Eras Through Her
The Feminine Timeline of Karoonjhar
by Areesha Khuwaja (Pakkhee)
In South Asia, the feminine has always been more than a symbol. It is a vessel: of memory, of wisdom, of survival. Women here do not merely witness time; they carry it. Their bodies hold the echoes of land, their rituals encode resilience, and their stories pass on truths too complex for linear history. From whispered lullabies to ritual dances, from silences to sensory memory, women are the keepers of folklore, of loss, of sacredness. They hold multitudes, contradictions, transformations, just like the land.
Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai, Sindh’s beloved poet-saint, understood this. He was not merely a poet but a curator of living memory. He didn’t collect things; he collected winds, silences, footsteps. This tradition stretches across South Asia. Meera Bai’s devotional songs carried a lineage of longing and surrender; Heer’s defiance in love became a parable of agency; Mai Bhago’s valor preserved spiritual courage; Nagarparkar’s own Hothlal Pari, a mythical guardian of the springs, embodied feminine protection and transformation; Shakuntala’s story, wrapped in natural memory, gave form to loss and return. In the Mahabharata, Gandhari and Kunti embodied grief and dharma in silence. Even in Punjab and Sindh, Sehras sung at weddings become living vessels, transmitting not just joy but inherited truths. And in Sindh’s seven Surmiyoon, Bhittai offered us warrior-princesses who blurred the boundaries between myth and memory, grounding metaphysical truths in lived landscapes. Through women like Marvi, he exhibited the soul of Sindh: its love for land, its resistance to seduction, its refusal to forget. In this way, Bhittai archived the unspeakable in verse. But what if these archives, held so subtly, remain unread by those who build our dominant narratives?
Karoonjhar too is a curator. Its ancient granite slopes have outlived empires. Through Parvati, Sita, Draupadi, and Kali, it has witnessed the passing of time not as a series of empires, but as shifts in consciousness, ethics, and belonging. Each Yuga, or cosmic age, is reflected through a feminine embodiment in this landscape.
Parvati and Ganesha at Karoonjhar - Mixed media by Pakkhee. Background photograph of Karoonjhar Mountains by Dileep Permar. This illustration imagines Parvati, the mountain’s daughter and a symbol of Satya Yuga’s harmony, seated with her son Ganesha amid the ancient pink granite of Nagarparkar - a sacred landscape of memory and myth.
Satya Yuga: Parvati and the Flowering of Non-Violence
At the Krishna Mandir in Palan Bazaar, we met Pandit Chaturlal Nanjimal Lohano - an elder, a keeper of memory, and a gentle guide through the vanished worlds of Nagarparkar. His words echoed with the calm conviction of someone who had lived through silence and remembered everything. It was he who told us of a time when Jain women bathed at Kajlasar before sunrise, their kohl leaving black trails on the sacred water, signs of a feminine devotion etched into the land itself.
In the beginning was harmony. Satya Yuga is the age of truth, balance, and wholeness. It is Parvati’s era: the daughter of the mountain, the stillness within stone. Her essence is not conquest, but union. Here in Karoonjhar, her presence is felt in the granite’s calm, in the desert bloom after rain. Her energy radiates through the Jain philosophy that once flourished here.
The Śvetāmbara Jain community, anchored in radical non-violence, mirrored Parvati’s gentleness. Their belief was so refined they wouldn’t even strike metal. Jainism in this region was not just a religion; it was a mode of being, a flowering. Their temples rose in white marble against the pink rock; their rituals wove into the daily lives of Nagarparkar’s people. Here, the sacred was not above life; it was within it.
“She Who Refused” animation by Pakkhee. Sita shapeshifts into Marvi — myth into memory, exile into rootedness.
Treta Yuga: Sita and Marvi: The Sacred Refusal
Treta Yuga saw the emergence of doubt, exile, and trial. It was Sita’s age; unjustly banished, yet steadfast in grace. Her story is mirrored in that of Marvi, as curated by Bhittai. Where Sita walked forests, Marvi walked the desert. Where Sita refused the comforts of Ravana’s palace, Marvi refused the seductions of the king.
Bhittai’s portrayal of Marvi was a revolution. He gave us not a princess, but a village girl whose love for land surpassed all riches. Her sense of place was sensual - the smell of wet clay, the warmth of a woven mat, the water from Marvi’s well. These weren’t symbols. They were her truth. In Sindh, Sita and Marvi are not separate, they’re echoes of each other. They remind us that the divine feminine lies in remembering.
One such story is that of Kasu Bha Sodho, a local farmer and custodian of this land, who refused to migrate during Partition. When his family chose to leave for India, he stayed behind. He is remembered to have said, "If you want to take me to India, then take Karoonjhar along with me." His words were not just poetic. They reflected a truth held deep within the soil of this place. Like Marvi, he saw no value in riches if they came at the cost of leaving his land. His stance, quiet and firm, echoed the essence of both Sita and Marvi. For him, love for land was not symbolic. It was embodied.
“Defiant Flame” animation by Pakkhee. Draupadi burns, eyes unyielding — a fire that remembers and refuses.
Dvapara Yuga — Draupadi and the Turning of the Age
Dvapara Yuga is the age of fire, injustice, and awakening. Draupadi, born of fire, embodies this age’s moral complexity. Her story is not one of quiet refusal but of public defiance. Her humiliation in court did not destroy her; it lit a spark that burned through empires.
In Karoonjhar, this Yuga mirrors the moment when stewardship turned to control. The Jain exodus was not a singular event, but a painful shift, brought on by Thakurs who imposed heavy taxes and made life untenable. After Partition,
a second wave of departures followed, as many Hindu villages left the region. Among them were the Lohanos, whose 24 villages slowly emptied, leaving only two that endured for a while longer. Pandit Chaturlal, himself not Jain but a descendant of those who stayed, recalls these changes not as abstractions, but as lived experience. Draupadi’s rage lives in the resilience of those who remained; not in rebellion, but in the quiet fury of remembering what was once sacred and held in common trust.
“Fierce Mother" animation by Pakkhee. Kali hovers over Karoonjhar in her wrathful form — keeper of the sacred amid forgetting.
Kali Yuga: Kali and the Light in the Dark
Kali Yuga is our present: an age of forgetting, of skepticism, of desecration. Yet, crucially, it is also an age of awakening. Kali is not the end; she is the fire that lights the end so something new can begin. She is fierce, fragmented, furious, but she is profoundly alive.
In Karoonjhar, Kali is Shamoon Kohli dancing barefoot in Palan Bazaar after decades of silence. She is the diya still flickering even in the darkest hour, a truth I found in Pandit Chaturlal's reflections. Rajput men sing of former glory, taking refuge in ritual, in longing, in substances to ease the ache. But that ache is real; a yearning for the sacred that once was.
And yet, the divine never left. It lives among children who call the mountain their brother: Doongar maro bha la. Among villagers who call Nagarparkar the land of peace: Aman ji nagri. The divine is in the way the granite hums, in how birds return, in how the wind knows your name.
As for me, I animate these stories because I hear them. I walk this land and it speaks. Through animism, I try to make others see what I see: that the mountain is not background, it is kin. This land needs not owners, but custodians. Not extractors, but stewards.
One story that remains with me is that of the woman from Vikasar, married across the border in Gujarat, tormented by an unrelenting migraine that no treatment could cure. It was only when she tasted a lentil from her homeland that her body remembered what her mind could not articulate. Her journey back to Sardharo, to return the skull of a deer entangled in her spirit from a past life, is more than a tale of healing; it is an act of ecological memory. The pond at Sardharo is still spoken of as sacred. Not for what was built there, but for what was remembered there. The water held her grief, her return, her resolution. This is what sacredness in Kali Yuga looks like; not grand temples, but quiet recognition. Not rituals imposed, but gestures of belonging restored. Even now, the hills around Sardharo are home to the last Chinkara gazelles, whose presence carries not only ecological importance but the weight of story. Their survival is not just a matter of conservation; it is a matter of cultural memory. And when locals protect them from hunters, they are not just defending animals; they are defending a world.
During this residency, we reflected on locality; not as a boundary but as a relationship. We acted with the land, not on it. We listened to what the rocks said. We blurred the lines between human and non-human, not to disappear, but to belong. Because in belonging, the sacred returns. And in every Yuga, through every woman, it always has.