Chitrakoot

Category:- All India Travel Tourism > City Guide > Madhya Pradesh > Chitrakoot

There is a strong belief that some of the events mentioned in the great epic Ramayana occured in and around Chitrakoot. It is believed that Rama, his wife Sita, and his brother Lakshmana, sought refuge in a forest that covered this entire area, after being banished from Ayodhya.

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Most of Chitrakoot's religious and leisure act

ivity revolves around the small, charming, and very central Ramghat, where boats with electric-blue mattresses and pillows create a pretty picture against a backdrop of ashrams and ghats to either side of the narrow, slow-moving river. Steps above the ghat lead to the Math Gajendranath Shiva Temple, and its picturesque river views.

Here, deep in a cave twittering with bats, water bubbles out of a spring, flows into another cave, pours down the hill and vanishes. A protrusion of black rock is identified as the voyeuristic demon Myunk. Along the pilgrim-bright ghat steps, touched by the river, are shrines dedicated to the royal assembly, the durbar, where the exiled King's brother Bharat tried to persuade him to return to the capital; one which, reportedly, marks the spot where Lord Brahma lit the sacred fires of creation; and a platform associated with one of the revered authors of the Ramayana.

Saffron-robed mendicants and pilgrims flow like confetti-streams of drifting colours along the narrow lanes of Chitrakoot, sharing it with the occasional trained elephant and inquisitive troops of monkeys.

Up a wooded hill, in a white fortress-shrine, Hanumandhara hill shrine, a spring gushes out of the living rock cooling an idol of the monkey-king Hanuman, enraged after he burst the palace of the demon king Ravana. The views of the ravine lands from here are spectacular.

Shrines have also been built around the hermitage of Sage Atri and his demure wife and her sister. These shrines are near rock-cut carvings which bear a resemblance to those of Angkor Wat in Cambodia.

Then there is the curious hill, Kamadgiri. Pilgrims to Chitrakoot traditionally perform the Parikrama, or ritual circumambulation of this wooded hill. Devotees believe that it is hollow and that in its cavernous interior sit seers wrapped in silent meditation. Only faith, apparently, can open the secret doors to this esoteric place of power.

On its course around the base of the hill, the five-kilometre path passes numerous temples and shrines, including the big Kantanath Swami Temple, which holds a modern image of Rama and Sita and a more venerated monolithic stone image, black and embellished with large eyes.

South of Chitrakoot

Several shrines linked with the Ramayana are tucked away in the region South of Chitrakoot. the major Janki Kund Temple ( " Pool of Janki"; Janki is another name for Sita ), is just 2 km south of Chitrakoot on the Satna road. Down the main road, 1 km south, a path through a complex of Ashrams leads to the large flat rock of Sphatekshila , protruding onto the river, where Sita used to sit. It supposedly bears the impressions of the feet of Rama.