Vindhyavasini

Vindhyavasini is the heart of a wider sacred landscape. Pilgrims perform the Trikona Parikrama, the 'triangle circuit', linking three goddesses of the Vindhyas: Vindhyavasini herself, associated with Mahalakshmi; Kali Khoh, a cave-shrine of Maha Kali a few kilometres off, tied to the slaying of the demon Raktabija; and Ashtabhuja, the eight-armed goddess of wisdom, Maha Saraswati, on a nearby hill. To walk the triangle is to honour the Devi in all three of her great aspects.

The temple sits where the Ganga bends close to the Vindhyas, and the meeting of the sacred river with the ancient hills gives the place much of its power in the devotional imagination. It is among the most thronged Devi shrines of the north, above all through the two Navaratras.

Within the sanctum the goddess is worshipped through the day with shringar and aarti, and the recitation of the Durga Saptashati fills the air during the Navaratras. The town keeps its own festivals too — the Kajali songs of the rainy season take their name from Kajali Devi, another name of the goddess — and pilgrims round off the darshan with a bath in the Ganga at the ghats below. It is a shrine defined less by monument than by ceaseless, living worship.

At Vindhyachal, on the bank of the Ganga in Mirzapur district, stands the temple of Vindhyavasini — 'she who dwells in the Vindhyas'. Where most great goddess-shrines mark a place a part of Sati's body is said to have fallen, Vindhyavasini is revered above all as the goddess who chose to reside here of her own will, and so the shrine is spoken of both as a Shakti Peetha and, more often, as a Siddha Peetha — a self-manifest 'seat of accomplishment'.

Her story is told in the Devi Mahatmya: born to Yashoda on the same night as Krishna, and exchanged for him to deceive the tyrant Kamsa, the infant goddess slipped from his grasp, took her divine form, and withdrew to dwell forever in the Vindhya hills. She is worshipped here as a living, ever-awake presence, her image held to be swayambhu, self-arisen.

The shrine is ancient and much rebuilt, and precise dates for it are not recorded; what endures is the unbroken tide of devotion, which swells to well over a million pilgrims in each Navaratri season.

The temple is of the Nagara type of northern India — a compact shrine much renewed over the centuries rather than a single historic monument, its sanctum opening onto a busy courtyard close to the riverside ghats.

Detailed record of its building is thin; it is valued less as architecture than as one of the most alive of the Devi shrines, its narrow lanes packed with pilgrims and offering-stalls, its worship continuous from before dawn to late at night. Around it the town of Vindhyachal has grown into a dense pilgrim settlement of dharamshalas and shops, and the Ganga ghats a short walk away, where devotees bathe before darshan, are part of the pilgrimage.