SA Travel Diaries: Baijnath Temple, Kangra, Himachal Pradesh by Shriya Gautam

You'd think one won't be covering a Temple when one's first cousin is getting married! 

Wrong!

In the heart of my heart, I always knew that I took an off from supervising SAV India for this wedding, only because it was being held 10 minutes away from the Ancient Temple of Baijnath.

You'd think a ten hour long drive on a topsy-turvy road, that included meandering our way through many village roads would be enough to exhaust anyone!

The Baijnath Temple, Kangra,Himachal Pradesh, North India

Oh, so wrong, again!

There we were, in a hotel overlooking Binwa River, appropriately named Hotel Binwa View, and while my family was busy reuniting for the wedding, congratulating the groom, trying dresses on and discussing the events, but more importantly, resting, yours truly spent the better half of the night, talking to the man at the concierge, to the devout Aunt, to the encyclopaediac Uncle, gathering information on the site, which I was determined to visit the first thing in the morning.

Two hours later, I had the preliminary information charted out and shared with the Volunteers as well as the other panelists.  It was enough to go on, considering how little people know of anything in relation to Kangra. It's a downright shame, too, because Kangra Sculptures can give any ancient school of sculpture a serious run for their trade! 

Unfortunately, Baijnath's history is no exception and much of what I could gather, was an amalgamation of one myth with another, topped up with a parallel eponymous site in the state of Uttrakhand, making me resign to the fact that nothing I had on Baijnath Temple at that moment, was factual, except for the coordinates! 

Sweet Binwa, run softly, till I end my song (or rather, in this case, my site report, which was just two pages of nonsense until I would actually see the site in question!).

March 4, 2016

10:00 am: It's impossible to extricate yourself from a hotel reserved for a family wedding and if you're an elusive wedding guest like me, everyone ( and I mean EVERYONE) wants to see you, hug you, slobber all over you with kisses, tell you that you're next, admonish you for saying you like being single, mistake archaeology for architecture and make jokes about grave-digging and         ghost-catching when you explain to them it's only the buried houses or old ones you'd ever concern yourself with.

Long story short, I was more than glad to get away from the hotel and make my way to the temple. Luckily, in a family of Brahmins, no one suspects an archaeologist to be "working" when (s) he lets slip that (s)he would be in a temple for the better part of the day. Rather, I left a few relatives misty-eyed with elevated, relieved spirits.

"Finally, there's hope for this girl! "

"I was worried her time in England would turn her from the agnostic she was before, to a complete atheist. Such a relief she's made peace with the Lord!"

Could it get any better? Not only was I allowed to escape the noise and get back to work, my workaholism was being approved of as, quite literally, a Divine Blessing!

Now, it was only a matter of getting there. I was worse than a child on Christmas night! I couldn't sit still in the car, my father couldn't drive faster, I couldn't walk swifter until finally — we were there!

The Temple Complex is a typical Nagara Style, facing North-South, with two entry points: the one on the East (accesible  independently as well as via South) and a false entrance from the West, accessible if you enter from the South. I, obviously,  took the longer one, walking all the way round the tank towards the East until finally entering through a balcony with magnificent carvings and pillars.

It's impossible to cover the whole temple in a day, or for that matter in a lifetime, because each sculpture, on every column, in every corner of the temple, has a million stories to tell.

The broken ones are locked up within the temple in a barred room near the eastern entrance, and the ones intact take your breath away!

I didn't just photograph Baijnath, I also wrote a complete site report with maps and diagrams and yet, at the end of the day, it felt like doing just 1% of the job, even though I had two other people photographing and interviewing the Temple Priest (who also happened to be an Archaeological Survey In-charge).

Baijnath Temple is much more than the 13th century Temple built by two merchant brothers, who found a pot of gold, at the site where Ravan, the legendary Demon-King of Sri Lanka, supposedly sacrificed his head ten times for Lord Shiva, the Hindu God of Death.

No, Baijnath is essentially poetry in stone, that no historical study, archaeological investigation or mythological story can ever translate to paper! It's ancient, romantic, secular, religious, even erotic —all at the same time! And you don't have to be an archaeologists or a devotee to visit it!

John Donne would have loved it the same way as Callimachus or Da Vinci.

Landscape Archaeologists, Object Analysts, Visual Culture students and Scholars of Indic Religions would have loved it all the same.

I spent half a day at Baijnath Temple, dedicated to the Healing Shiva, Lord of the Physicians (Vaidyanath, in Hindi and hence the name of the Temple), listening to the chants of the priests over the gurgling song of Binwa River (originally called Binduka), watching devotees pray, tourists photograph and wondering how I fit in on this site —half a poet, half an archaeologist, a vagabond shuttling between India and England —trying to make sense of something which was an architectural marvel, an archaeological puzzle, a piece of poetry in stone but above all, a place where thousands flocked to seek peace and talk to God daily.

Maybe, you just can't peel off the layers of Baijnath Temple like onion skins. Maybe there are too many layers. Maybe they all make sense together, when viewed as a whole and not in isolation.  Maybe, that's true for everything archaeological or, for that matter, human! Maybe, I'd never know and maybe, that's what brought me such inexplicable, infinite peace!