ABSTRACT
Until the 20th century divine kings ruled the vast and remote regions in the Western Himalayas in India, located along the headwaters of the Yamuna and Sutlej Rivers. The ruling deities were generally referred to as the four Mahasu brothers. With gods as the principal political actors, the cult of Mahasu stood out, historically, as volatile and intransigent. Headhunting Hindu men from the Rajput caste, who were proudly independent of their neighbouring kingdoms, monopolized it. Despite the Gurkha, British and now the Indian state’s claim to political power over the region, local inhabitants continue to insist on their cultural autonomy, living by the ritual regime prescribed by their divine kings. Ritual processions of the divine kings, generally construed by observers as pilgrimage, describe a complex landscape of political networks based on loyalties to clan and god. The divine king’s processions continue to traverse the Himalayan landscapes even though the region became a part of the state of India, post-independence. These journeys, arranged in the form of communal sacrifices, sometimes even across snowbound high mountain passes, still traverse long distances and preserve a religio-political idiom of embodied practice that reproduces an ancient polity and its complex networks of interaction, ranging from the local to the cosmic. This paper takes an ethnographic look at how these travels link ritual with other geographical spaces, seeking points of intersection between the divine and the human, the religious and the political, while constructing fields of identity, agency and territorial power.
