Height: 1,389 m (4,557 ft)   District: Pune   Region: Purandar tehsil, Sahyadri

About The Mountain

South-east of Pune, where the Sahyadri makes its transition from the dramatic western escarpment to the more gradual eastern slopes that face the Deccan plateau, a fort rises from a ridge that has been considered important for a very long time. Purandar stands at 1,389 metres, visible from Pune on clear days, its twin summits, Purandar itself and the lower Vajragad that stands beside it, not to be confused with the Vajragad of Satara in Chapter Fourteen, forming a silhouette that the people of the Pune plateau have been reading in the sky for centuries.

The fort is in the Purandar tehsil of Pune district, roughly 50 kilometres south-east of Pune city, approached from the village of Narayanpur or from Saswad, a town on the Deccan side that has its own long history as a market and administrative centre. The approach from Narayanpur passes through forest that opens as the altitude increases, the path arriving at the fort’s lower level through a gateway that is among the better-preserved entrances in the Sahyadri fort network. The walls here are substantial and the masonry is careful, this was built to last.

Purandar is a double fort, twin summits connected by a saddle, the upper fort proper and the lower Vajragad working together as a single defensive system. The upper fort commands views in every direction, the Deccan plateau to the east and north, the western Sahyadri ridges receding toward the coast, the Bhima river valley to the south. At 1,389 metres, Purandar is the highest fort in the immediate Pune region, and the view from its summit on a clear morning is the view of the entire Pune landscape laid out below, the city, the rivers, the other ridges, the long plateau stretching to the horizon.

At the summit of the upper fort, the goddess Purandareshwari has her temple. It is an active temple, not maintained as a monument but as a living place of worship, receiving devotees regularly, its rituals observed, its festivals marked by the communities of the tehsil that carries the fort’s name. The tehsil and the goddess and the fort all carry the same name: Purandar. The mountain named the land around it, and the land around it carries the mountain’s name in everything, its administrative identity, its communities, its relationship with the sky above it.

Beside the summit temple, a Kedareshwar shrine continues the pattern already seen at Harishchandragad and Ghangad, Shiva in his form as the lord of difficult high places, present on Purandar as he is present on other Sahyadri summits, the god who lives where the ordinary world stops. The two sacred presences on the summit, Purandareshwari and Kedareshwar, are the goddess of the thunderer and the lord of difficult terrain, the rain and the height, sharing the summit the way the storm and the mountain that catches it always share their particular piece of sky.

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The Name

Purandar is one of the hundred and eight names of Indra, the king of the gods, the wielder of the vajra, the lord of rain and thunder and storm. The name means the destroyer of strongholds, pura meaning stronghold or citadel, dara meaning destroyer or breaker. Indra Purandar: the one who breaks the enemy’s fortifications, who demolishes the defences of the asuras, who clears the way for the forces of dharma by smashing whatever walls have been raised against them.

It is a warrior’s name. A name from the oldest layer of the Rigveda, where Indra is primarily the storm god who fights the forces of drought and darkness and wins, who breaks the cloud-demons that withhold the rain, who strikes with his vajra and releases the water. Purandar the destroyer of strongholds is the same Indra who destroyed Vritra in the Vajragad chapter, the same thunderbolt, the same battle, the same release of the water that the world needs.

A fort carrying this name is a fort that has adopted the god’s warrior identity as its own. The fort that destroys strongholds, the fort named for the one who cannot be resisted, the fort that carries in its very name the promise that it will do to the enemy’s fortifications what Indra does to the asuras’ cities. It is an audacious name for a fort, the name not of a defender but of an attacker, not of a holder but of a breaker. And yet the fort that bears this name has been used primarily as what all forts are primarily used as: a place to hold, to defend, to wait out what comes against it.

Purandareshwari, the goddess at the summit, is Indra’s name made feminine, made divine in the shakti form. She is the power of Purandar expressed as a goddess rather than as a warrior king: not the force that breaks walls but the presence that holds the mountain, the energy of the storm and the thunder transformed into the care of the deity who watches over the land from the height that carries her name. The destroyer of strongholds and the protector of those below, the same name, the same energy, understood in two different registers.

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The Stories

Purandar’s stories come from the deep association between Indra and the Sahyadri, from the tradition of Purandareshwari and her particular connection to this mountain, and from the older stories of what it means to place the name of the king of the gods on a fort above the Pune plateau.

Indra and the Mountains of the Deccan

Indra’s relationship with the mountains of the Deccan is an ancient one, older than most of the stories in this book, rooted in the Rigveda’s understanding of the monsoon as the annual battle between the storm god and the forces that would withhold the rain. Chapter Fourteen, on Vajragad, introduced this story: the demon Vritra who swallowed all the world’s water, the vajra forged from the bones of the sage Dadhichi, the battle that released the rain and made the world habitable again.

But Indra’s relationship with the Sahyadri goes beyond the single battle. He is, in the oldest understanding of the tradition, the king who presides over the sky, the whole sky, the sky above the Sahyadri and above the Deccan and above the Arabian Sea. When the monsoon comes, it comes at his direction. When the thunder sounds above the fort plateaus of the Sahyadri, it is his voice. When the lightning strikes the highest points, the Vajragad of Satara, the summits of the escarpment, the ridge of Purandar, it is his weapon making contact with the earth.

A fort named Purandar, on a ridge that catches the monsoon storms as they roll in from the west, is a fort that experiences this presence annually, directly, without distance or metaphor. The thunderstorms that move across the Pune plateau and break against the Sahyadri ridges come to Purandar with the full force that the altitude and the exposure invite. The name of the destroyer of strongholds is the name of what the storm does to the silence before it arrives. The fort carries the name of the god who carries the storm.

Purandareshwari — The Shakti of the Thunderer

The goddess Purandareshwari at the summit temple is the shakti, the divine feminine power, of Indra, understood in the tradition of the Sahyadri not simply as a consort but as the active principle behind the name. Where Indra’s name carries the warrior energy of the destroyer of strongholds, Purandareshwari carries the same energy expressed as protection, as care, as the holding of the mountain and of the communities below it in the divine keeping of the storm’s power.

It is said in the tradition of the Purandar tehsil that the goddess has been on this mountain since before the fort was built, that the summit was understood as her dwelling place before any human construction acknowledged it, and that the decision to build the fort here was partly a recognition that the ground was already held by something that strategic wisdom was simply confirming. The mountain already belonged to the shakti of the thunderer. The fort made that belonging visible in stone and walls.

Devotees who climb to Purandareshwari’s temple come with the prayers of the Deccan agricultural community, prayers for rain, for the monsoon to come when it should and to bring what it promises, for the storms that can also damage crops to spare what the farmer has planted. The goddess of the thunderer is the goddess who mediates between the storm’s power and the farmer’s need. She holds both, the force of the rain and the fragility of the growing thing that needs the rain to be generous rather than violent. She is asked to make Indra’s power kind.

The Festival of the Fort

Purandar has a tradition of festival worship that connects the summit temple to the wider community of the tehsil in a way that few other fort temples manage. The festivals at Purandareshwari’s temple are not simply pilgrimage events, they are community events, drawing the villages of the entire tehsil into a shared relationship with the goddess on the summit above them.

It is said that the tradition of the festival at Purandar is old enough that its origin is not clearly remembered, it is simply what has always been done, the gathering that happens at the right time of year because it has always happened, the procession from the villages to the fort because the communities have always understood the goddess above them as someone they gather to visit together rather than separately. A festival that draws an entire tehsil to a single mountain is a festival that expresses something about the relationship between a community and its sacred landscape: the mountain is not simply one community’s mountain. It is the mountain above all of them, and the goddess on it holds all of them in her keeping.

The Fort in the Maratha World

Purandar is among the most historically significant forts in the Pune region, and its history in the era of the Maratha kingdoms is substantial. The fort has a deep connection to the events that shaped the Maratha world in the seventeenth century, events that are part of the history of this landscape in the period when Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj was consolidating the network of forts that defined the Maratha homeland. The Treaty of Purandar in 1665, negotiated on this mountain, was one of the significant political events of that era, its terms and consequences shaping the political geography of the Deccan for years afterward.

The mythology of this mountain is the reason it is in this book. The name of Indra, the goddess of the thunderer, the Kedareshwar shrine on the summit, the tradition of the festival that draws the tehsil to the mountain, these are older than any treaty, older than any political arrangement, older than the fort walls themselves. The history sits on top of the mythology the way the fort sits on top of the ridge: the ground was already sacred before anything was built on it, and that ground remains sacred regardless of what the political history of the fort above it has been.

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The Name, the Sky, and the Last Day of Rain

There is a moment at Purandar that comes once a year, at the turning of the monsoon, the day when the last major storm of the season passes over the fort. The sky has been bringing rain for four months. The cisterns are full. The fort walls are wet and dark. And then one day the storm that passes is the last one of the season, and after it the sky begins to clear, and the visibility that the monsoon reduced to a few hundred metres opens out again across the Deccan plateau.

From the Purandar summit on that day, the view is extraordinary, washed clean by the season’s rain, the Deccan plateau visible for enormous distances, the Sahyadri ridges to the west sharp and clear, the light that comes after rain having a quality that no other light quite matches. It is the view that the farmer in the valley below has also been waiting for, the signal that the growing season is done, that what was planted has received what it needed, that Indra’s annual work is complete.

The goddess Purandareshwari on the summit receives the last of the monsoon on the same day that the farmers below receive it. She and they have been in the same storm together all season. The fort named for the destroyer of strongholds has been the closest point to the storms that Indra sent, catching the thunder and the lightning and the rain at 1,389 metres, holding it all in its walls and its cisterns and its open ground, and then releasing it, as the season turns, as the sky clears, as the Deccan comes back into view, back to the world below.

Purandar. The destroyer of strongholds. The thunderer’s fort. The mountain above the Pune plateau that carries the oldest warrior name of the god of rain, and on its summit, his shakti, the goddess who makes the storm’s power kind, who holds the mountain in her keeping through every monsoon that comes, and every one that passes.