Kullu

The valley

The Pal rajas of Kullu claimed a line reaching back to the early centuries CE — the same country as the Kulūta of the Vīrayaśas coins — and ruled the upper Beas from Jagatsukh, then Naggar, and finally Sultanpur near modern Kullu town. The valley's isolation behind high passes preserved a distinctive culture: timber-and-stone temple architecture, and a dense population of village deities with their own territories, palanquins and mediums.

In the seventeenth century Raja Jagat Singh, seeking expiation for the death of a brahmin, had an image of Raghunath brought from Ayodhya and formally made the deity the ruler of Kullu, himself governing as its servant. The device is the same one Travancore used a century later, and in Kullu it is still observed.

The Dussehra

The Kullu Dussehra begins when the rest of India's has ended. Several hundred village deities are carried down from their valleys to the Dhalpur maidan to attend Raghunath, in a week-long assembly that is both a religious festival and the annual convening of the valley's political order — precedence, disputes and standing among the deities are all worked out in it.

It is among the clearest surviving expressions of a Himalayan polity in which the god, not the king, is sovereign, and in which the relations between villages are conducted through their deities.

Kullu passed to the British in 1846 and was administered as part of Kangra district rather than restored as a state.