Chitrakuta

Chitrakuta is a sacred landscape of wooded hills and the Mandakini River in the Vindhyas. The Ramayana places Rama, Sita and Lakshmana here during their exile, and tells how Bharata came to ask Rama to return to Ayodhya. Pilgrims bathe at Ramghat and walk around Kamadgiri, the hill revered as Rama’s abode. Caves, riverbanks and shrines throughout the area are linked to episodes of the epic.

Chitrakuta also figures in the traditions surrounding the poet Tulsidas, whose retelling of Rama’s story became a great work of devotion in the sixteenth century. Local legend says that he received a vision of Rama at Ramghat. Fairs draw worshippers to the river and the circuit of Kamadgiri, joining the remembered landscape of the epic to the living practice of pilgrimage.