Saptashringi, Vani

Maharashtra counts its own Devi seats as the sade-tin, three and a half: Mahalakshmi at Kolhapur, Bhavani at Tuljapur, Renuka at Mahur, and Saptashringi of Vani — the four matched to the syllables of AUM. The received reckoning, which the district administration records, names this gad the ardha — the half-measure that closes the sacred sound. The trust's own telling gives it another weight: Saptashringi as the mula sthana, the root seat of Adi Shakti, in whom Mahalakshmi, Mahakali and Mahasaraswati are present together. Both are held with love; pilgrims make the round of all four without weighing them.

Pan-Indian lists count the gad among the fifty-one Shakti Peethas, where Sati's right arm is said to have fallen, and the Devi Bhagavata Purana names the Saptashringa hills a seat of the Goddess. Devotees find her in her fullness, a lion at her side and crown, nose-ring and waist-belt upon her; the svarup stands so tall that it takes an eleven-yard sari to robe her.

The great gathering is the Chaitrotsav, from Rama Navami to the full moon of Chaitra, when pilgrims walk in from Maharashtra, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, the last days counted in lakhs. At midnight on that full moon, and again on Mahanavami, the Kirtidhwaj — a saffron banner many metres long, borne up by a family that has held the right for generations — is raised on the peak above the shrine. Both Navaratras are kept, and Kojagiri Purnima.

North of Nashik the Sahyadri throws up a ridge of seven peaks, and on a plateau of that ridge — some 4,600 feet up, in Kalwan taluka above the town of Vani — the Goddess is worshipped as Saptashringi Nivasini, 'she who dwells on the seven peaks'. The hill is the gad, the fastness, and all of it is sacred: the Markandeya hill stands to the east, and tradition sets the Navadurga on the seven summits, unseen.

The image is not installed but self-revealed. In a cleft at the foot of a sheer scarp stands a svarup some eight feet tall, red with the sindoor of centuries, eighteen arms ranged nine to a side, each holding a weapon given by one of the gods — trident, chakra, conch, bow, sword and noose among them. She is Mahishasuramardini, who ended Mahishasura's long war against the devas; and from the facing hill the sage Markandeya is said to have recited the puranas for her delight, composing there the Devi Mahatmya.

Human work on the gad is later, and modest beside the rock. The stone stair to the shrine — about five hundred steps — was first cut in 1710 by Umabai Dabhade of the Maratha senapati house. The Peshwas kept the seventh day of their Navaratri for the worship of Adimaya here, and the scholar R. C. Dhere traced this Goddess as the kulaswamini — the family deity — of Sant Dnyaneshwar himself. The temple trust has cared for the shrine since 1975.

There is little here of the built temple. The sanctum is the mountain itself, a rock-cut chamber in the scarp with the great red svarup filling it. What has been added — doorway, pillared front, galleries, the shelter over the stair — serves the crowd and leaves the rock to speak.

The rest of the gad is the temple's true precinct. Its watershed holds some hundred and eight kundas, honoured as tirthas; a Ganesha shrine stands to the south, and beyond it the Shitkada, a fall of a thousand feet. From the plateau a funicular railway climbs to the shrine in about three minutes — opened in 2018, built and run by Suyog Gurbaxani Funicular Ropeways and widely reported as India's first — sparing the infirm the long stair.