A Winter in India

Today we drove through beautiful pine forest to Jageshwar, where there is a large group of Hindu temples that range in size from 2 to 60 feet high and were built over a span of 1000 years. The “new” ones are from 1560. It is a staggering collection, made even more so by the gigantic size of the trees around it. Some of these deodar trees were 12 feet in diameter! They look something like larch trees on steroids. It is rare to see forest in India, and this was just beautiful.

The Archaeological Survey of India is doing a fantastic job of conserving and restoring these sites, and in the process, employing and training hundreds of people. We wandered around the temples for a while, and took the first picture of the preparations for a puja ceremony, though we didn’t know what the ceremony was to be. We went off for a hike across a little river and up the mountain. On the way down we ran into a group of Italian women who told us that the preparations were for a cremation. So we sat on the side of the mountain and watched from a discrete (?) distance. The second photo is the family seated around a large fire at the place we saw being readied in the first photo. The ceremony involved lots of chanting by the priest, repeated by the people, and tossing of flower petals, and pouring of water. While the ceremony was happening, a large truck delivered tree trunks ton the street outside the temple complex. Workmen carried one tree at a time, past the temples and over to the river bed, where they built the cremation pyre, as you see in the third photo. We decided not to stay to watch the actual cremation.