Where Shiva Wept

[sandhu786]

@thejoke

I have been to many places in Pakistan but sadly never devoted myself to the salt Range region. Has anyione been here? I hope to definitely go to this place on my next non-summer visit.

where shiva wept
Footloose, NOS, The News International

Where Shiva wept…
If all goes well, Ketas will yet again thrive as a pilgrimage site
By Salman Rashid
For those who believe, the pond at Ketas (near the town of Choa Saidan Shah in Chakwal district) was formed by his tears when an inconsolable Shiva wept for his dead wife Sati. And so the pond is sacred to the Hindus. Among the tirathas in the subcontinent, Ketas, because of its connection with Shiva, ranks among the holiest. In this pond the devout tell their children to strew their ashes after they die, here they long to visit in their lifetimes. And when they do come, they carry away bottles of the sacred water – the magical talisman to cure all ills, to banish all worldly cares, to cleanse all impurities of body and soul.
Long before the Shaivites took over this site and raised their temples to Shiva, Ketas was sacred to other religions. We do not know the gods they worshipped here five thousand years ago, but since the spread of Buddhism, Ketas was a great and bustling monastery. In 631 Xuanzang, the Chinese Buddhist master, travelled from Taxila to the town of Singhapura in the midst of mountains.
We now know from the work of great archaeologists that Singhapura is today marked by the village of Dulmial a kilometre and a half to the north of Ketas. Having billeted himself there, the pilgrim visited the monastery and the stupa. He was horrified to see it deserted and without priests. The stupa, so Xuanzang tells us, had been raised by Asoka and was at the time of his visit in ruins.
Only a hundred years before the pilgrim’s visit, Punjab had been laid waste by the barbaric Huns under Mehr Gul (Mihiragula) and flourishing Buddhism had suffered considerably. This setback to the prevalent religion permitted Hinduism to go on the ascendant. It was then that the Shiva legend replaced earlier Buddhist legends the same way as even older tales were taken over by the Buddhists a thousand years earlier.
In the five hundred years of peace between the overthrow of the Huns and the invasions of the Turks, the Salt Range was adorned with a number of temples by the Hindu Shahya rulers of Punjab and Pukhtunkhwa. At Ketas they raised a complex because there stand three edifices that can clearly be dated to the late 11th century. Built of dark calciferous limestone, they stand apart from the stone and mortar buildings of later times.
Overlooking the sacred pond is the main Shaivite temple and with it an arc of ancillary buildings. Adjacent to the main temple is the fortress like residence of Sardar Hari Singh Nalwa that he ordered when he governed the Salt Range in the early years of the 19th century.
Following the transmigration of partition, Ketas was laid waste a second time. The temples were desecrated, Nalwa’s palace destroyed, its rafters removed to build other homes. In fact, the roofs of most of the buildings were dismantled and the material used elsewhere. In the mid-1980s a half-hearted attempt at restoration was made when a group of pilgrims were to visit from India. This was restricted to white-washing of a couple of buildings and no more.
So aggressive was the neglect that for a time it seemed Ketas had been consigned to doom. But miracles never cease in this land and the Punjab Archaeology Department (PAD) has recently acquired the temple complex from the federal government. Among other things Hari Singh’s palace has been fixed with doors that had long ago been wrenched out to adorn other homes and its roofs are being redone.
That is a good beginning because PAD has great plans in store: Ketas, if all goes well, will yet again thrive as a pilgrimage site. It will yet be pulled back from the brink.

Mods. please delete this posting as it relates to Hindu King Shiva and the author, Indian Hindu Salman Rashid once wrote “Satanic Verses” to humiliate all muslims.