Nanda Devi
नंदा देवी नन्दा
Also Nanda, Sunanda, Gaura, Nanda Rajrajeshwari, Nanda Bhagwati.
ShaktaSaivaVillage and folk
Who this is
The goddess of Garhwal and Kumaon, and the one deity on this table whose whole character is that she is somebody’s daughter. She is Parvati and Gauri by identification and the second highest mountain in India carries her name, but the hills do not keep her as a mountain or as a consort: they keep her as a dhyani, a daughter of the village who was married far away into the snows and comes home once a year, is fed and dressed and sung to, and is sent back weeping at the end of the day. That is why her festival is an Ashtami and not a nine night, why the songs sung to her are the songs sung to a married daughter, and why the people who keep her say she belongs to them rather than that they belong to her. She was the kuldevi of the Katyuri and then of the Chand rajas, so her temples stand where the old capitals were, at Chandpur Garhi, at Almora and at Nainital, and she is still the kul devi of a great many Garhwali and Kumaoni households.
How to recognise them
The image that matters is made and destroyed in a day: the kadali, a plantain stem cut in the forest and carried into the village with drums, shaped, dressed as a bride in the cloth and ornaments the house or the temple keeps for her, and given up at the close of the Ashtami. Where there are permanent images, as at the Nanda Devi temple in Almora and at Nainital, she is a seated goddess with Sunanda beside her, often with the lion and with the mountain behind. In the Raj Jat the thing that goes ahead of the procession is not an image at all but a four horned ram, the chausingya khadu, which is sent on alone from Homkund.
Family and companions
Daughter of the hills and wife of Shiva, which in the hill telling means that Kailash is her husband’s house and the village is her father’s. Sunanda is kept beside her and is spoken of as her sister in most places and as a second form of her in others. Latu devta of Wan is her attendant and her companion on the road, and the Raj Jat is led by him beyond Wan because the way past there is held to be his; in some Garhwali tellings he is her brother, and the accounts do not agree.
How they are worshipped
Bhadrapada Shukla Ashtami above all, the Nanda Ashtami on which she is worshipped and sent back, and the melas at Almora, Nainital, Ranikhet, Nauti and Kurud around it. The Nanda Devi Raj Jat walks only in the years the Nauti Rajbar family and its committee call one, which is why no calendar should print it.
At home in the households that hold her as kul devi, and at her melas, which are the public form of the same thing: Almora, Nainital and Ranikhet in Kumaon, Nauti and Kurud in Chamoli in Garhwal. The kadali is cut and brought in with drums, the image is made and dressed, the women of the house sing her the songs of a daughter leaving home through the day, and she is taken out in procession in the afternoon and given up at the close of the Ashtami. No priesthood is required for the household observance and the singing is the greater part of it.
The stories
As they are told, with the disagreements left in
The daughter who is sent back to the snows
The hills tell her as a daughter of the village who was married to Shiva and went to live in the snows, and who comes home for one day in Bhadrapada. Everything in the observance follows from that. The image is dressed as a bride because a married daughter who comes home is dressed at her father’s house; the songs are the ones sung at a daughter’s departure; and the image is given up at the close of the Ashtami rather than kept, because a daughter who has a husband’s house does not stay. The weeping at the end is not performance and is not mourning: it is what a hill household does when a daughter leaves, and the goddess is given the same treatment because she is held to be one.
The Raj Jat and the four horned ram
Once in roughly a generation a ram is born with four horns in the Nauti Rajbar household in Chamoli, and the hills take it as the sign that the Raj Jat is due. The procession walks from Nauti through Kansuwa, Nauti again, Kurud, Wan and Bedini to Homkund, past Roopkund with its bones, carrying the gold image and the ornaments, and from Homkund the ram is loaded and sent on alone over the pass toward the snows, which is the gift going with her to her husband. Latu devta of Wan leads it beyond Wan, because the way past there is held to be his. It is spoken of as twelve yearly and it is not: the intervals in the last century have been irregular, the year is settled by the family and the committee and announced when it is settled, and no arithmetic on the Sun or the Moon produces it.
The kuldevi who moved with the capital
She was the kuldevi of the Katyuri kings and then of the Chand rajas of Kumaon, and her temples mark where those courts sat rather than where a legend places her. The Garhwali line keeps her at Chandpur Garhi and at Nauti; the Chands took her to Champawat and then to Almora, where the Nanda Devi temple stands in the Malla Mahal compound beside the old palace, and the British garrison town of Nainital built her another in the nineteenth century. This is the ordinary way a hill goddess becomes a regional one: a ruling house takes its own kul devi with it, and the capital makes her everybody’s. What is unusual is that the household form survived the royal one intact, so the same goddess is kept at a court temple and in a kitchen corner without either version being the official one.
Where the regions differ
- Tamil
- Kerala
- Telugu
- Kannada
- North
- Maharashtra
- Bengal
- Punjab
- Assam
- Sri Lanka
- Nepal
- Gujarat
- Odisha
- Mithila
- Kashmir
- Tulu Nadu
- manipur
- rajasthan
- konkani
- sindhi
- jharkhand
- himalayan
- kodava
- Himachal · Uttarakhand
- The goddess of Garhwal and Kumaon, kept as a dhyani and not as a mountain: at Nauti and Kurud in Chamoli, at Chandpur Garhi, and at the Nanda Devi temples of Almora and Nainital, with Nanda Ashtami in Bhadrapada as her day and the Raj Jat in the years it is called.
Their days
Every one of these has a page of its own