What do the old texts say about the Kumbh at Nashik?

The Mahatmya is Brahma’s telling. Some rishis asked him about the holy places, and he told them what he had once told Narada: there are twelve great rivers, six that come down from the Himalaya and six that run south of the Vindhya, and the first of the southern six is the Godavari. Narada had asked him how she came to the earth. Here is what Brahma told him, the way the Gautami Mahatmya tells it.

It starts with a pot of water. Shiva made it at his own wedding, the best water there is, and gave it to Brahma to keep, and Brahma kept it until the day Vishnu took the three worlds from the asura king Bali in three steps, and then washed his father’s foot with it. Off Mount Meru the water ran four ways, and the stream that ran south Shiva took into his matted hair, and that was the Ganga, and he would not let her go. Uma wanted her out of his hair, and it was Ganesha who found the way — a drought that had emptied the earth, a rishi called Gautama on Brahmagiri feeding every rishi in the country, and a cow sent into his rice that fell down at a wave of a blade of grass and lay there as if it were dying, so that the rishis could tell him the one thing that would make him clean was the water in Shiva’s hair. Gautama went to Kailash and did penance until Shiva gave her to him, and he walked home with the river in his own matted hair and laid them down on the rock on the top of Brahmagiri, and she stood up out of them and went east, towards the sea. The whole of it, the drought and the cow and what was said on Kailash, is on the source of the Godavari.

The water in Shiva’s hair came down to earth in two parts. The first was the one Gautama brought. The other was brought later by a king, Bhagirath, by his own penance, for his ancestors. South of the Vindhya the Ganga is called the Gautami, and north of it she is called the Bhagirathi.

When Gautama had brought her down, he asked Shiva what a man must do to bathe in her, and Shiva gave him the rules for going to the river. Then he told him what she is worth: that the Gautami counts everywhere and always, at his word, and that one bath in her when Jupiter is in Leo is on a par with sixty thousand years of bathing in the Ganga. And he gave her six names, Gautami and Godavari among them. The whole of what he said is on Why it is called Simhastha.

This is what Nashik tells about the river and the Kumbh.

The Godavari came down when Jupiter was in Leo. It was in the age when Vishnu was the tortoise, in the days of King Mandhata. She came down onto Brahmagiri at Trimbakeshwar, and she is the Ganga of the south. Her name comes from the cow: go is the cow, and she is the river that made Gautama clean of it. And for as long as Jupiter stays in Leo, which is about a year, every river, every sea and every tirtha, and the rishis with them, come and live on the bank of the Godavari.

That year is why the Kumbh is here. What brings it round is Jupiter going into Leo, and Why it is called Simhastha says how that works, and the twelve-year cycle says why it is once in about twelve years. And at Nashik the place where the drops of amrit fell at the churning is Ramkund, on the bend of the river at Panchavati, and Why the Kumbh comes to Nashik tells that in full.