Pushkar

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The water sits in a bowl of low hills at the edge of the Thar, a sheet of it improbable against the dun of the desert, and a flight of stone steps falls to its margin from every side. Bells carry across it at dawn. Pilgrims wade in from the steps and tip the water over their heads, and behind them, on the rim, a temple lifts a red spire that is sought out for a reason that has nothing to do with how it looks. It is one of the very few houses on earth raised to the god who made the world.

That rarity is the whole gravity of the place. The labor of devotion in the land flowed, over the long centuries, to the preserver and to the destroyer — to Vishnu who keeps the worlds and to Shiva who unmakes them — and left the maker, the first of the three, with almost no temple anywhere that is his. The lake of Pushkar holds the exception. Here the creator did his work, and here, by the telling, he was bound to the one shrine he kept.

The lotus that made the lake

The geography is exact and unembellished. Pushkar lies in the district of Ajmer in central Rajasthan, around 26.49 degrees north and 74.55 degrees east, set in a hollow of the Aravalli foothills some ten kilometers over a ridge from the city of Ajmer itself. The lake is the center of everything: a managed body of water fed by monsoon runoff and ringed, in its present form, by fifty-two stone ghats — bathing-steps named after the kings and patrons who built them — and overlooked by something on the order of five hundred temples. Of these, one is the reason the rest are there.

Inside the frame of the tradition, the lake was not dug but dropped. The creator — Brahma in the later theology, the maker of the worlds — looked for a place on the earth fit for his great sacrifice, the fire-rite by which the cosmos is set going and sustained. To find the spot he let fall a lotus from his hand. Where the flower struck, water welled out of the ground; and because the petals scattered, the welling came in three places, so that there are properly three Pushkar lakes — Jyeshtha, the eldest, Madhya, the middle, and Kanishtha, the youngest. From the lotus comes the name. The Sanskrit pushpa, “flower,” joined to kar, “hand,” gives Pushkar, the place of the flower in the hand of the maker. A second strand of the same myth gives the lotus a harder edge: the petals fell as Brahma struck down a demon with the flower as a weapon, and the lakes opened where they landed. Either way the water is held to be the creator’s own, not native to the desert but called up out of it by a single deliberate act.

The site is among the oldest the tradition names. The lake is counted one of the five sacred lakes, the Panch-Sarovar, and it carries the title tirtha-raja — king of pilgrimage-grounds — a rank claimed by very few crossing-places. The word tirtha is itself worth pausing on: it means a ford, a place where one crosses, and in the sacred geography of the land it came to mean a place where the crossing is between worlds, where the bank one steps onto is not the one across the water but the far shore of the self. A tirtha-raja is the foremost of these crossings. Pushkar shares that superlative with Prayag, the triple-confluence far to the east where three rivers meet; that two places both wear the title is no contradiction in a tradition that lets sanctity be local and absolute at once. The older books speak of Pushkar by name: it appears in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana and in the Padma Purana as an adi tirtha, an original or first ford, a place to which the rite of the creator already belonged when the texts were composed. To bathe here, the same books hold, brings the merit of fire-sacrifices performed across centuries — the water doing in a single immersion what generations of yajna would otherwise require.

That equation is older than the temple and runs deep in the grammar of the tradition. The fire-sacrifice was the central act of the historical Vedic religion — the rite by which the priesthood fed the gods, ordered the year, and kept the world turning, an act understood not as petition but as cosmic maintenance. A lake that can substitute for centuries of that labor is making an enormous claim: that the place itself does, by its mere water, what the most demanding ritual machinery of the culture was built to do. Pushkar makes the claim because of whose lake it is held to be. The water is the creator’s; to enter it is to enter the medium of the first sacrifice, the one from which all the others descend.

The ghats of Pushkar Lake, the fifty-two flights of bathing-steps that ring the water. Photograph by Gerd Eichmann, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

It is worth keeping the layers apart. The founding story — the lotus, the three welling lakes, the creator’s choice of ground — is Puranic, drawn from the later mythological corpus and not from the oldest hymns. The hymns of the Rigveda, composed roughly between 1500 and 1200 BCE and preserved through centuries of disciplined recitation, do not know Brahma the creator-god of the temple. What they know instead is Prajapati, “the lord of creatures” — and the road from one to the other runs through the lake.

The creator with no other house

Prajapati stands in the late Rigveda as the maker, the one from whom the worlds issue. The famous hymn of the golden germ, Rigveda 10.121, asks after the god who arose first from the cosmic waters as Hiranyagarbha, the golden embryo afloat on the deep, holding all that is — and the tradition reads that arising as Prajapati’s. The creator there is not a comfortable figure: in the priestly books that follow the hymns, Prajapati makes the world by an act that empties him out, a self-expending sacrifice that leaves the maker undone and in need of being put back together by the very rite he founded. He is the yajna before he is anything else — sacrifice in the form of a person.

In the post-Vedic age this Prajapati was identified with Brahma, and Brahma inherited the office: four-faced, lotus-born, the first member of the later triad with Vishnu and Shiva. The merger is one of the clearest cases in the whole development of the tradition of an older divine name being folded into a newer figure — the abstract Vedic lord of creatures becoming the personal creator of the Puranas, the golden-egg cosmology of the hymn recast as Brahma emerging from Hiranyagarbha on the primal sea. The temple at Pushkar is the rare place where that inherited creator is given a standing house.

There is a further subtlety in the name itself. Brahma the creator is a masculine personal god, four-faced and lotus-borne; he is not to be confused with brahman, the neuter absolute of the Upanishads, the impersonal ground of being that underlies all the gods and is sought by the path of knowledge that later philosophy — the schools of Vedanta — would make its highest object. The two words share a root and a family of meaning, the swelling, growing power at the source of things, but they name very different objects of regard. The temple at Pushkar is dedicated to the person, not the principle — to the god one stands before, not the ground one dissolves into. This may itself help account for the loneliness of his cult. A tradition that increasingly located its ultimate not in a creator-person but in the impersonal absolute had less need of a temple to the one who began the world, and the office of beginning, once performed, does not repeat. The maker’s work is done; the keeper’s and the unmaker’s go on. Devotion followed the gods whose work continues.

And here the tradition turns on its own strangeness, and offers a story to explain it. Brahma, the telling runs, came to Pushkar to perform his fire-sacrifice — the rite for which he had made the lake — and for the rite he needed his consort beside him at the fire, as the offering requires a wife. His first consort, Savitri, was not ready at the appointed hour. The auspicious moment could not be let pass, so Brahma took a local cowherd girl, Gayatri, made her his wife on the spot, and seated her at the fire to complete the offering. Savitri arrived to find another woman in her place. In her anger she laid a curse on her husband: that he should be worshipped nowhere on earth but here, at Pushkar, and nowhere else have a temple of his own. Gayatri, by some tellings, softened it — but only to confirm that the one place would be this one. The myth is Puranic, told most fully in the Padma Purana, and it does a precise double work: it accounts at once for the existence of the temple and for its loneliness, for why the maker of the world has a shrine here and almost nowhere besides.

The Jagatpita Brahma Mandir at Pushkar, one of the rare temples on earth dedicated to the creator-god. Photograph by V. Vasant, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The shrine that holds this office is the Jagatpita Brahma Mandir — “temple of the world-father.” Its present structure is a stone building of the fourteenth century CE, marble-floored, raised on a stepped platform and crowned by a red pinnacle; the tradition pushes its origin much further back and credits the sage Vishvamitra with its first making, with a renovation laid to Adi Shankara in the eighth century. Inside sits a four-headed marble image of the creator, his consort beside him. The bird of the building is the hamsa, the goose or swan that is Brahma’s mount, worked into its ornament. That it is one of very few temples to Brahma anywhere is the documented and repeated claim — the most prominent house of the creator on earth, even where it is no longer quite the only one. The worshipper here is doing something the land otherwise gives almost no occasion to do: standing before the god who made the world, in the one place the world keeps for him.

The full moon and the camels

What gathers at Pushkar gathers in autumn, at the full moon of the month of Kartik — Kartik Purnima, falling across late October and November. The bathing on that night is the heart of it. The pilgrim descends the steps into the lake and immerses, and the water is held to carry off the deepest stains, the sins that ordinary washing cannot reach; the full-moon bath in the creator’s own lake is the immersion the older books rank above years of sacrifice. For this the fifty-two ghats fill. Pilgrims circle the water, light lamps at its edge, and climb to the red spire on the rim to stand before the four-faced image.

Around this religious core, over the centuries, a second thing grew up. The herders of Rajasthan — the camel-keepers, the cattle-drovers, the horse-traders — brought their animals to Pushkar in the same season, until the pilgrimage and the market became a single event. The Pushkar Fair, the Kartik Mela, is now one of the largest livestock gatherings in Asia and one of the most concentrated pilgrim gatherings in the desert at once. In the days of the fair the town of some fifteen thousand swells toward two hundred thousand people, with tens of thousands of camels, horses, and cattle driven in over the sand from across the region. The two registers run side by side and do not cancel each other: the trader haggling over a decorated camel and the pilgrim wading into the lake at moonrise are at the same fair, and have been for a very long time.

Camels brought to the Pushkar Fair, the autumn gathering that is market and pilgrimage at once. Photograph by Sudipta Dutta Chowdhury, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The lake itself has had a harder history than its sanctity suggests. A desert tank fed by seasonal rain is a fragile thing. Pushkar has silted and shrunk and been dredged and refilled across the generations; conservation has meant de-silting, de-weeding, treatment of the inflow, and planting against erosion on the slopes around it. In a bad year it can fail outright — during the 2009 fair the lake dried entirely, and water had to be trucked in and held in concrete tanks so the pilgrims could perform their bathing at all. The crossing-place that the texts call the king of pilgrimage-grounds is, in plain terms, a body of water that has to be kept alive by hand.

The ghats at Pushkar during dredging — the desert tank requires constant de-silting to survive. Photograph by Pierre André Leclercq, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons.

There is a long quiet behind the noise of the fair. The creator of the older theology — Prajapati, the lord of creatures who spent himself making the world and had to be reassembled out of his own sacrifice — was, in the Rigveda, scarcely an object of cult at all, more a principle than a person to be approached. When that creator became Brahma and acquired a face and a consort and a swan, he gained a biography but almost no following; the devotion of the land had already gone elsewhere, to the gods who keep and unmake rather than to the one who began. The temple above this lake is the rare visible seat of that beginning — a house for the maker in a tradition that, having received the world from him, turned its worship toward what the world became. The water keeps his sacrifice the way a name keeps a memory, and once a year, at the full moon, the desert comes down to the steps to stand in it.

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