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village deities or Gramya Devtas have no temple but they have their spokesmen, who would
go into a trance when occasion demands and act as sooth-sayer, disease-diviner and also
the medicine man. Another rather inaccessible village Chhitkul in Sangla tahsil, the last
and highest village in the Baspa valley has a local goddess Mathi with three temples.
Mathi is more than a village god. The main temple is said to be about five hundred years
old built by a resident of Garhwal. The Goddess is
on a square ark made of walnut wood covered with clothes and decorated by a tuft of the
tail of yak, a very useful animal for the villagers. Two poles called Bayangas are
inserted and the goddess is carried out at times. It is said the goddess had started from
Brindavan and via Mathura and Badrinath had reached Tibet. From there she came down to
Garhwal and ultimately came to this area via Sirmur, previously a small princely State.
Here the deity found the territory divided into seven parts.
She appointed her relatives including her husband as guards for particular areas. The
husbandBadrinath was put as a guard of the throne of Bushahr. Finally she settled at
Chhitkul and took over a supervisory role of the seven divisions. She is worshipped with
the water of the nearby spring. A simple legend out of simplistic ideas, it has a
tremendous hold on the people of the village and the neighborhood. |
