Kheer Bhawani: Kashmir's Colour-Changing Sacred Spring

Twenty-five kilometres north-east of Srinagar, where the Sind River soaks down through soft alluvial soil, there is a village the old texts said was not quite solid ground. Dig a hole at Tulmul, people say, and you will find fish swimming in the water below. The name itself whispers it — from tula - cotton, and mula - worth: the place of cotton-soft earth, a floating island between water and land. And it was here, on ground that is half water, that the Great Queen chose to make her home.

 

She did not choose a temple. She chose a spring. The white marble shrine you see today, rising from the middle of the water like a pearl in a shell, came late — barely a century ago. The Goddess herself is older than any building: she is the spring, a seven-sided pool that flows from west to east along the path of the sun and changes colour with her moods. Milky blue when she is at peace. Green when she is turned inward. Rose and gold in seasons of change. And black — black when something terrible is coming. When the British commissioner Walter Lawrence stood here in 1886 and saw the water tinged violet, the locals told him it darkened before famine and plague; he called Tulmul perhaps the most sacred place in all Kashmir.

 

They call her Ragnya Devi, Maharajni, Kheer Bhawani** — the Queen, the Great Queen, the Goddess of Milk. She is the kuladevi, the family deity, of the Kashmiri Pandits: the one they have turned to whenever the world grew dark. And in Kashmir, the world has grown dark many times.

 

The journey from Lanka

 

Her story, like so many, begins with Ravana. The demon-king of Lanka was a ferocious devotee; he worshipped the Goddess as Shyama - the Dark One, and, pleased by his penance, she graced his island with her presence. But when Ravana stole Sita and dragged the world into war, she would not stay in his kingdom. She asked Hanuman to carry her away — and he bore her north, together with three hundred and sixty serpent-spirits, the nagas, all the way to Kashmir, and set her down at Tulmul. She was fond of kheer- rice simmered in milk; and so kheer is what her people have offered her ever since.

 

Those serpents never left. The spring is theirs — which is why its water carries its own name, Syandh, set apart from the ordinary river nearby. And here the oldest thread of Kashmir ties itself in a knot: the nagas were the first inhabitants of the valley, back when it was the lake Satisar, and when the sage Kashyapa drained the waters to make dry land, he promised them their sacred springs forever. Verinag, where the Vitasta is born, is one. Kheer Bhawani, the Pandits say, is the greatest of them all.

 

Shiva and Shakti in one spring

 

There is something at Tulmul you will find almost nowhere else. Within the sacred pool stands not only the Goddess but a Shiva lingam beside her — god and goddess, Shiva and Shakti, worshipped together in a single body of water. In a valley whose oldest philosophy, Trika, holds that the masculine and feminine are finally one, the seven-sided spring is that idea made visible: seven sides for the seven centres of the subtle body, a mandala drawn in water — the Goddess's own geometry.

 

Lost, and found by a snake

 

The spring was not always here to be seen. Kalhana's twelfth-century chronicle remembers that floods once drowned the shrine at Tulmul and swallowed it into the marsh, and for ages the very place was lost. Then a Srinagar yogi, Krishna Pandit Taploo, dreamed the Goddess to him. She would reveal herself, she said, by swimming as a snake; he must take a boat from Shadipora, follow the serpent, and mark where it dived. He did exactly that — and where the snake went under, the sacred spring rose again.

 

For centuries after, pilgrims poured milk and sugar into the water until the offerings silted the pool. And when at last the debris was cleared to raise the modern temple, the workers found, at the bottom, the ruins of the ancient shrine— carved slabs, images of the Goddess — waiting beneath the weight of all that devotion. She had never really gone.

 

"Do you protect Me?"

 

In the autumn of 1898, Swami Vivekananda left his companions with orders not to follow, and came here alone for nearly a week. Each day he made the fire-offering and gave the Goddess kheer; each morning he worshipped a small Brahmin girl as Uma Kumari, the Goddess in the form of a child. But grief gnawed at him. Standing among the marks of centuries of destruction, he thought that, had he lived then, he would have laid down his life to stop the temple's desecration.

 

And the Mother answered him. What was it to him, she asked, if unbelievers defiled her image? "Do you protect Me, or do I protect you?" He never forgot it. The Goddess who makes and unmakes universes has no need of a mortal's defence — the devotee serves not because she requires it, but because the service remakes the devotee. He left Tulmul, by his own account, a changed man.

 

The colours of warning

 

The water turned black in 1990. That year an insurgency emptied the valley of its Pandits — more than three hundred and fifty thousand people driven from the land of their ancestors in a matter of months, scattered across India. A community that had worshipped at this spring since before Kashmir kept records was, almost overnight, gone.

 

Almost. For at Kheer Bhawani, something held. The priests refused to leave — through every threat, they stayed at the spring. Soldiers came to guard the island; pilgrims began, cautiously, to return, first in escorted convoys through a hostile valley, then in growing numbers. And a quiet, remarkable thing began to happen at the yearly gathering: local Muslim neighbours came too — not to watch, but to line up and offer kheer to the returning Hindu families, to help, to welcome them home. In one of the most divided places on earth, the Milk Goddess still draws that out of people.

 

How to stand at Kheer Bhawani

 

Come, if you can, for the mela on Jyeshtha Ashtami, in late May or June — after Amarnath, the largest gathering of Hindus in Kashmir. This, tradition says, is the day the Goddess returns to Tulmul from the shrines where she dwells the rest of the year, and the water shifts colour to mark her coming. Families who flew in from across the world camp on grass mats beneath the vast Chinar trees, the air sweet with milk and incense.

 

Take off your shoes. Walk the smooth stones around the spring, as the barefoot do. Pour your kheer into the water; drop a sugar candy, scatter a few flowers and aromatic leaves. Then stand at the rail and look down — and notice the colour of the pool. That colour is the oldest news in Kashmir: the mood of a goddess who has been reading the valley's fate, and holding her people's fear and hope, for longer than anyone can name.

 

Look, and let the water tell you how Kashmir is.