Hidimba Devi Temple, Dhungri Manali
— — the smell of deodar after rain.
Not only on a wall.
“A four-tier wooden pagoda in a deodar grove above the Beas valley. The temple has stood since 1553, the cedars longer. Pilgrims come up the path from the Mall Road in the afternoon; by dusk the forest holds the sound of bells. The shrine is small, the trees enormous, the quiet older than either.
Hidimba Devi Temple, Dhungri Manali, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The temple stands in Dhungri Van Vihar, a cedar reserve roughly 1.5 km from Manali's Mall Road, in the Kullu district of Himachal Pradesh. The structure is a four-tiered pagoda of carved deodar, built in 1553 by Maharaja Bahadur Singh. It honours Hidimba Devi, the rakshasi who married Bhima during the Pandavas' forest exile in the Mahabharata. The grove sits near 2,000 metres above sea level on the western shoulder of the Beas valley, beneath the higher slopes leading toward Solang and Rohtang.
The grove is what makes the site. Cedrus deodara, the Himalayan cedar sacred across the Western Himalaya, reaches forty metres here, with trunks several centuries older than the shrine. The canopy keeps the temple cool through the Kullu summer and damps the noise from Old Manali below. After monsoon rain the air carries the resinous note of crushed cedar needles, the same scent the temple's beams have held since the sixteenth century. Local langurs move through the upper branches without ceremony.
The temple opens daily and is free to enter; the walk in from the Mall Road takes twenty minutes through the cedar reserve. Photography is permitted in the grove but not inside the sanctum. The annual Dhungri Mela falls in mid-May and draws families from across the Kullu valley with folk dance, music, and offerings. Mornings before nine are quietest. Evenings belong to the bells and the slow light filtered through cedar.