it arrived. The historical core of that story is uncertain and the encyclopedia says so; its persistence is a fact about the place regardless.

She is in this encyclopedia because fifteen references across ten existing pages kept pointing at a temple the module had never described.

The Shakti Peetha frame. The peethas are the places where parts of Sati's body fell, and the lists — in the Tantra Chudamani, the Pithanirnaya, the Devi Bhagavata and a good many regional compilations — give fifty-one, or fifty-two, or sixty-four, and do not agree. The Sati page sets that out properly. Jwalamukhi is in essentially all of them, which is not true of every site.

The tongue. The assignment of body parts to places is the organising device of the whole system, and here it is unusually apt: a place that produces flame from the ground is given the tongue, and flame is what a tongue of fire is called in every Indian language. Whether the geology suggested the body part or the body part was found a geology is not answerable.

The flames. They are, in the ordinary physical sense, natural gas seeping through fissures in the rock of a geologically active region, and burning. The encyclopedia states this plainly because it is true and because the temple's own staff and the devotees are not, in general, troubled by it. The Kangra area sits in a seismically and geologically complex part of the Himalaya and similar seepages occur elsewhere in the world; Yanartaş in Turkey and the Baba Gurgur field in Iraq are the best-known parallels, and both have had religious significance.

Saying what the flames are does not settle what they mean, and a great many people who know exactly what natural gas is go there anyway.

The Katoch patronage. The temple belongs to the Kangra country and to the Katoch rulers, one of the oldest continuously attested ruling lines in India. The structure has been built and rebuilt; the gold-plated dome is attributed to Maharaja Ranjit Singh, who visited in the early nineteenth century, and the Sikh connection to the site is real and documented.

The Akbar story. The standard telling: the emperor marches on Kangra, is told of a temple where fire burns without fuel, attempts to quench it by diverting water, fails, and sends a chhatra of gold which is not accepted and turns to another metal. A chhatra of mixed metal is shown at the temple.

What can be said responsibly: Akbar did campaign in the Kangra hills, Mughal interest in the region is well documented, and the legend is old and locally universal. The specific episode is not established by contemporary record, and the encyclopedia presents it as a tradition of the place, which is what it is.

Guru Gobind Singh is also associated with the site in Sikh tradition, and Punjabi and Sikh pilgrims form a substantial part of the traffic.

There is nothing to depict, and this is the module's purest case of aniconism.

The flames. Nine, from fissures, in a rock face behind the sanctum. The principal one burns in a silver-plated square pit about a foot across, under a canopy; the other eight are around the chamber, each named and each with its own small attendant structure.

No idol. No stone, no metal image, no murti of any kind in the sanctum. A visitor expecting a goddess finds a recess in rock and a flame in a silver box.

What has been added around it. A gold-plated dome; silver doors; the canopy; brass bells; the chhatra attributed to Akbar. Pilgrims offer milk, water and rabri, and — because it is a fire — ghee.

In print and painting. Where the goddess is given a form in posters and in the temple's own publications, it is a generic red-clad many-armed Devi on a lion, which has no basis in the shrine itself. That iconography is imported, and the encyclopedia says so.

The other aniconic Shakta sites. Kamakhya has a cleft in rock with a spring and no image; Vaishno Devi has three pindis; Ambaji in Gujarat has a yantra and no idol; Chintpurni's page is in this tranche. There is a whole class of major goddess shrines in India where the most-visited object is not a statue, and it is one of the more interesting things about Shakta practice.

Distinguishing her. By the flames. There is nothing else.

Jwalamukhi / Jwala Devi / Jwalaji. Jwala, flame; mukhi, faced — the flame-mouthed, or she whose face is flame.

The nine flames, each named: Mahakali, Annapurna, Chandi, Hinglaj, Vindhyavasini, Mahalakshmi, Saraswati, Ambika, Anjana. Four of those nine have pages in this encyclopedia; Hinglaj is the Shakti Peetha in Balochistan, Vindhyavasini is in Mirzapur and was written in the sixth tranche.

As a Shakti Peetha. The tongue; with Unmatta Bhairava as the attendant form of Shiva.

The Chamunda, Chintpurni, Naina Devi, Brajeshwari and Jwalamukhi circuit — the Himachal and Punjab hill goddesses, visited together by very large numbers of pilgrims as a group. Chintpurni's page is in this tranche; the others are not here yet.

Not Jwalamukhi as a common noun, which in Hindi means a volcano — and the temple is not a volcano and sits on no volcanic vent. The word does both jobs and the confusion is frequent.

Not the Jwalamukhi of the Jain tradition, a yakshi, nor the several places of the name elsewhere in India.

Sati's tongue. The peetha story: Daksha's sacrifice, Sati's death, Shiva carrying the body, Vishnu's discus cutting it away piece by piece. The Daksha, Sati and Sudarshana pages carry the three ends of it. Here the tongue came down, and the flames are it.

The Sati page states the necessary thing and this page repeats it in one line: the practice later named after Sati is not her story — she died before Shiva, she was not a widow, there was no pyre — and it is a criminal offence in India under the Commission of Sati (Prevention) Act, 1987, including its abetment and its glorification.

The cowherd and the flames. The local origin story, and the better one: a cowherd notices that one of his cows gives no milk, follows her, and finds her pouring it over a flame coming out of the rock. The place is reported to the Katoch raja, who builds the shrine.

The pattern — an animal makes the daily offering before anybody knows there is anything there — recurs across India, and the Vithoba, Ayyanar and Tirumala material has versions of it. It is the standard shape of a discovery legend, and its persistence suggests something about how such sites actually came to be noticed.

Dhyanu Bhagat. The Akbar cycle's other half, and the one told at the temple with most feeling. A devotee named Dhyanu, leading pilgrims, is challenged by the emperor to prove his goddess's power; his horse is beheaded; he prays, and the head is restored. In some versions he offers his own head and it is given back. The story is local, late, and not historically established, and it is recited constantly.

The water and the chhatra. Akbar's attempt to quench the flames, and the parasol that changed metal. Discussed above; the encyclopedia treats it as a tradition of the place and not as an event.

No further narrative. Like most peethas, Jwalamukhi's legends are about the site rather than about a goddess with a biography. What happens here happens in the rock.

The temple is open daily and is one of the busiest in Himachal Pradesh, at Jwalamukhi town in Kangra district, about 55 km from Dharamshala and 35 km from Kangra town.

The two Navaratris — Chaitra (March–April) and Ashwin (September–October) — are the peak, when the whole Himachal goddess circuit fills, and a Magha fair is also kept.

Offerings. Milk, water, rabri, flowers, and coconut. The aarti is performed five times a day; havan and path are offered through the temple administration.

The circuit. Most pilgrims come as part of a group that takes in Jwalamukhi, Chintpurni, Naina Devi, Chamunda Devi and Brajeshwari at Kangra, often by bus over two or three days, and very often from Punjab. Sikh participation is substantial and long-standing.

A practical note, because the circuit is a real logistical thing. Navaratri crowds on these hill roads and temple stairs are very large. Deaths in crowd crushes at Indian religious gatherings are recurring and preventable — there was a fatal crush at Naina Devi in 2008 — and the district administrations issue route, timing and barricade arrangements for exactly this reason. Follow them; go outside peak hours with children and elderly relatives if you can; and treat the queue management as part of the pilgrimage rather than an obstruction to it.

And a note about the flames themselves. They are fire, in a confined stone chamber, with crowds. The temple manages approach and offerings for safety reasons. Loose clothing, dupattas and hair near an open flame are a real hazard, and ghee offerings are made where the staff direct and not otherwise.

On what is claimed. Pilgrims come with petitions of every kind. DharmSetu records the worship here as religious practice and makes no claim of any kind about outcomes. Where intermediaries at any such site promise a specific outcome for a fee, or escalate from one rite to a series at rising cost, that is a commercial operation whatever else it may be.

Jwalamukhi Devi Temple, Jwalamukhi (Kangra district, Himachal Pradesh) — the shrine itself. The nine flames, the silver pit, the gold dome attributed to Ranjit Singh, and the mixed-metal chhatra. Open year-round; Navaratri is the peak.

Chintpurni (Una district, Himachal Pradesh) — the next on the circuit, and its page is in this tranche.

Chamunda Devi (Kangra district), Brajeshwari Devi, Kangra (Kangra district) and Naina Devi (Bilaspur district) — the rest of the Himachal group. Chamunda's page is here; the other two are not yet.

Baglamukhi Temple, Bankhandi (Kangra district) — nearby, and the Bagalamukhi page carries the Mahavidya.

Kangra Fort and the Kangra valley — the Katoch country, and one of the most attractive landscapes in the western Himalaya.

Hinglaj Mata (Lasbela district, Balochistan, Pakistan) — one of the nine flames is named for her, and she is herself a major Shakti Peetha, visited by Pakistani Hindus in large numbers at the Hinglaj Yatra.

Kamakhya (Guwahati, Assam), Vaishno Devi (Reasi district, Jammu and Kashmir) and Ambaji (Banaskantha district, Gujarat) — the other great aniconic goddess shrines, where what is worshipped is a cleft, three pindis, or a yantra. Their pages, where they exist, carry them.

The Sati peethas as a whole, which the Sati page maps as far as the disagreeing lists allow.

A major temple with nothing in it. Jwalamukhi is the clearest case in this encyclopedia of a shrine where the object of worship is not an object. There is no image, no stone, no face — there is a recess in rock and nine flames, and millions of people come to look at them. For a religion routinely characterised, by admirers and detractors alike, as centrally concerned with images, the busiest goddess shrines in the north — this one, Vaishno Devi's three pindis, Kamakhya's cleft and spring, Ambaji's diagram — are aniconic, and that fact deserves to be better known than it is.

The geology is known and it has not mattered. The flames are natural gas through fissured rock. The temple administration knows it, the state knows it, and the pilgrims largely know it. They come anyway, in enormous numbers — because the question what is this and the question what does this mean turn out, for most people here, to be different questions. The encyclopedia states the physics and declines to treat that as a refutation, because the people it is describing do not treat it as one.

The tongue, in the right place. Of all the body-part assignments in the Shakti Peetha scheme — and there are fifty-one or more, mostly arbitrary-seeming — this one lands. A site that produces flame from the ground is given the tongue, in a language where a flame is a tongue. Whether the geology found the myth or the myth found the geology, somebody made a good decision.

A story about an emperor that will not go away. The Akbar legend is not established history and it is told at the temple every day. What it does is explain the place's survival: a shrine in a contested hill country, under a dynasty that was absorbed and re-absorbed, keeps a story in which imperial power tried and could not put the fire out. Whatever happened, that is what the story is for, and the encyclopedia records both the telling and its uncertain footing.

And the circuit is the real institution. Almost nobody comes to Jwalamukhi alone. They come on a bus from Punjab, doing five goddesses in three days, and the shrine is one stop in a regional practice that links Himachal and Punjab, Hindu and Sikh, across a hill landscape. The temple is the thing on the map; the circuit is the thing people actually do.