Deo Surya Mandir

Bihar's tourism department states the practice plainly: at Deo, Surya is worshipped at sunrise and at sunset both. That is the shrine's whole disposition, and it is why Chhath belongs here. Chhath, the department writes, is the one occasion on which the setting sun is worshipped along with the rising — Surya Shashti, kept on the sixth day of Kartik, a bathing festival held inside four days of abstinence and ritual purity.

The four days run at Deo as they run at every ghat of Bihar: the holy dip of Nahay-Khay; Kharna, the day-long fast broken late in the evening on kheer and fruit; the third day's Sanjhiya Arghya, the water crowded with those standing in it to offer to the setting sun, and the night's Kosi, its canopy of sugarcane hung with earthen lamps; and before dawn on the fourth, the Arghya to the sun as he rises. All India Radio's news names Deo among the famous temples the crowds reach at Chhath.

Chaitra brings it all again — the Chaiti Chhath fair at Deo opens with Nahay-Khay and runs its four days, drawing devotees from across the land.

Deo is a small town ten kilometres south-east of Aurangabad town, in Bihar's Aurangabad district, in the old Magadha land south of the Son. Bihar's tourism department calls the shrine an ancient temple of Lord Sun and counts it among the most important Surya temples of India; the district administration records that the custom of worshipping the Sun God and bathing in its Brahma Kund goes back to the era of King Ayel.

Deo puts the raising of the temple beyond history altogether. Tradition holds that Vishwakarma, the architect of the devas, built it with his own hands in the course of a single night, and that its worship comes down from the Treta Yuga. That is Deo's own telling, set down here as Deo tells it.

The recorded dating is genuinely unsettled, and the honest account gives the spread. The district administration calls this a fifteenth-century temple and ascribes it to Bhairvendra Sing, a Chandravanshi king of Umga, whose Vaishnava temple at Umga, fifteen kilometres from Deo, the district says resembles the Sun temple built at Deo. An inscription of 1437 is read as recording Bhairavendra's dedication; the lettering of an older inscription outside the shrine is read to the eighth or ninth century; historians of temple building place the surviving fabric somewhere between the eighth and the twelfth. What no reading disputes is that Surya has been worshipped at Deo a very long time, and is worshipped still.

The temple faces west. The tourism department states it as the thing that sets Deo apart: the shrine looks towards the setting sun, not the rising, where a Surya temple is expected to face east. The district administration gives the building at a hundred feet with an umbrella-like top; the tourism department describes a dome carved above it, a gold urn set on the dome, and the whole a mixture of Nagara, Dravidian and Vesara work in intricately carved stone. In the sanctum the department names three presiding images — Vishnu, Surya and Avalokiteshvara — while Deo itself speaks of Surya in his three hours, Udayachal of the morning, Madhyachal of the noon and Astachal of the evening. Below the temple lie the kunds, the sacred tanks whose water is the first act of every Chhath kept here.