Katas Raj Templesਕਟਾਸ ਰਾਜ ਮੰਦਰ

High in the Salt Range of Pakistani Punjab, a group of old stone temples gathers around a still, green pond. The Katas Raj Temples, also called Qila Katas, stand near Choa Saidanshah in Chakwal district, close to the Kallar Kahar interchange of the M2 motorway between Islamabad and Lahore. Hindus regard the pond at the centre of the complex as sacred, and tradition in the Puranas says it formed from the tears of Shiva as he wandered in grief after the death of his wife Sati. The name itself is linked to the Sanskrit word kataksha, meaning tearful eyes. Few temple sites in either Punjab carry so many layers in one small valley: epic story, early travellers, Sikh era buildings, and a modern court battle to save the pond itself.

What are the Katas Raj Temples?

The Katas Raj Temples are a complex of Hindu temples in Chakwal district, Punjab, Pakistan, linked to one another by walkways around a sacred pond. The site holds twelve temples in all, seven of them original. The oldest group, called the Satgraha, is a cluster of seven ancient temples, joined by five later medieval temples, the remains of a Buddhist stupa, and havelis scattered around the water. The temples were raised under the Hindu Shahis from around the middle of the 7th century to the 10th century. Shiva is the principal deity, and the complex also holds temples of Ramachandra and Hanuman. Set at about 2,000 feet in the Potohar plateau country, Katas Raj is counted among the most sacred Hindu sites in Pakistan, and its great festival is Maha Shivaratri.

The pond of Shiva's tears

Everything at Katas begins with the water. The pond covers two kanals and fifteen marlas and is about twenty feet deep at its deepest, and devotees believe its clear water washes away sins. In the telling preserved in the Puranas, some of Shiva's tears gathered here, and others at Pushkar near Ajmer, so the two ponds are spoken of as a pair. The pond was known by older names before Katakshkund, the spring of tearful eyes, among them Viskund and Amarkund, and in Urdu and Persian it is called Chashm-e-Alam, the sorrowful eyes. Because the whole complex stands or falls with this one spring fed pool, the health of the pond has become the site's central modern story, told below.

Pandavas, travellers and kings

Hindu tradition places the Pandava brothers of the Mahabharata at Katas for a large part of their exile, and tells that this pond is where a yaksha challenged the brothers with riddles, the Yaksha Prashna. Four brothers fell lifeless, the story goes, until Yudhishthira answered wisely and brought them back to life. Another tradition says Krishna laid the temple's foundation and set a hand made lingam here. These are beliefs of the tradition, and they sit alongside recorded visits. The Chinese monk Faxian described a temple here in the 4th century, and the 7th century traveller Xuanzang reported a Buddhist stupa of the Ashoka era, said to be 200 feet tall and ringed by ten springs. Guru Nanak is believed to have visited Katas, and Maharaja Ranjit Singh came on pilgrimage repeatedly, for Vaisakhi in 1806 and again in 1818 and 1824. His general Hari Singh Nalwa built the fort and haveli that still overlook the temples.

How are the temples built?

The temples at Katas show the character of Kashmiri Hindu temple building. Most stand on square platforms, their outer walls rising in a series of cornices with small rows of pillars, crowned by ribbed domes. The seven old temples share dentils, fluted pillars, trefoil arches and pointed rooflines. Inside, the Ramachandra temple, east of the Hari Singh haveli, is a double storeyed building with eight rooms on the ground floor and decorated ceilings, while the Hanuman temple stands at the western end of a high enclosure and the Shiva temple rises on its own square platform. Readers who want the wider northern style can compare this complex with Jugti's explainer on Nagara temple architecture, the North Indian tradition to which these Salt Range shrines belong in spirit.

Decline, restoration and the fight for water

Before Partition in 1947, large crowds came to Katas for Maha Shivaratri. After Partition the local Hindu community left for India, visits from Indian pilgrims stopped and started again across the decades, and the complex fell into neglect, its pond littered and its murals fading. India's former deputy prime minister Lal Krishna Advani visited in 2005 and spoke against its condition. Pakistan began restoration in 2006, cleaning the pond and restoring temples, placed murtis in the seven temples, and in January 2017 began installing shikharas and a water filtration plant. In 2012 and again in 2017 the pond's level fell as nearby cement factories and eucalyptus planting drew down the water table. Pakistan's Supreme Court took up the case, and in May 2018 it ruled that the cement factories must take their water from elsewhere and pay the Punjab government for what they drew. Pakistani Hindu pilgrims, about 2,000 of them in 2010 and 2011, had by then revived the Maha Shivaratri gathering at the shrine.

Visiting Katas Raj

Katas Raj stands beside the road between Kallar Kahar and Choa Saidanshah, near the village of Dulmial and about 100 kilometres by road from the Tilla Jogian temple complex. Its setting, a walled temple town around spring water in dry Salt Range hills, makes it a natural companion read to Jugti's Punjab goddess shrine across the border, Devi Talab Mandir in Jalandhar, and to the cave pilgrimage of Hinglaj Mata in Balochistan, Pakistan's other great Hindu pilgrimage covered in this collection.