Keeping (in) Touch: Humans,Gods and Environment in the Western Himalaya

Floods

In August and September 2025, exceptionally heavy monsoon rains triggered devastating floods and landslides across northern India and eastern Pakistan, displacing over 1.5 million people and causing significant loss of life. In the North Indian Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh, the districts of Mandi, Shimla and the Kullu Valley were among the worst affected. Old Manali, a village in the upper Kullu Valley near the town of Manali, was likewise severely impacted. The village where I have lived for several years, and which I have visited repeatedly over the past three decades, suffered extensive damage. The Manalsu stream swelled dramatically, partially collapsing the bridge that connects the village to the tourist hub of Manali and National Highway 3. A large section of the riverbank was washed away by the gushing waters, sweeping away shops, restaurants, bike rentals and other businesses. Fortunately, because the river rose during the daytime, residents were able to escape and no lives were lost. A staircase leading to the temple of the locally revered and nationally renowned Goddess Haḍimbā was also destroyed when the massive rock on which it stood fell into the river. ‘It was great luck’, villagers later told me. As the rock plunged into the water, it slightly diverted the river’s flow, saving the nearby forest from being washed away and likely preventing the river from reaching Manali’s Mall Road. No one wanted to imagine what the consequences of that would have been.

Dev Bhūmi: The Land of Gods

The Western Himalaya in general, and the Kullu Valley in particular, are widely known in India as Dev Bhūmi, ‘the Land of Gods’. The regional stream of Hinduism practiced here, sometimes referred to as Pahāṛī or mountain Hinduism, is marked by several key features. It centres on the worship of local goddesses and gods enshrined in hundreds of village temples throughout the region. Each of these devīs and devtās has a designated medium, locally known as chelā or gur, who is believed to channel the deities during oracular sessions, thereby serving as their mouthpieces. Many of the local deities also manifest in movable forms known as rathas, palanquin-like structures that are carried on the shoulders of devotees. These colourful and vibrant vehicles are believed to embody the devtās, and their movements are understood to be directed and controlled by the gods themselves.

Another key element in Pahāṛī religion is that the local devīs and devtās are understood to maintain close connections with the surrounding natural environment. These connections fall into two main categories: stewardship and intervention. First, the devtās are believed to promote the protection of the environment and the preservation of its purity and well-being. This may take different forms. Ramachandra Guha, for example, notes that in Kumaon, religion has been instrumental in protecting natural resources: ‘Often, hilltops were dedicated to local deities and the trees around the spot regarded with great respect’ (Guha, 2000, p. 29). Guha further notes that sacred groves help naturalize deodar plantations, which have ‘an obvious functional role in stabilizing water flows and preventing landslides’ (Guha, 2000, p. 30). Peter Suterland, to take another example, notes that through oracular consultations, devtās intervene in various aspects of their devotees’ everyday lives, one of which is the distribution of ‘grazing and irrigation rights’, thereby regulating this dimension of human engagement with the environment (Sutherland, 2006, p. 101). In Uttarakhand, as Gerrit Lange shows, cobra-shaped nāgas, who ‘are said to inhabit and protect alpine springs and mountain lakes’ (Lange, 2018, p. 363) function as guardians of water sources.

A salient example comes from the Kullu Valley. In recent years, local deities have played a key role in averting the grandiose ski village project that was about to transform high-altitude grazing commons into a massive luxury resort complex, threatening local biodiversity and the region’s fragile hydrological balance. Daniela Berti describes the grand assembly of deities (jagti pūch) that was convened in this regard in 2006. She quotes a report of this multi-deity oracular consultation that appeared in an article in Down to Earth: ‘God after god spoke and made it clear that they did not want the ski village in the area since it would desecrate holy places. They warned the people that if the project was approved, the gods would leave and destroy the area’ (Berti, 2015, p. 8). ¹ Indeed, we should note that much of this divine stewardship of nature is often geared towards regulating resources for human social and agricultural needs, and that we should therefore be cautious about uncritically treating it as straightforward environmentalism primarily directed at ecological preservation. However, the outcome is often quite similar, in its portrayal of nature as requiring careful engagement, which is governed and secured by divine agents.

Second, as also attested in Berti’s quote above, the devtās are thought to possess the power to intervene in environmental processes and to occasionally hold off rain or snowfall, bring about floods or employ other measures. The deities are understood to resort to such dramatic interventions when conveying a strict message that might otherwise be ignored by their followers. William Sax and Lokesh Ohri show that in recent years Himalayan devtās—such as Jamlu of Malana, Tunganath of Uttarakhand and Shiva at Kedarnath—have been perceived to consistently and increasingly resist development projects considered environmentally harmful. The authors describe how natural catastrophes have been popularly attributed to these local deities, whose realms are understood to have been polluted and desecrated by the construction of hydroelectric dams, tourist facilities and road infrastructure (Sax & Ohri, forthcoming). ²

Such perceptions are also found in the Kullu Valley, as reflected in my conversation with Raju, a villager from Old Manali, who reflected on the causes of dramatic environmental events:

Last year [in 2022] there was a big flood. Many said: ‘The devtās are angry—they did it!’ Others said it was done by nature … As for nature, we have narrowed the river streams, we have altered their course, we have done damage. So nature works against us. As for the gods, they too can punish us for our misbehavior towards nature. I mean, the positive and negative [actions of god] are all mixed up. Sometimes God supports us, but he can punish us as well. ³

Many others in the valley also attributed the 2025 floods to divine intervention. A common view held that the disaster was retribution for cutting down trees near the temple of Bijli Mahadev, one of the Kullu Valley’s most prominent deities. The clearing, carried out in connection with a planned tourist ropeway to the deity’s remote and elevated temple, has generated much resentment in the valley, and villagers have hinted at improper economic interests behind the contested project. They said the floods were a warning from the God not to proceed with the construction, as it would further compromise the temple’s natural surroundings and its relative isolation. ⁴

Many villagers also pointed out that following the floods, Goddess Haḍimbā announced through her oracle that visits to several sacred lakes and water sources in the surrounding mountains were henceforth prohibited. Locals explained that tourists who trek to these places are unaware of their sacrality and, as a result, pollute or otherwise desecrate them. Here is Raju again:

The lakes are sacred. When locals go there, they know that. You shouldn’t bathe in them, you should keep them clean, you shouldn’t eat meat there. At first, when tourists started going there, they went with local guides, who explained all this to them. But today, you have Google Maps, so people go alone. They bring chicken and packed meat. They misbehave. So the flood was a warning [cetāvanī]: ‘Preserve the purity of these places.’ Not just Haḍimbā said it; other devtās said it too. This had happened before, in 1988, when the river flooded the bridge. It also happened in 1995. ⁵

Ashok, a villager in his late twenties from Old Manali, agreed and offered a rather blunt example of such tourists’ misconduct. ‘See’, he said, showing me an image he had captured on his phone, ‘trekkers even left a makeshift toilet seat near Bhrgu Lake’, an especially sacred site high in the mountains. ‘This is how clueless they are’, he said. ⁶

Accordingly, the ban imposed by Haḍimbā on visiting the lakes is perceived as a measure intended to restrict access and preserve the purity of the surrounding area’s natural water sources. As such, it simultaneously reveals and reinforces the association in the valley between the treatment of the environment, the forces of nature and the gods—as regulators of both. In the villagers’ view, people do not respect the natural environment and continue to encroach upon it, which eventually triggers floods. These are seen as either nature’s or the devtās’ way of doing some ‘cleanup’, or sāf karnā, as locals often describe such events.

In a 2017 publication titled Winds of Change, I showed that the association of the devtās with the natural environment, and the degree of control they are thought to have over it, do not go unchallenged. The spread of global ecological disturbances, along with the growing awareness of the science behind climate change, has shaken local environmental worldview (Halperin, 2017). Still, as I argued in that paper and as I have observed since, residents of the Kullu Valley continue to ascribe great agency to their gods in the regulation, protection and, when necessary, manipulation of the environment as part of their efforts to keep it from harm. In what follows, I explore the mechanisms through which the intimate association between local deities and the environment is constituted and maintained in everyday life. I argue that while this association rests on local theology and belief, it is even more deeply anchored in practice. To a large extent, it is through material ritual performances that the relationship between the gods and the environment is constituted, experienced and sustained.

Material Religion

In Mediation and the Genesis of Presence, a widely cited 2012 publication, Birgit Meyer argues that much of religious studies has been shaped by what she calls a ‘mentalistic approach’. This approach privileges ‘the “inside”—concepts, ideas, beliefs, worldviews—above the “outside”—rituals, objects, pictures, and so on’. Rooted in enlightenment and protestant legacies, this approach views ‘the essence of religion … [as] located “inside” people, while the “outside” manifestations, e.g. rituals, creeds, and religious institutions, were held to be secondary’ (Meyer, 2012, pp. 8–9). In Meyer’s view, religious studies have largely preferred to treat ritual as a mere reflection or expression of an underlying system of beliefs and meanings, rather than an active site for their very production. Challenging this bias in her publication, Meyer instead called for a material approach to the study of religion that acknowledges the centrality of practices and objects to religious life and the generation of experience and meaning within it. In particular, she is interested in how matter is essential to mediating a sense of what is otherwise absent and inaccessible, namely, divine presence. Meyer is not alone. Over the past two decades, a growing number of scholars, such as David Morgan, Robert Orsi and Tanya Luhrmann, have turned their attention to the material, embodied and performative aspects of religious practice, and to their essential role in shaping religious worldviews and ways of being (Luhrmann, 2020; Morgan, 2005; Orsi, 2016).

Narrative Associations

We will employ this perspective shortly, but before doing so, let us retain for a moment the mentalistic approach. Let us first look at the ways in which the association between the devtās and the natural environment is constituted in the Kullu Valley conceptually, through written and oral narratives, theological statements and religious notions circulating in everyday conversations. In doing so, we soon realize that the association of the devtās with the surrounding environment appears frequently and explicitly across all these sources. Origin stories of local deities are a case in point. Here is one such story about the emergence of the gods of a village named Goshal:

Once, a mute boy from the Lud family was plowing his field. At one place, his plow got stuck on a stone. When the boy attempted to forcefully dislodge the plow, a voice suddenly spoke: ‘We are the gods Gautam Rishi, Ved Vyas, and Kanchan Nag’. The mute boy became frightened. He returned to the village and, with his hands, signaled to the people to follow him to the field. There, as he again tried to dislodge the plow, the voice repeated: ‘We are the gods Gautam Rishi, Ved Vyas, and Kanchan Nag.’ The villagers dug at that spot and discovered a three-headed statue. They built a temple for these gods at that very place, and later a palanquin, shared by the three of them (Vaśiṣṭh, 1996).

This origin story explicitly associates the devtās with the land. The deities emerge from the soil, as if born from the earth when it is cut open by the ploughing boy. Similar narratives abound, recounting how devtās appear from other natural elements as well. In summarizing key themes in such origin tales Sutherland makes similar observations. Divine power (śakti), he notes, is often said to appear

in mountain lakes … in the wilderness of the high-altitude pastures … where shepherds graze their flocks … in forest-lakes where hunters chase game, and cowherds graze their cattle; and in fields where ploughmen till the earth … śakti spontaneously materializes in the form of a ‘self-generated image’ (utpati mūrtī), which is discovered by a shepherd, cowherd or ploughman. (Sutherland, 1998, p. 64)

The association of devtās with the surrounding natural elements is often mentioned in oral conversations as well. Yoginīs, for example, are regarded by villagers as divine beings who dwell in the wilderness—in the high jungles, on mountaintops and near water sources. While chatting with Anup, a drummer from Old Manali, he explained, ‘Jogini is a forest devī.… She lives in the forest. In the wind. Most of all she lives in the trees. She doesn’t have a mūrtī. She is like the wind. Natural.’ ⁷ Dani Devta too is a deity closely associated with the uninhabited landscape. Considered the guardian god of shepherds, he is often thought to reside in the forests just above the villages. As Dasi Devi, an elderly woman from Old Manali, explained, ‘When women go to the forest to collect wood or grass, they say the name of Dani Devta out loud or in their hearts, to ask for his protection.’ ⁸ For this woman, as for her fellow female villagers, the association of Dani Devta with the forest is thus continuously renewed as they venture through his domain on a regular basis. Interestingly, the devtās themselves make theological statements concerning their intimate affinity with the unsettled landscape. Communicating with their devotees through possessed chelās, the gods often scold villagers for their misbehaviour. They warn their followers that if they do not amend their wrong ways, then the gods will leave them and return to the forests from which they originally came. Such examples abound, as similar associations between the devtās and the environment frequently appear in local myths, everyday conversations and other narrative forms.

However, as noted above, narrative and verbal articulations are not the only sites where theological associations are formed. Rituals and other religious performances are also pivotal. Responding to Meyer’s call, we should treat ritual performances not as merely symbolic reflections of belief but as primary means of its constitution. Scholars contributing to the growing field of material religion contend that it is often through embodied sensory repetition that ritual practices generate the very convictions we call beliefs. Rituals do not merely mirror belief but often constitute it. Embodied performances do not just express an underlying faith but also facilitate experiences that cultivate this faith and inscribe it on practitioners’ bodies and minds. In what follows, I show how this comes about in the Kullu Valley, by illustrating how ritual practice plays a profound role in the establishment of the intimate association between the devtās and the surrounding natural environment.

Performative Ritual Associations

Let us begin by looking at the yoginīs again. Their association with the forest is also constituted through everyday ritual. Various ritual performances in the mountains include offerings made to the yoginīs: four small pieces of dough, called bhungṛī, are thrown in the four directions, affirming the yoginīs’ presence as formless beings surrounding the worshippers. Continuing our conversation above, Anup further explained: ‘We give bhungṛī in her name. We throw it [in the air]. [We do it] mostly during Navaratri, [but also] when we perform pūjā at home, when we do havan—we need to give her [the bhungṛī]’. ⁹ The yoginīs are also invoked in less frequent yet recurring ceremonies. For instance, when a new temple is built, a dhoz—a carved tree trunk—is installed nearby. Before cutting down the tree, participants perform a ritual seeking the permission of the area’s yoginī, who is believed to inhabit such trees. The association of these divine female beings with the forest is also reinforced in everyday customs. Villagers report that, when walking through the high jungles, they avoid shouting so as not to disturb the yoginīs who dwell there. Raman, a priest of the famous local Goddess Haḍimbā, shared the following in one of our conversations:

Raman: There is a place called Mangankot. … There is a very powerful joginī [yoginī] there. I mean, when a person goes there alone, he can hear [the joginīs] talk. They talk among themselves, though you cannot understand what they say. [The joginī] is so powerful that when there was no rain, they used to send people from the village, who would go up there and burn leather [camṛā]. They would defile the place [‘do impurity’, aśuddhī karnā].

Ehud: Why?

Raman: For the sake of rain. The joginī would then give rain in abundance.

Ehud: Really? People do such impurity and the joginī would give rain? How can this be?

Raman: She would give it out of anger [for defiling her place]. They would only do this when there was no rain…. This is what they used to do in older times. They haven’t done so recently, for quite some time now.

Ehud: I see.

Raman: One time, when I was very young, I really didn’t know [about all this]. I went there and ate some food and drank something. All this was jūṭhā [scraps, considered defiled and polluting]. When I started coming back, the clear weather was gone in no time, and it began raining very heavily. Very heavy rain, because of that fault [doṣ, sin, ritual blemish]. ¹⁰

We can appreciate here how Raman draws on the ritually constituted bond between the yoginīs and what is regarded as a pure mountain landscape to interpret his own childhood memory. Taken together, this indicates that the association between the yoginīs and the forest is continually performed and renewed through everyday offerings, routine observances and exceptional acts such as the founding of new temples or rain-invoking ceremonies. As Raman’s testimony demonstrates, this association is internalized and becomes part of how one sees and understands the world.

Everyday rituals also link other devtās to the surrounding natural terrain. Almost every pūjā in these regions involves the burning of incense made from beṭhar, a mountain juniper that grows at high altitudes, typically between 3,000 and 4,000 meters. Nearly every act of worship—whether in temples, at home or during festivals—includes this shrub. The scent is closely associated with divine presence: when one smells beṭhar incense, a god is near; when a god appears, the fragrance of beṭhar soon follows. The regular use of beṭhar requires an ongoing supply, so villagers must routinely climb the mountains to gather it. As Raju explained:

Beṭhar grows above the tree line. Everyone goes to get some at least once a year—going specifically to gather it, while on a picnic, or grazing sheep. If they bring a lot, they give some to the temple. You put it on coals, and it smells wonderful. ¹¹

Thus, a tripartite bond is continuously constituted between the high reaches of the mountains, the beṭhar that grows there and the presence of gods, with which the shrub is ritually associated.

The association of devtās with the surrounding environment is sometimes constituted even more directly. This was the case with a devtā named Ghatotkach, worshiped in Dhungri village. A few years ago, someone stole Ghatotkach’s piṇḍī—the original aniconic stone understood as his embodied manifestation. The villagers replaced the piṇḍī with a new stone, which they brought with great ritual pomp from the riverbed in the upper valley. Tarachand, a local villager in his late fifties, described the event. He said that people went to Palchan, near the upper reaches of the Beas River, accompanied by musicians, a bell and a censer (ghaṇṭī dhauḍch) and Goddess Haḍimbā’s medium at the time, Tuleram. ¹² The group sacrificed several sheep, chose the stone and carried it back to the village without setting it down throughout the 10-kilometre journey. They also fasted throughout the day. For the next three days, the musicians played and panḍits came from the Jagatsukh area to perform the sthāpnā (ritual of establishment). ¹³ Ghatotkach was thus intimately associated with the upstream riverbed through an elaborate ritual performance, centred on a material object which was treated as both natural and divine.

Ghatotkach’s manifestation in a natural stone is, in a sense, a kind of rebirth in nature mediated through ritual means. This, of course, aligns well with the core narratives of the origin stories we discussed earlier about self-appearing devtās. Interestingly, instances of devtās miraculously emerging from the soil are not limited to mythic tales but occur in contemporary life as well. A recent example took place in the village of Bari, where a statue of God Kartik Swami was discovered during construction work in a field. Sheru, the person in whose field the statue was found, recounted to me how the mūrtī was revealed beneath a large rock, just after a sudden upwelling of groundwater. Recognizing the statue as a spontaneous manifestation (prakaṭ) of Kartik Swami, Sheru placed the devtā in a temporary shrine in his field, and he plans to build a proper devtā sthān within a year or two. Reports of the incident circulated on social media and YouTube, amplifying its impact and reinforcing the sense that the devtās remain intimately bound to the soil and its natural forces—sometimes emerging from it in contemporary life, just as they do in story and myth. ¹⁴

Another performative mechanism that associates devtās with their natural environment is the ritual bath. Periodically, the devtās’ palanquins are taken to a natural water source, such as a lake, a spring or a river, where a ceremonial bath takes place. These events draw broad participation and are often reported in the local press. For instance, in November 2023, a local news media outlet reported that Gods Neelkanth Mahadev and Ligan Narayan performed a ‘royal bathing’ ceremony. The two deities bathed in the springs of Manikaran before returning home after an eight-day pilgrimage (Divya_Himachal, 2023). In practice, the palanquins themselves are not immersed in water. Instead, their metal masks are washed, and water from the source is sprinkled over them and incorporated into the ritual. The musical instruments that accompany the palanquins, along with the bells and censers identified with each deity, are likewise carefully washed. A similar practice occurs, for example, in the annual washing of the instruments of Goddess Haḍimbā in the Beas River during the Dussehra festival, and again during her yearly visit to the hot springs in Vashisht village. Sometimes, the contact with water is even more direct, as in the ritual bathing of Gods Agni Pal Ji and Kala Nag Ji in the Rudra-Nag waterfall in the Parvati Valley, as reported on social media platforms. Here, devotees are seen carrying the devtās’ raths on their shoulders while wading through the pool water (Chet Bharati, 2013). Thus, at regular intervals, a ritual practice reconstitutes a material and tangible connection between local deities and the water bodies of the region. The gods, manifested in their mobile forms, interact directly and intimately with their natural surroundings, thereby further reinforcing this association.

Before concluding, I turn to one final ritual, also from the village of Ghoshal, which offers a striking example of how the bond between Himalayan deities, the natural environment and human life is sustained through regular practice. Talking to the Hindustan Times, temple priest Rama Kant Sharma explained:

With the start of Makar Sankranti [around January], the deity [Gautam Rishi] goes on meditation for the next 42 days, which requires tranquility in the village.… people believe that if they indulge in noisy activities, it would disturb the meditation of the deity and may bring them ill fortune. (Manta, 2015)

Neel, a 40-year-old man from a nearby village, added that during this time of silence,

[N]o digging in the ground is allowed, so as not to harm the animals inside it. No cow dung (gobar) should be taken out of the cowshed, so as not to harm the worms that live in it. Everything must remain pure (śuddh). No music, no shouting, no digging.

Before this period begins, Neel continued, a special ritual takes place:

Soil is brought from a slightly distant place. From a clean and pure area [in the forest] … for example, from the area of the water tank near Dhungri village, an area known for its red, pure, and clean soil. This soil is mixed with water … and plastered over a copper vessel.

The plastered vessel is then kept in the temple until the beginning of Phagli, the festival that ends the period of silence and marks the return of God Gautam Rishi from his meditation. It is then taken out of the temple, and the plastered soil is broken into pieces and distributed to the participants.

Chamman, a villager from Old Manali, said that if hair is revealed, it means that someone will die; a flower indicates a bad apple crop and small metal balls, resembling rifle bullets, mean that a war is coming. He said that before the 1999 Kargil war between India and Pakistan, he saw ‘with his own eyes’ many such small metal balls appearing in the plastered soil. ¹⁶

What we have here, then, is a prolonged ritual practice during which the village God, Gautam Rishi, enters deep meditation in his temple besides a lump of soil gathered from the surrounding area. During this period, the villagers avoid any form of harm to the environment—to the soil, the animals and even to the worms. They maintain silence so as not to disturb the deity’s meditation. At its end, the ritual conjunction of the God and the soil yields a prophecy for the coming year. Thus, the intimate and reciprocal connections between the deity, the surrounding natural environment and the humans who live in it are effectively constituted in this locally renowned annual ritual.

Conclusion

The Kullu Valley in particular, and the Western Himalayan Dev Bhūmi more broadly, offer a compelling example of an environmental worldview articulated through theology and ritual. The local devtās, closely tied to the natural environment, are seen as its protectors and regulators. They urge restraint in its use, rebuke those who harm it and at times intervene in it, bringing rain, floods or landslides to warn people to amend their ways. This bond between the devtās and the environment is articulated conceptually through stories, teachings and everyday speech. Yet, as I have shown above, it is constituted and transmitted equally through repeated ritual practice. Through embodied performance and engagement with material elements, people experience the presence of the devtās as inseparable from the landscape. They repeatedly see, feel and enact this connection. Devotees not only learn this association cognitively but also experience it physically and affectively, with their own bodies. For scholars concerned with local understandings of environment, ecology and sustainability, this underscores the importance of practice. What people say and believe matters, but what they do—how they worship and perform rituals—is equally vital to the making and transmission of their environmental imaginaries. Thus, to better understand local environmental knowledge systems and people’s engagement with ecological and climatic concerns, it is necessary to attend to religion in its broadest sense, considering not only local beliefs and theological articulations but also the everyday performances and ritual practices often serve as their very foundation.