What is Brahmagiri?

This is the story the Gautami Mahatmya tells of how the hill got its name, and it is Brahma himself telling it.

In the beginning there was the water, and out of the water a lotus, and Brahma was born on the lotus. He could see nothing. The earth and the wind and the sky and the fire were there before him, and nothing else — no living thing, no Vedas, not even the lotus he had been born on. He kept quiet, and out of the sky a voice spoke to him. Create the universe, it said. Everything that moves and everything that stands still.

How, said Brahma. With what? Perform a sacrifice, said the voice. A यज्ञ yajna is an offering made into a fire. There is nothing a man who performs the sacrifice cannot do, in this world or the next. Then where shall I perform it, said Brahma, and with what? And there was nowhere yet. There was no Ganga then and no Narmada, no Yamuna, no Tapi, no Sarasvati, no Godavari. There was no sea, no river, no lake, no pool. The voice said, south of Meru, south of the Himalaya, south of the Vindhya, south of the Sahya, is the land of holy rites. Go there.

So Brahma left Meru and came south, and stood in the new land and thought, where shall I sit? Go this way, said the voice. Stay this side. Sit here, alone. Decide to do the sacrifice, and it will be finished.

He sat down, and the Vedas came into his mouth by themselves, and he understood them, and he remembered the hymn of creation. He made the vessels the hymn calls for. And the place where he sat, made clean and ready, is called by his name — Brahmagiri.

He laid out his altar from the hill a long way to the east, and lit the three fires on it. A sacrifice cannot be finished without a wife, so he split his body in two, and one half became his wife and the other half was himself. He made the seasons his offerings — the spring was the ghee, the summer the twigs, the autumn the offering itself, and the rains were कुश kusha, the stiff grass also called darbha. The Vedas were the fences round the fire. Time, which has no beginning and no end, was the post. But a sacrifice needs something tied to the post, and there was nothing alive to tie to it. Brahma said so, and the voice said, praise the first Person with the hymn. He did, and then he saw who was to be tied to the post — the first Person himself, his own father, the one he had been praising — and he tied him there, and the Person stood in front of him.

And out of that Person the whole universe came. The gods came out of his mouth, the wind out of his breath, the four directions out of his ears, the sky out of his head, the moon out of his mind and the sun out of his eye, the earth, the rishis out of the pores of his skin, the herbs out of his hair, the animals wild and tame, and the people. It is finished, said the voice. Now put everything into the fire. Brahma made the offering into the three fires, and Vishnu himself was in them, white in one, dark in another and gold in the third. The place of that sacrifice is the Dandaka forest, the forest that runs east from the hill, and the three fire-pits are there even now.

A परिक्रमा parikrama is the walk round a holy thing — a temple, a hill, a river — keeping it on your right hand the whole way, and the parikrama of Brahmagiri is the walk round this hill. The Śiva Purāṇa has how it began: when the cow had fallen in Gautama’s field, the rishis told him that to be clean he must go round this mountain a hundred and one times, or eleven times and then bathe in the Ganga, and he did, and that is where the walk comes from. The jyotirling at Trimbakeshwar tells the whole of Gautama’s story.

The walk is kept. Among the people the temple keeps for its work — the priests for the three pujas, the man who sweeps the road down to Kushavarta — are two devotees whose work is to walk round Brahmagiri. Where that establishment came from is on the Peshwas and the temple.

There is a fort on top of Brahmagiri. In 1742 the Marathas took it from the Nizam. In 1818 it went to the British, and today it is the Government of India’s. On the north side four hundred steps have been built up to the fort, paid for by a donor from Karachi, Lalchand Sheth.

When it went to the British, the fort sat behind a wall of rock two to four hundred feet high that went all the way round the hill, and there were only two ways in. The main gate was on the south, with one gateway inside another for a long way in. The north gate was a single gate at the top of a stair of nearly three hundred steps cut into the rock, wide enough for one person at a time, with grooves cut beside the steps to hold on by, because from halfway up it was dangerous to look back down the cliff. The storehouses and most of the houses of the garrison were cut into the rock too, and at the foot of the cliff, near the way up to the north gate, was an old village in ruins.

The way up is on foot. A flight of stone steps goes up the face of the hill from the town to Gangadwar, the cave temple where the water of the Godavari first shows herself, and the source of the Godavari has that climb and what was at the top of it. The steps to the fort go up from the north side. There are paths along the hill to caves where sadhus sat, and people walk them.

Brahmagiri is not the only hill. Two more, Nilagiri and Kalagiri, close the bowl the town sits in, and Nilparvat is close by. An अखाड़ा akhada is an order of sadhus with its own head, its own rule, its own property and its own place in the bathing order at a Kumbh, and at the last Kumbh some of the akhadas camped on Nilparvat and below it, and the seven Shaiva akhadas has the camps. Along the road back towards Nashik is Anjaneri, the hill with Hanuman’s mother’s name, and from the top of Brahmagiri you can see it. Down in the town, Kushavarta is where the river comes back out of the hill, and the Trimbakeshwar temple is a short walk from the kund.