The 'lost temple and ashram' of the puranas - starting in search - Part One
There are some journeys that begin not with maps, but with irritation.
Not anger exactly. Not rebellion either. Irritation.
A deep, private irritation with the modern world’s certainty that everything worth discovering has already been discovered, measured, photographed, indexed, and explained away by someone sitting far from the place itself.
I had carried that irritation for years.
Perhaps decades.
It sat somewhere inside me like an old splinter beneath the skin—small enough to ignore on ordinary days, but sharp enough to remind me of its presence whenever I read a dismissive article or heard a polished lecture that reduced the ancient world to a set of safe conclusions.
The irritation became particularly unbearable during academic conferences.
I remember one seminar in Mumbai barely three years before my retirement. A young visiting scholar from abroad, earnest and articulate and impossibly certain of himself, had delivered a lecture explaining that most geographical references in the epics were merely ‘symbolic constructs of ritual imagination.’ The phrase itself irritated me so deeply that I wrote it down in my notebook simply to stare at it later in disbelief.
Symbolic constructs.
Ritual imagination.
As though generations of people had crossed forests, rivers, mountains, deserts, and kingdoms merely to preserve decorative metaphors.
I had sat through the lecture quietly, perspiring gently beneath the auditorium lights while the air-conditioning failed in its usual heroic Indian manner. Around me, younger faculty members nodded enthusiastically and typed notes into glowing laptops. Someone behind me whispered the words ‘post-geographical interpretation’ with the reverence usually reserved for sacred mantras.
And all the while I kept remembering a night nearly twenty years earlier in a village near Adi Badri in modern day Himachal, just north of Haryana, when an old priest with cataract-clouded eyes had argued with me for two straight hours about the original location of a vanished pilgrimage route mentioned in a neglected recension of the Skanda Purana.
The old man had possessed no formal degree.
He mispronounced certain Sanskrit words.
He had probably never travelled beyond Himachal or Haryana.
And yet his understanding of terrain, memory, seasonal movement, river behaviour, and oral continuity had contained more living intelligence than half the conference halls I had attended in my professional life.
That was when I had first begun suspecting that modern scholarship often suffered from a peculiar weakness.
It studied texts while distrusting memory.
The old India I had encountered during my travels did the opposite.
It trusted memory so deeply that it buried geography inside story.
Perhaps that was why I had become restless after retirement.
My Academy had given me comfort, routine, salary, institutional respectability, and I retired without a proper pension. But retirement also removed the last practical barrier between me and the unfinished questions I had postponed for decades.
Questions have strange behaviour in old age.
If ignored long enough, they stop behaving like intellectual curiosity.
They begin behaving like unfinished obligations.
Mine eventually drove me northward into the Himalayas.
By the time I turned sixty-three, it had become impossible to ignore.
Age has a way of clarifying certain obsessions.
It does not always soften them.
Sometimes it hardens them into purpose.
I had retired from the Academy with the kind of official respect that institutions offer to men who have spent too many years inside them. There had been speeches, shawls, bouquets, framed citations, and careful words about my work in the natural sciences and the old knowledge systems of India. I had taught zoology, systems thinking, environmental planning and ecology, and now, after retirement, the epics—especially the Ramayana and the Mahabharata—long enough to know that the classroom was only one layer of the work. The real teaching, the deeper teaching, began when one looked at the world itself and asked why so many old texts were not merely stories, but routes, directions, topographies of memory.
The current academics —sharp, efficient men and women with fashionable spectacles and expensive conference bags— spoke about ancient India with the strange confidence of those who had never slept inside a crumbling temple mandapa during the monsoon, nor listened to hereditary priests argue over forgotten place names by the light of a kerosene lantern, nor watched a village elder trace a vanished river with one finger and say, with complete certainty, “It used to flow there.”
To them, the Vedas were text. To me, they had always been geography. Terrain. Memory. A coded civilizational map.
I did not mean that in a romantic or careless way. I was trained in the sciences. I had spent enough years with measurements, reactions, field notes, and data sheets to distrust vague enthusiasm. But the old Indian texts had gradually taught me something that no laboratory manual ever could: that a civilisation stores its knowledge in more than one form. A river may vanish from a modern map and still survive in a verse. A shrine may be dismantled and yet remain alive in a village name. A sacred path may be forgotten by surveyors and preserved by mule handlers, shepherds, and old oral traditions spoken only after tea and tobacco.
That was the kind of world I was pursuing now. Not a fantasy world. A buried one.
A world that might still exist north of Dharchula, beyond Trishul-ki-Chatti, even at some distance north of a small hamlet Nandipara, where the mountains narrowed and the air thinned and the older memories of the land seemed to gather in the folds of rock and pine like water waiting in a hidden basin.
I had come in search of a long-lost temple and an ashram said to lie somewhere further north. That was the simplest way to put it. There were other ways, of course, more scholarly ways, more cautious ways, but simplification becomes necessary when one is speaking to oneself.
I was searching for a place mentioned obliquely in old texts, a site connected to Vishwamitra, to fire, to discipline, to a knowledge of matter that sat somewhere between metallurgy and alchemy and ritual science. I had studied three Puranas closely, compared them against coded references in two Vedic passages I had no intention of revealing casually, and followed the strange convergence of names until the trail seemed to point toward this small, obscure Himalayan hamlet.
My colleagues would have called it a speculation. Some would have called it an obsession. One or two, if they were being kind, might have called it scholarly intuition. I called it unfinished work. And I knew very well that unfinished work can become a burden in old age. I was not a proper traveler in the fashionable sense.
I could not move like the young trekking groups who arrived with poles, certificates, matching jackets, and the cheerful arrogance of good circulation. I could not pretend that my body was still the body it had been at thirty-five. At sixty-three, I was broad, heavy, and uncomfortably aware of every ascent. I became breathless easily. My knees spoke up first, then my lower back, then my pride. Even so, I was not defeated by discomfort. I simply negotiated with it.
I packed as if preparing for a long siege. Medicines in one large haversack. Extra clothes in another. Woollens, rainwear, socks, gloves, trekking poles, tablets for the stomach, tablets for the heart, tablets for the tablets. I carried notebooks, folded maps, printed pages wrapped in plastic sleeves, and a stubborn supply of pencils because pens had betrayed me too often in cold weather.
I hired local guides, mules, and a cook. I arranged for one team to move ahead, find a reasonable camping site, and prepare shelter before I arrived. It was not luxury. It was prudence. The mountains do not reward vanity. They punish it quickly. One of the mule men had looked at my luggage and laughed softly.
“Professor sahib,” he said, adjusting the rope across a mule’s load, “you have brought enough things to stay here for a year.”
“Only if the road itself decides to imprison me,” I replied.
He grinned. “The road does not imprison. The weather does.”
That, too, was true. By the time I reached Nandipara, I had already learned that altitude changes not only one’s breath but one’s arrogance. The village was small enough to be missed by careless travelers, a few stone houses, a shrine, smoke from damp firewood, prayer flags faded by wind and snow, and faces that carried the calm reserve of people accustomed to difficult winters and older stories.
I sat that evening in a tea shed, warming my hands around a brass tumbler of salted butter tea, when an old villager asked me, not unkindly, “You have come this far for a temple that no one has seen?”
I smiled and said, “For a temple, perhaps, and for an ashram. Or for the trace of one.”
He looked at me for a long moment and then said, “In these mountains, the trace is often the thing itself.”
I did not answer immediately. The sentence stayed with me. Because that was exactly what I feared and hoped at once. That the temple might still be there. Or that only its trace remained. Or that the trace, if followed carefully enough, might become a doorway back into a forgotten landscape of memory.
And so I sat there, a retired professor of environmental planning and ancient India, overweight, aging, breathless, skeptical, persistent, and strangely excited, with the cold Himalayas gathering outside the tea shed and the unknown path north of Nandipara waiting like a sentence not yet finished.
(c) Dr. Bharat Bhushan
10 May 2026
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