Maa Sharda Devi, Maihar

To go up to Sharda is the pilgrimage itself. Madhya Pradesh Tourism counts one thousand and sixty-three steps to the summit, the district administration a thousand and one, and many climb them barefoot; for those who cannot, a ropeway of four-seat cabins lifts the pilgrim up the scarp, and a road has been cut to the hilltop. However one comes, the ending is the same — the small white shrine, the terrace, and the plain lying wide open below.

Her great days are the two Navaratras, Chaitra and Ashvin, when a mela fills the town and lakhs of pilgrims come; the queues on the stair run through the night. And Maihar holds one belief above every other. Alha of the Alha-Khand — who, tradition says, did twelve years of tapas here and received deathlessness from the Mother — is held to come still, so that the first worship of each day is his. He and his brother Udal were her devotees, the district writes, the first to find her in that forest; it was they who called her Sharda Mai, the name she has carried since. Alha Deo's temple stands behind hers on the hill, his pond and his akhara at its foot.

Her town is a musician's town too. Ustad Allauddin Khan — brought to Maihar by Maharaja Brijnath Singh, founder of the Maihar gharana, guru of Ravi Shankar and of Ali Akbar Khan — sang, the district writes, in Sharda's temple more regularly than he played in the court. And the flowers that come down from her sanctum are not discarded: Maihar's women roll them into incense.

Maihar lies where the Kaimur and Vindhya hills come together above the Tamas, and over the town rises Trikuta, the three-peaked, with the Mother's shrine on its summit some six hundred feet above the plain. The district administration, whose collector heads the Maa Sharda Devi Mandir Prabandh Samiti that keeps the temple, states her simply: Sharada is also called Saraswati, the Goddess of learning, who gives intelligence, mind, wisdom and logic.

The town's name is the first thing a pilgrim is told. When Shiva bore the body of Sati, tradition holds, her necklace fell here — mai, the mother, and har, the necklace — and Mai-ka-har wore down through the centuries into Maihar. On that account Madhya Pradesh Tourism counts the shrine among the fifty-one Shakti Peethas of the Goddess, and the district records the same belief — their reckoning, and the one this region keeps.

The shrine's own age is not recorded. An old inscription beside the temple is read as Vikram Samvat 559 — 502 CE — and the state's tourism literature gives that as the temple's beginning, while the Government of India's Utsav portal says the Devanagari lettering stands on the image of the Mother herself, and adds a further tradition: that Adi Shankaracharya worshipped here in the ninth or tenth century.

There is little grandeur of stone here. The sanctum on the summit is small and plainly built — a white conical shikhara above a marble-faced shrine, a flagstaff, and a railed terrace across which the darshan queue moves — and the temple's real architecture is the hill itself: red rock, dry forest and the plain far below.

The summit carries more than one seat. Beside the Mother, the Government of India's Utsav portal names Kaal Bhairavi, Hanuman, Kali, Durga, Gauri Shankar, Shesh Nag, Phoolmati Mata, Brahma Dev and Jalapa Devi as worshipped on this hilltop, and the state's account singles out the images of Hanuman, Narasimha and Kali. The stair climbs in long flights with shelters and stalls along it, and the ropeway runs up beside it.