The Brahma temple in Pushkar

A temple to Brahma is worth seeing, since there are very few of them. Most guidebooks and web sites about Pushkar will tell you that the Brahma temple here is the only one in the world. But India is huge and no one has counted the number of temples in the country, so I can’t be sure that there isn’t one other. The story goes that Brahma himself chose this site for his temple. The site is old enough that Sankaracharya was involved in its renovation in the 8th century CE. The current structure is attributed to a king of Ratlam in the 14th century, and the renovation in marble and pink stone, is said to follow the design of Sankara’s renovation. Unfortunately photography is forbidden inside the temple, so I cannot present photos of the surprisingly small structure with its four headed statue of Brahma, the creator, with his consort Gayatri.

I examined the marble flagstones that decorate the steps and the surroundings. Each slab is donated by a devotee, and details about the devotee and dates can be read. Not all the writing was in Devanagari, so I could read only some of them. I could not see any which was definitely more than a century old. This could be due to several reasons, of course. Maybe the older ones are further from the steps. Or maybe the older plaques have writing in a script I cannot read. Or, perhaps, the custom of laying a plaque was started in the 20th century. We know that until the 18th or 19th centuries it had been common for kings and large landowners to donate for the upkeep of temples. As this stream dried up, it would have been natural for temples to seek donations from devotees. It is possible therefore that the custom of donating marble to the temple is fairly recent.

There are offices and rooms surrounding the steps. Many doors were locked up at the time we visited. That gave me a view of this pink door which certainly has character.

Outside the temple, the lanes were lined with shops selling religious material. Several of them did a side business in keeping the shoes of the visitors. We reclaimed ours by paying for the storage, and then took a few photos before setting off the explore the rest of the town.

Around Pushkar Lake

Pushkar is perhaps an old center for pilgrimage, having been more or less continuously inhabited since the late Paleolithic age. The name is mentioned in myths and iron age stories. The lake is enfolded within one of the oldest geological structures in Northern India, the South Delhi Fold Belt, which limits the spread of the Thar desert. With such an old history, structures have been rebuilt many times over.

We reached on a humid afternoon and had just a little time for a walk before an incredible rainstorm stranded us. In the bazaars around the lake We only saw structures which are fairly recent. The oldest could have been less than a hundred years old, but rebuilt and added on to even in the current decade. The lake front where the storm caught us (photo above) was definitely paved in the last couple of years, going by the new style of paver blocks used. Almost certainly the oldest structure would be the overhanging balcony (photo above) in the traditional style. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was from the 19th century CE. The wooden shutters on these windows looked like early to mid 20th century style. Backpackers from the west started frequenting Pushkar from the 1960s, and from the looks of it low-end foreign tourism is doing well. Quite a mixture!