Tara Tarini

What sets Tara Tarini apart is the twin form of the deity: within the sanctum are two stone heads, adorned with gold and silver and given silver eyes, worshipped alongside brass 'moving' images carried in procession. The two faces — Tara, who liberates, and Tarini, who saves — embody the Mother in her role as the ferry across the troubles of life.

A distinctive rite of the shrine is the mundan, the first head-shaving of a child, offered here in great numbers, with khichadi as the customary bhoga. The hill and the river below lend the place a quiet grandeur that has made it one of the four cardinal goddess-seats of the east and the beloved Ishta Devi of the Ganjam region.

The great gathering is the Chaitra Parba, when on each of the four Tuesdays of the month of Chaitra lakhs of devotees climb to the twin goddesses and the brass processional images are carried out among the crowds. Tara Tarini is also revered as a centre of the Tantric tradition of the east, and its pairing with Bimala at Puri, Kamakhya in Assam and Kalighat in Bengal places this Ganjam hill among the four cornerstones of the Goddess's worship across the region.

Tara Tarini crowns the Kumari hill — also called Taratarini or Purnagiri — on the bank of the Rushikulya river near Purushottampur in Ganjam district, southern Odisha. It is among the oldest and most revered Shakti centres of eastern India, worshipped not as one goddess but as twin sisters, Tara and Tarini, the guardian deities of the whole Ganjam country.

By the Shakti Peetha tradition — the story of Sati, dismembered as the grieving Shiva bore her across the world — it is here that her breasts are said to have fallen, and so the shrine is honoured as a Stana Peetha, a 'breast-shrine'. In Odia tradition Tara Tarini is counted among the four Adi Shakti Peethas, the primal seats of the Goddess, together with Bimala at Puri, Kamakhya in Assam and Dakshina Kali at Kalighat.

The shrine is ascribed to the Kalinga age with later medieval additions, and is administered today under a temple trust of the Odisha government; over the centuries the twin goddesses have drawn pilgrims from across Odisha and beyond.

The temple is built in the Kalinga style of Odisha, a modest but ancient shrine set on its hilltop above the Rushikulya. Pilgrims reach it either by climbing the long flight of 999 steps that rises from the riverbank or by the ropeway that now carries them up in a few minutes over a rise of some hundred and fifty metres.

The setting — the twin-goddess shrine on the Kumari hill, the river winding below, the plains of Ganjam beyond — is as much a part of the darshan as the sanctum itself, and around the main shrine stand lesser shrines, tanks and rest-houses that serve the pilgrim crowds.