Height: 1,403 m (4,603 ft) District: Pune Region: Velhe tehsil, Sahyadri
About The Mountain
The last mountain. That is what Torna is in this book, and the fact deserves a moment before the description begins. Twenty-five mountains have been described in the chapters before this one, from Kalsubai in the north to Mahipatgad in the south, from the jyotirlinga at Bhimashankar to the creole headland at Korlai, from the Jain liberation site at Mangi-Tungi to the cloud fort at Ghangad, from the eye in the rock at Ratangad to the linga in the valley at Lingana. The Sahyadri has been walked across in these pages, mountain by mountain, story by story. Torna is where it ends. And Torna is, in every way, the right place to end.
Torna stands at 1,403 metres in the Velhe tehsil of Pune district, in the central Sahyadri, roughly 60 kilometres south-west of Pune city. It is the highest fort in the Pune district, higher than Purandar, higher than Rajgad on the neighbouring ridge, higher than almost everything in the landscape around it. The approach from the village of Velhe is long and demanding, the path climbing steadily through forest and open hillside before arriving at the fort’s massive gateway. The walls here are among the most extensive in the Sahyadri, great lengths of cut stone running along the natural ridgeline, bastions at strategic intervals, the whole construction working with the mountain’s own shape in a way that makes the boundary between the basalt and the fortification difficult to locate precisely.
The fort plateau is large and open, exposed to the wind on all sides, the kind of high place that the monsoon hits first and hardest, the clouds building against the western escarpment and releasing their first great discharge here, at this height, before moving east. In the dry season, the plateau grass is short and gold and moves in the wind with a sound that is half rustle and half whisper. In the monsoon, the whole plateau disappears into the cloud the way Ghangad disappears, the fort walls becoming spectral presences in the mist, the views that were thirty kilometres closing to thirty metres, the mountain keeping its own company in the weather.
At the summit, in a cave carved into the basalt of the highest point of the fort, is the temple of Toranjai. This is not a large temple. It is not an elaborately decorated temple. It is a cave temple of the kind that the Sahyadri produces when a goddess chooses a place in the rock rather than a place in a constructed building, small, dark, lit by the light of lamps rather than by any opening to the sky, the goddess present in the stone the way the sacred is always present in the stone of a mountain that has been understood as sacred for long enough. The goddess named this mountain. The mountain carries her name still. That the temple is carved into the rock at the summit’s highest point seems exactly right.
The view from Torna’s summit on a clear day is the view of the central Sahyadri in its fullest expression. The ridge of Rajgad is visible to the north-east. Sinhagad can be seen in the far distance. The Velhe valley lies below to the east. The Konkan escarpment drops away to the west. And in every direction, the Sahyadri, the range that this book has been travelling through from its first chapter to this last one, range after range of basalt and forest and story, stretching away to every horizon. Torna sees all of it. The last mountain looks back at everything that came before it, and the view holds all twenty-five previous chapters in its compass.
— — —
The Name
Torana in Sanskrit means a gateway, an arch, a threshold structure, the kind of decorated arch that marks the entrance to a sacred space, that frames the transition from the ordinary world to the sacred one. A torana is not simply a door. It is the announcement of the door, the structure that says: here the crossing happens, here the world changes, here what you are entering is different from what you are leaving.
Torna, the mountain’s popular name, the name by which everyone knows it, is Torana simplified, worn smooth by centuries of use in the languages of the people who live below it. And Toranjai, the goddess at the summit, is the deity who lives at the gateway, who holds the threshold, who presides over the crossing. A mountain named for a gateway, with a goddess named for the goddess of the gateway, on the highest fort in the Pune district. The name and the deity are the same declaration: this is a place of crossing, a place of transition, a place where what you are when you arrive is not quite what you are when you leave.
The second name, Prachandagad, is the older, more formal name, the name the fort carries in the historical and administrative records of the Deccan. Prachanda means fierce, intense, overpowering, the quality of something that does not moderate itself, that expresses its full nature without restraint. The fierce fort. The fort that is completely and overwhelmingly what it is. This name too fits: a fort at 1,403 metres on the highest ridge in the Pune district, first to receive the monsoon storms, exposed to the full force of the Sahyadri weather, is a fort that experiences the landscape at its most prachanda, most fierce, most unmediated, most entirely itself.
Two names, then, for this last mountain: the fierce fort, and the gateway. The place that holds nothing back, and the place where the crossing happens. In the tradition of this book, which has found in every mountain a name that carries its truth, these two names together make a complete and fitting closing declaration.
— — —
The Stories
The stories of Torna are the stories of the goddess who named it, of the gateway quality that the name carries, and of what it means for a book about the Sahyadri to close on a mountain called the fierce fort and the threshold.
Toranjai — The Goddess of the Gateway
Toranjai is not a goddess of the great texts. She does not appear in the Puranas as a named deity with an elaborate mythology and a pan-Indian following. She is a mountain goddess, specific to this peak, specific to this cave in the basalt at the summit’s highest point, held in the devotion of the communities of the Velhe tehsil with the particularity that a local goddess commands from the people who are specifically hers.
It is said in the tradition of Velhe that Toranjai has been in this cave since before anyone built a fort on this mountain, that the cave was a place of worship before the fort walls were raised around it, that the goddess chose this specific point at the summit’s highest level because it is the place on this mountain that is most completely itself. The highest point. The most exposed. The place where the wind is strongest and the view is widest and the weather arrives first. The goddess of the gateway chose, for her dwelling, the most fully realised point of the mountain.
Toranjai is approached by the communities of the Velhe region with a directness that reflects the intimacy of a local goddess tradition. She is not asked for the grand things, not for victory in war or for the removal of cosmic obstacles or for the kind of blessings that the great pan-Maharashtra goddesses are approached for. She is asked for the gateway things: safe passage, successful crossing, the ability to complete the transition from one state to another. The farmer asks for the transition from planting to harvest. The family asks for the transition from difficulty to ease. The traveller asks for safe arrival. The person standing at any threshold asks Toranjai for what threshold deities have always been asked for: help with the crossing.
The cave temple at the summit is small enough that visitors enter it one or two at a time, and in that smallness there is an intimacy that no large temple can replicate. You are in the rock, with the goddess, with the lamp light and the smell of incense and the sound of the wind outside. The mountain is around you. The goddess is in front of you. There is nothing between you and the encounter that the name of this mountain always promised.
The Fierce and the Sacred
Prachanda, fierce, intense, overpowering, is a quality that the Sahyadri expresses in many of its mountains, but rarely in the name itself. Most mountains are named for their shape, their deity, their story, their person. Torna is named for its intensity, for the quality of full, unmoderated expression that this particular ridge at this particular height embodies.
In the sacred tradition, prachanda is understood not simply as a quality of violence or aggression. It is the quality of something that is entirely what it is, without dilution or compromise. Prachanda is the monsoon at its peak, not threatening, exactly, but absolutely itself, holding nothing back. Prachanda is the goddess in her most complete form, not the gentle aspect, not the motherly aspect, but the full expression of the divine feminine in her total power. The fierce fort is fierce the way the monsoon is fierce: not because it wants to harm but because it holds nothing back.
A mountain that is both fierce and a gateway, both Prachandagad and Torna, is a mountain that makes the crossing available in its fullest form. The gateway is not a gentle arch over a smooth path. It is a gateway at 1,403 metres, first into the storm, exposed to the full force of the Sahyadri weather, asking the person who crosses it to meet the mountain on its own terms. The fierceness and the gateway are not in contradiction. The gateway that asks something of the person who crosses it is the gateway that transforms. The crossing that costs something is the crossing that changes something.
The Ancient Name Before the Fort
The tradition that Torna’s sacred history predates its military history is one that holds across several of the mountains in this book, the pattern of the goddess or the god or the sacred quality being present in a place before any fort acknowledged it, the fort being built around what was already there rather than on neutral ground. At Torna, the tradition is particularly clear: the goddess was in the cave before the fort was on the mountain, and the fort that came later took its popular name from her.
This is the oldest relationship between the sacred and the strategic in the Sahyadri: the high places were sacred first, understood as the dwelling places of divine presences before they were understood as defensive positions. The forts came because the high places mattered, and the high places mattered because something was already there. Toranjai was in her cave. The mountain was already Torna, already the gateway, already the fierce threshold, before a single stone of the fort was laid.
When the tradition says this, it is saying something important about the order of things. The goddess is primary. The fort is secondary. The history that is written in political and military records is the surface of a landscape whose deeper layer is the sacred geography, the network of divine presences and their dwelling places that the mountains of the Sahyadri have held since before those mountains were named. Torna is the goddess’s mountain. The fort is what was built on the goddess’s mountain. And the goddess is still there, in her cave, at the summit, long after the last garrison has gone and the walls have begun their return to the basalt they were cut from.