Golu Devta

Golu Devta, also called Goril or Goljyu, is the god of justice of Kumaon, in the hills of Uttarakhand. His shrines, of which the most famous is at Chitai near Almora, with others at Ghorakhal and Champawat, function openly as courts: petitioners write out their grievances, sometimes on stamped legal paper, and hang them at the temple, and when a plea is answered they return to offer a brass bell. The shrines are hung with thousands upon thousands of bells and letters, layered over decades into walls of testimony.

The tradition

Local tradition remembers Golu as a prince of the Kumaon hills, commonly linked to the house of Champawat, and as an embodiment of Gaur Bhairav, a form of Shiva. In the best-known telling, his mother's jealous co-wives substituted a stone for the newborn and set him adrift on the river; raised by a fisherman's family, the boy returned riding a wooden horse, and by asking publicly how a queen could give birth to a stone he exposed the deception. As king he judged with such fairness that after his death the hills kept him as their judge. His mount remains the white horse, and images of it stand at his shrines.

Worship

Golu is petitioned for the settling of disputes, the recovery of what has been wrongly taken, and protection from injustice of every kind. He is also invoked through jagar, the Kumaoni tradition of ritual possession, in which the god speaks through a medium to give judgment. For many Kumaoni families he is the ishta devata, the chosen household god, and no undertaking of consequence begins without his name.