Chamundi Hill: Climbing the 1,008 Steps Before Dasara

In Mysuru you do not have to look for the hill. It is simply there, east of everything, a long green back with a white speck of gopuram on it, and you spend your whole life orienting yourself by it without noticing. Then one morning in Ashwina you find yourself at the bottom of it in the dark, shoes left in the car, and the hill stops being scenery.

I learned counting from a music teacher, and I cannot climb this hill without hearing her. A tala is not a number you know; it is a number you keep. Nobody gets credit for understanding that a cycle has sixteen beats. You get credit for being on the first beat again when it comes round. The 1,008 steps work the same way. The figure is easy. The keeping is the whole thing.

What the number actually means

There are, by tradition, one thousand and eight steps from the foot of the hill to the temple at the top. The hill stands at about 1,060 metres, some thirteen kilometres east of the city.

A thousand and eight is a japa number — the count of a full round on a long rosary, the number you reach when you have stopped negotiating with yourself about how many. Whoever settled on it was not measuring a gradient. They were prescribing a practice.

The steps were cut in 1659, under Dodda Devaraja Wodeyar. Somebody with the power to build anything looked at a hill people were already climbing and decided the useful, permanent thing was to make the climb possible — dressed stone laid up a slope, so that an old woman could get to the goddess without scrambling. Three and a half centuries later the same stones are still doing the job. Most donations do not age that well.

Before light, because of the stone

You start early for an unglamorous reason: the granite. By nine the exposed stretches are hot enough that barefoot stops being devotion and becomes a problem to be solved, and people hop from shadow to shadow, which ruins the rhythm. Before six the stone is cool and slightly damp, almost soft underfoot, and the hill is quiet except for other people breathing.

The steps are not uniform. Some flights are shallow and quick and flatter you. Then there is a run of tall, deep ones that break whatever pace you had settled into, and you understand that the stair was cut to the rock and not to your legs. This is where first-timers make their only real mistake: attacking the shallow stretches. Find a tempo slow enough that you are slightly bored by it, then refuse to change it. You will pass, on the way up, the people who ran the first two hundred.

Look down as you go and you will see that almost every step is marked — smears and thumbprints of kumkum, layer on layer, the red gone brown where it has been walked over a thousand times. People touch each step and mark it as they climb. It is the least photogenic thing on the hill and the most affecting: a staircase that has been worshipped one step at a time, by hand, for generations.

The bull, roughly halfway

About halfway up, the stairway opens out and there is a Nandi, and it is not a small one: something close to five metres tall and seven and a half long, cut from a single block of black granite, garlanded, its flanks polished dark by the hands of everyone who has ever stopped there. Accounts of its date disagree — you will see it credited to the same seventeenth-century building push as the steps, and you will also see it called far older — so I will not pretend to settle it.

Everyone rests here. Vendors sell buttermilk and cut cucumber with salt. The trick is not to sit long: ten minutes on that ledge and the calves cool and stiffen and the second half costs you double. Take the water, touch the stone, keep going.

The air changes on the upper flights. Mysuru is a sandalwood city — the government factory, the soap, the oil, the worn-down billet of it in half the households here — and near the top you start getting sandal paste, camphor and incense coming down to meet you, mixed with damp granite and crushed marigold. It is why ours is a sandalwood house too, and why a plain chandan stick still smells to me like altitude.

Arriving

The last stretch delivers you at the side of the temple, and then you walk round and the gopuram is above you, seven tiers of it, pale and crowded with figures. Worship on this hill is very old; the Wodeyars took Chamundeshwari as their family deity, and Krishnaraja Wodeyar III gave the temple a substantial renovation and a good deal of jewellery in 1827. There is an older Shiva shrine on the hill too, Mahabaleshwara, which predates the goddess's temple and which almost nobody in the queue is thinking about.

The queue is the last part of the discipline, and the part nobody warns you about. You have just climbed for an hour and now you stand still, sweating, in a slow line, and the temptation is to feel you have earned something. That is rather the point of arriving on foot: by the time you reach the door you are too tired to be pleased with yourself.

Above the temple stands the statue of Mahishasura, sword in one hand, cobra in the other. The city is named for him — Mahishuru, the place of Mahisha, worn down over centuries into Mysuru — and the goddess at the top is Mahishasura Mardini, the one who ended him. Say it plainly and it is an unusual arrangement: the city carries the name of the defeated, and keeps his likeness on the summit, facing out.

Dasara 2026, and a date worth checking

All of this is ordinary for most of the year. In Ashwina it is not.

Sharad Navratri begins this year with Ghatasthapana on Sunday 11 October 2026, and Mysuru's Dasara has been announced as an eleven-day festival running 11 to 21 October. The royal Dasara here is old and self-consciously inherited: Raja Wadiyar is recorded as beginning a ten-day Dasara at Srirangapatna in 1610, taking up a court festival the Vijayanagara kings had kept before him.

Now the part to actually diary. Vijayadashami across most of India falls on Tuesday 20 October 2026 — but Mysuru's Vijayadashami, and with it the Jamboo Savari, falls on Wednesday 21 October. It is not a discrepancy. Dashami tithi begins in the afternoon of the 20th and runs to the afternoon of the 21st, so it is the 21st that holds Dashami at sunrise, and the city's Vijaya muhurat sits in the early afternoon of that day. The 20th here is Mahanavami, when the royal sword is worshipped and carried out in procession — the local form of Ayudha Puja.

If you are travelling for the procession, book for the 21st. People have got this wrong before.

Karnataka itself is not one answer. Kollur Mookambika, in Udupi district, keeps its Vidyarambham on the 20th — the day the tithi opens — while Mysuru waits for the morning it stands at sunrise. One tithi, two reckonings, inside a single state.

The Jamboo Savari itself is the image everyone knows: Chamundeshwari carried in a golden howdah, reported at around 750 kilograms, on a tusker, from the palace to Bannimantap. What gets less attention is the destination. Bannimantap takes its name from the banni — the shami tree, the one the Pandavas are said to have hidden their weapons in during their year in disguise, and returned to on this day to take them up again. The procession is not a victory lap. It is a collection: going back to where you left your work, and picking it up.

If you are going to climb

Start by five, and reckon on an hour and a quarter at a pace you are not proud of. Carry less water than you think and buy more on the way. Going down hurts differently and takes longer than people expect, so during Dasara, when the crowd on the stair is continuous from before dawn, it is entirely reasonable to walk up and come down by bus.

And if you cannot climb, take the road. The goddess has never once been reported to check.

But if your knees will take it, do it in the dark, at a dull tempo, touching each step. Not because a thousand and eight steps buys you anything. Because a count you keep, beat after beat, without hurrying and without stopping, is one of the few things a person can actually offer.