What is the history of Nashik?

Before any of this was a town it was a forest, and the forest had a name. Janasthan. That was the rakshasas’ part of the great Dandaka forest, the country where Ravan’s brother Khara sat with his army, where the rishis were eaten if they wandered too far, and where nobody went who could help it. Nashik keeps Janasthan as one of its own old names. The town was in the middle of that country once, and it does not mind saying so.

Another of the old names is Trikantak.

And the whole of this place was Panchavati. Five banyan trees gave it the name, and the old part of the city on the left bank of the river still has it. When someone in Nashik says Panchavati they mean the lanes behind the river, the banyans, the cave, the temples, and the pool at the water’s edge. That is where the story of the town happens, and everything else grew up round it.

Much later there were the Mughals, and while they held the city they gave it a name of their own. Gulshanabad, the city of roses. Nobody calls it that now, but everyone here has heard it, and it comes up whenever the old names are being counted.

The last thing about the name is the spelling. Nasik and Nashik are the same town. Nasik is the old way of writing it, and you still see it written like that on the older signs, and the Government of Maharashtra changed it to Nashik, and that is the name now. If you hear both on the same day, nobody is wrong.

Agastya was here before Ram was. He is the rishi who came south over the hills when the south was still all forest, and he lived in this forest and did his तपस्या tapasya here, his penance, the long years of living on nothing and wanting nothing that a rishi gives to it.

Then Ram came into the forest with Sita and Lakshman, and it was Agastya he came to. Here is that part, the way the Valmiki Ramayana tells it in the Aranya Kanda.

Ram asked him for a place with trees and plenty of water where the three of them could live in peace, and Agastya thought for a moment and said: go to Panchavati. There is fruit there, and roots, and deer, and it is close to the Godavari. Sita will be happy there. He told them the way, and the two brothers picked up their bows and set off with Sita between them.

At Panchavati Ram looked about and chose the spot himself, a flat piece of ground with trees all round it and the river close by, wide and slow, with lotuses on the water and deer coming down to drink. He took Lakshman’s hand and said, build it here. And Lakshman built the hut with his own hands. Mud walls on a frame of long bamboos, a roof of shami branches and reeds and leaves, the floor beaten level. When it was done he bathed in the Godavari, came back with lotuses and fruit, did the small rites you do for a new house, and only then brought Ram to see it. Ram held him and said that as long as Lakshman was alive, with all that care in him, their father was not dead.

And then they lived here, and for a long time nothing much happened. The rains came and went, the river rose and fell. Rishis walked in from the forest, sat, ate, talked, and walked back. On winter mornings the three of them went down to the river before sunrise through mist so thick you could hear the cranes but not see them, and bathed, and gave water to the gods and to their ancestors, and walked back up to the hut. The pool where Ram bathed is still there. It is called Ramkund. A little along the bank from it is the place where he did the rites for his father, Dasharath, who had died while Ram was in the forest, and the town calls it Ramgaya, Ram’s Gaya, after the place in the east a son goes to for exactly that. And near the hut there is a cave, and Ram used to leave Sita in it when he had to go out, because this was still Janasthan and he did not want her seen.

The banyans near the Kalaram temple grew from the five the place is named for, people believe, and the temple itself is built on the ground where the three of them lived.

It was one of those mornings. They had bathed, come back, said the morning prayers, and Ram had sat down inside the hut to recite. And a woman came walking out of the trees.

She was Shurpanakha, Ravan’s sister. She roamed this forest the way she roamed everywhere, and she saw Ram before he saw her. She looked at him — the long arms, the big eyes, the matted hair piled on his head, the way he carried himself even in bark cloth, like the king’s son he was — and she wanted him, then and there.

She came up and asked him what he was doing here. Dressed like a sadhu, with his hair matted, but carrying a bow and arrows, and with a wife beside him, in a forest that belonged to rakshasas. What had brought him?

Ram told her the truth, all of it. My father was King Dasharath. I am his eldest son, Ram. This is my younger brother Lakshman, and this is my wife Sita, the daughter of the king of Videha. I am living in the forest because my father wished it. Now tell me who you are, because by the look of you, you are a rakshasi.

I am Shurpanakha, she said. I can take any shape I like. I wander this forest and everything in it is afraid of me. My brothers are Ravan, whom you must have heard of, and Kumbhakarna who is always asleep, and Vibhishan who is not like the rest of us, and Khara and Dushan who are great fighters. And I am stronger than all of them. I saw you and I want you for my husband. What is this Sita to you? Look at her, thin and plain. I will eat her right here in front of you, and your brother with her, and then you and I will go wherever we please, over the hills and through the whole Dandaka forest.

Ram smiled.

He answered her the way you answer someone you are not taking seriously. I already have a wife, he said, and a woman like you deserves a husband all to herself. But look at my brother here. He is young, he is handsome, and he has no wife with him in this forest. Go to him.

Lakshman had a wife, back in Ayodhya, and Ram knew it. He was teasing.

So she went to Lakshman, and Lakshman played along. What would a woman like you do with a servant like me, he said. I do whatever my brother tells me. Go back to him. He will happily leave that ugly, bad-tempered wife of his for you.

She did not hear the joke in it. What she heard was that the wife was the problem. She turned, and she went for Sita, who was sitting at the door of the hut, the way a falling star goes for the ground.

Ram caught hold of her. And the smile was gone. This is what comes of joking with cruel creatures, he said to Lakshman. Never play with them. Look, Sita is in danger. Cut her.

Lakshman drew his sword and cut off her nose and her ears.

She screamed and ran. She went howling through the forest with her arms up and the blood pouring down her, and she did not stop until she reached her brother Khara at Janasthan and fell on the ground in front of him and showed him her face.

Nashik places that morning not up at the hut but a little way down the river, in the forest where the rishis did their penance, Tapovan, where Ram also stayed and where Lakshman went for the fruit they lived on. The spot where she stood is marked, down at the water, and pilgrims are taken to it. Nasika is the nose. The place where Shurpanakha lost hers is called after it, and the town grew up round that place and took the name with it.

What that one morning started — Khara and his fourteen thousand, Shurpanakha in front of Ravan in Lanka, the golden deer, the empty hut — is told whole on Tapovan and Sita Gufa, and the Ramayana connection has all of it in one place.

The Godavari that runs through all of this starts a little way upstream, on Brahmagiri, the hill above the town of Trimbakeshwar, and there is a temple of Shiva there that people come to from all over the country. So the river reaches the banyans from a place that was already holy before the water got here. Ram bathed in it. Families still come to the same pool to do the rites for their dead. The bathing places along the bed of the river are counted and named, and the tirthas on the Godavari has them.

And once in about twelve years the Kumbh comes. Nashik is one of the four places in the whole country where it is held, and when it is Nashik’s turn the town fills up in a way it does not at any other time. The Vaishnav akhadas who arrive make their camp at Tapovan, in the same forest. The Shaiva and Udasin akhadas, and the naga sadhus among them, camp at Trimbakeshwar instead, and Sadhugram has both. Beside Ramkund there is a temple to the Godavari herself, the Ganga Godavari temple, with the image of the goddess inside it, and its door opens only at the Simhastha.

Almost all of it is in Panchavati, on the left bank, and you can walk it in a morning.

Start at the Kalaram temple, the temple of the black Ram, which is built on the ground where the hut was. Near it are the old banyans, very tall, and people will tell you they grew from the five. Sita Gufa is close by, a small opening at the foot of a narrow flight of steps, and you go down into it and find Ram, Sita and Lakshman inside. Then go down to the river. Ramkund is where the bank opens out, the pool cut into the stone with the steps going down into it, and this is where families sit with a priest at the water’s edge for the rites. Stand on the steps and look across, and you are looking at the place Agastya sent them to. Beside the pool is the Ganga Godavari temple.

Then go downstream along the same bank to Tapovan, where it is quieter and the trees come down close to the water. The marked spot where Shurpanakha stood is by the river, and next to it is the temple everyone calls the all-religion temple.

Of the older names, only Panchavati is still on the signboards.

Outside the town there are three more places. Ramshej is the hill to the north where Ram slept, people say, a hill with a fort on it, and most pilgrims do not go. Anjaneri is the hill on the way to Trimbak where Hanuman was born. And on the hill at the edge of the city, up a long flight of steps, are the caves cut into the rock a very long time ago for Buddhist monks. People call them Pandav Leni. Go up in the early morning, before it is hot, and turn round at the top. The whole town is below you, with the river going through it.