Height: 1,033 m (3,389 ft) District: Pune Region: Maval tehsil, Sahyadri
About The Mountain
There is a particular pleasure in a name that is simply true. Not poetic, not mythological, not borrowed from a king or a sage or a goddess, just accurate. Tikona means triangle in Marathi. The mountain is a triangle. You look at it from the shore of Pawna lake and the shape is immediately obvious: a clean, steep-sided pyramid of basalt rising from the water’s edge, its three faces meeting at a point at the top with a geometric precision that seems almost deliberate. Someone saw this mountain, looked at its shape, and called it what it was. That name has held for as long as anyone can remember.
Tikona stands at 1,033 metres in the Maval tehsil of Pune district, on the western shore of Pawna lake, the reservoir created by the Pawna dam, built in the 1970s. The lake came after the mountain, and the relationship between the two is one of the more beautiful accidents of the Sahyadri. The water of Pawna lake surrounds three sides of Tikona’s base, so that the mountain appears to rise directly from the lake, its reflection doubling its triangular shape in the water below on still mornings. At sunrise, when the mist sits on the lake and the first light catches the upper rock faces, the effect is striking enough that people drive from Pune and Mumbai before dawn simply to see it.
The approach to the fort is through the village of Tikona Peth, a settlement that has grown up around the base of the mountain and around the steady flow of trekkers who come to climb it. The path winds up through terraced farmland first, then forest, then open rock. It is not the most technically demanding climb in the Sahyadri, there are fixed chains on one section of the upper route, but it is steep enough to ask for effort and high enough to reward it with a view that on a clear day takes in Pawna lake, the Pawna dam, the surrounding peaks of the Maval region, and to the east the hints of the Pune plateau shimmering in the distance.
At the summit, a small but active temple sits within the remains of the fort walls. The temple is dedicated to Trimbakeshwar, a form of Shiva, the same divine presence whose great temple and jyotirlinga we encountered at Trimbakeshwar in the Nashik chapters. Here, far from Nashik, Shiva appears again on a summit, quieter, less grandly housed, but present. The temple is tended regularly. Flowers are brought up the steep path by devotees who come not for the trek but for the puja, who have been making this climb since long before it was called trekking.
The fort walls that remain are extensive for a peak of this size, long sections of cut stone running along the ridge, bastions at strategic angles, the remnants of cisterns that collected rainwater for the garrison. The fort was real and functional and defended, part of the network of Sahyadri heights that controlled the passes between the Konkan and the Deccan through this section of the range. The stones are old enough that moss and lichen have made them partly their own, the boundary between fortification and geology slowly dissolving the way it does at every fort in the Sahyadri that has been left to the rain long enough.
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The Name
Tikona. Triangle. Three sides, three angles, a point at the top. The name is so directly descriptive that it requires almost no unpacking, and yet a name this simple, held this long, has its own kind of depth.
The triangle is not a neutral shape in Indian sacred tradition. The downward-pointing triangle is the yantra symbol of Shakti, the feminine divine energy, the goddess in her most essential geometric form. The upward-pointing triangle represents the masculine principle, Shiva’s energy, the ascending force. The two triangles interlocked form the Shatkona, the six-pointed star that appears in many yantra diagrams and in the floors of certain ancient temples, representing the union of the two principles, the completion of the cosmos.
A mountain shaped like a triangle, then, is not simply a mountain that happens to have three sides. In the framework of sacred geometry that runs quietly beneath the surface of so much of the Sahyadri’s sacred tradition, a triangular mountain is a mountain shaped like a yantra. A mountain that participates in the geometry of the divine. Whether the people who first named Tikona were thinking in these terms cannot be known with certainty. But the tradition of seeing geometry as sacred meaning is old enough in this landscape that the coincidence, if it is a coincidence, is worth noting.
The suffix the mountain carries in common usage, Tikona Gad, or Vitandgad as it is also sometimes called, adds the familiar gad: fort, defended height. But it is the first word, the simple descriptive word, that has endured. Tikona. The mountain that is shaped like what it is. There is an honesty in that name that the Sahyadri, which names things for what they are worth and what they carry, seems to have found satisfying enough to keep.
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The Stories
Tikona’s stories are quieter than those of many mountains in this book. It does not have the mythological density of Bhimashankar or the great Puranic dramas of Harishchandragad. What it has are stories of a more local kind, the stories of a mountain that has been lived beside, farmed beside, worshipped on, and defended from for a very long time, by people who left their memories in the landscape rather than in the texts.
The Trimbakeshwar Temple on the Summit
The small temple at Tikona’s summit is dedicated to Trimbakeshwar, literally, the lord of three peaks, or the lord of the three eyes. Trimbak is another name for Shiva, specifically in his aspect as the three-eyed god: the two ordinary eyes that see the world as it presents itself, and the third eye in the centre of the forehead that sees through appearances to the truth beneath them. When the third eye opens, it is said, what it sees cannot remain hidden. It is the eye of final knowledge.
The name Trimbakeshwar on this triangular mountain, this three-sided peak, carries a quiet resonance that feels deliberate even if it cannot be proven to be so. Three sides on the mountain. Three eyes on the god. The number three appearing twice, in the shape of the rock and in the name of what is worshipped at its summit. Whether someone chose this correspondence intentionally, or whether it is the kind of meaning that a landscape accumulates without anyone planning it, the result is the same: the triangle and the three-eyed god fit each other in a way that gives the summit temple a quality of rightness.
It is said in local tradition that the temple at Tikona’s summit is very old, older than the fort walls, older than the period when the mountain was used as a military position. That the worship of Shiva on this triangular peak predates its fortification, that the mountain was sacred before it was strategic. This is a pattern that appears at several mountains in this book, the sacred use coming first, the military use layering on top of it later, and the sacred use surviving long after the military use has become irrelevant. Tikona fits that pattern. The fort is ruins. The temple is still visited.
Pawna and the Lake That Came After
The Pawna river runs through the Maval region of Pune district, and the Pawna dam, built in 1972, created the lake that now surrounds Tikona’s base. The lake changed the mountain’s relationship with the landscape in ways that were not entirely anticipated. What had been a mountain rising from farmland and forest became a mountain rising from water, and the visual effect of that change gave Tikona a new life as a place people came to see as well as to climb.
The local communities around Pawna lake have their own stories about the relationship between the mountain and the water. It is said that before the dam was built, the Pawna river ran through the valley at Tikona’s feet and that the mountain’s reflection could be seen in the river on still days, that the triangular shape doubled in the water was something people here had always known, not a consequence of the reservoir but a quality of the mountain that the river had always shown them. The dam simply made that reflection larger and more permanent.
There is a gentleness in this story, the idea that the lake did not change the mountain’s essential relationship with water but simply made it more visible. That the mountain was always a mountain that looked at itself in water. That the reflection was always part of what Tikona was.
The Fort That Guarded the Bhor Ghat
Tikona’s position in the Maval tehsil put it near one of the most strategically important passes through the Sahyadri, the Bhor Ghat, the route that connected the Konkan coast to Pune and the Deccan plateau. This was not a minor route. It was one of the principal arteries of movement through the central Western Ghats, used by traders, armies, administrators, and ordinary people moving between the coast and the interior for centuries.
A fort at Tikona commanded views of the approaches to this ghat and of the surrounding valley. Together with the nearby forts of Lohagad and Visapur and Tung, Tikona was part of an interlocking network of defensive positions that could watch every significant approach through this section of the Sahyadri. The fort was not simply a single defended height, it was part of a conversation between peaks, a network of watchers whose combined field of vision covered the landscape below.
Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj recognised the strategic value of Tikona and the surrounding cluster of forts, and the Maval region, whose hardy, hill-trained Maval soldiers formed the backbone of the early Maratha fighting force, was central to the story of how the Maratha kingdom came into being. The mountains of Maval, Tikona among them, were known ground to those soldiers. They had grown up in sight of these peaks.
The Three That Watch Together
Among the traditions of the Maval region, Tikona is often spoken of alongside Lohagad and Tung, the three forts that rise from the same stretch of the Sahyadri west of Pawna lake, visible to each other across the water and the ridgelines. Local tradition holds that the three forts formed a triangle of watching, that signal fires lit on one could be seen from the other two, that the geometry of their positions was as deliberate as the geometry of Tikona’s own shape.
Three forts. A triangular mountain. The number three appearing again, in the landscape itself this time, in the arrangement of defended heights across the lake, watching each other and watching the valley below. Whether the people who built and garrisoned these forts thought of their arrangement in geometric terms is impossible to say. But the landscape holds the pattern, and the people who have lived in it have noticed it, and the story that three triangular things, the mountain, the temple’s god, the arrangement of forts, belong together in this stretch of the Sahyadri has been told long enough that it has become part of what the place means.
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Why It Still Matters
Tikona is the last mountain in this book, and it is, in many ways, the right mountain to end on. Not because it is the most dramatic, it is not. Not because it carries the densest mythology, it does not. But because it is the most honest. A mountain named for its shape. A shape that turns out to carry meaning. A temple at the top that was there before the fort and will be there after it. A lake that came later and made the mountain more beautiful. Stories that belong to the people who live beside it rather than to the great Puranic texts.
Tikona is what the Sahyadri is when it is not trying to impress you. It is a triangular mountain reflected in a lake. It is a steep path through forest to a summit with a view. It is an old temple where someone climbs every week to bring flowers and light a lamp, because that is what has always been done here and there is no reason to stop. It is fort walls dissolving back into the rock they were cut from. It is the number three appearing three times, in the shape of the mountain, in the name of the god at its summit, in the arrangement of forts across the water, without anyone having planned it.
All thirteen mountains in this book have this quality in different degrees, the quality of being more than they appear, of carrying more than their physical presence. The Sahyadri is a range that accumulated meaning for as long as people have lived beside it and climbed it and named it and built on it and told stories about it. That accumulation does not end. It continues, quietly, every time someone makes the climb and finds the temple open and the view clear and the shape of the mountain reflected in the water below.
The mountains of the Sahyadri are not finished. They are still being climbed, still being named, sometimes renamed, still receiving prayers and trekkers and pilgrims and people who come for reasons they cannot quite articulate. The stories in this book are the old ones, the ones that have been held long enough to settle into the rock. The new ones are being made now, by the people on the paths, by the ones who stand at the top and feel something they will spend years trying to find words for.
Tikona. The triangle. The mountain that is exactly what it looks like, and more than that. The last peak of Volume One, and the first peak that Volume Two will be able to see from its opening pages, across the water, from the other shore, a clean triangular shape against the Sahyadri sky.