Each year, many residents of the small town of Ramtek, Maharashtra gather at a modest temple (Figures 6.1 and 6.2) about halfway up the large, steep hill at the center of town to celebrate Maha Shivaratri—“The Great Night of Śiva.” For this annual festival of devotion to Śiva, the image inside this temple—a śivalinġ a known by the name Dhūmreśvara (Figure 6.3)—becomes the focus of attention despite there being several other similar images scattered about town. Śambūka and Dhūmresv́ ara are, in fact, one and the same. Though worshipped by a different name, Śambūka's identity as Dhūmreśvara is on full display on signs and posters and in pamphlets and inscriptions, leaving visitors to the temple fully aware that when they approach the śiva-linġ a, they are approaching Śambūka. I will outline in this chapter how Śambūka came to be known by this name and how, of all places, Ramtek Hill came to house the world's only temple to Śambūka. To do so, I focus on four historical periods of development in the area: the Vākāṭaka period, the Yādava period, the Marāṭhā period, and, finally, Ramtek today. Literature and structures from these periods provide us with an amalgamation of historical layers on Ramtek Hill spanning over one thousand years. In following this pathway through the area's history, we see how the early literary and material foundations associated with the town's central hill primed the area to welcome Śambūka as a permanent fixture of local Hindu religious life.

Ramtek and the Vākātakas

Kālidāsa has already proven himself crucial to our unfolding narrative about the evolution of the Śambūka story through his innovations to the episode as it appears in his Raghuvaṃsá (RaV). Chapter 3 outlined a changing and increasingly institutionalized Vaiṣṇavism emerging in the Gupta Empire and Kālidāsa's contribution to this. In his RaV, Kālidāsa reimagined Śambūka's path after death through a paradigm of redemption, a striking departure from Śambūka's fate in the VR.