When The Goddess Bleeds: Waiting For Maa Kamakhya With The Sadhus

The sky outside was still bruised with the last traces of night when I stepped into the puja room. The air smelled faintly of sandalwood and silence—the stillness that accompanies sacred routines at dawn.

Normally, the first rays of the sun would filter through the window and fall softly on the brass idols lined neatly on the altar.

Ganesha with his broken tusk and curved trunk. Shiva in his linga form, omnipresent, omniscient. Kali, fearless, with a severed head in one hand and her khadga in the other. And in the center of it all, Kamakhya, the divine mother.

A diya would be lit, its flame gently quivering in the morning breeze, accompanied by a trail of agarbatti smoke curling upwards like a question seeking heaven.

But not today.

Today, the flame remained unlit. The incense stayed in its box. The conch lay untouched.

A small brass bell sat beside the puja room, its tongue silent, its song withheld.

Today, like every other household in Assam, the ritual had been interrupted. It was not out of neglect, nor any lapse in faith. It was out of devotion.

It was Ambubachi.

As I covered the last murti, I felt a quiet stillness descend on the room—a sacred pause, a divine retreat. Even the gods, it seemed, were asked to rest today. No fire. No flowers. No offerings.

Because the Goddess herself was resting.

It is believed that on this day, the day of Pravritti, the beginning of the Ambubachi Mela, Maa Kamakhya, the bleeding Goddess of Nilachal, begins her annual menstruation.

Ambubachi is not just a religious observance. It is a metaphysical acknowledgment of Shakti, of the fertile, generative power at the heart of all life. It is, in essence, a festival that asks us to do what our culture so often refuses: to let the woman rest.

And in doing so, even the gods fall silent.

What Is Ambubachi Mela?

If there is a festival in India that manages to be both intensely sacred and socially subversive, it is the Ambubachi Mela. Not in the way of slogans or defiance, but through silence, withdrawal, and the simple act of acknowledging a truth that is as old as womanhood itself.

The pilgrims begin to arrive on foot, in buses, clinging to the backs of trucks, or crammed into auto-rickshaws, bearing not just their hopes and ailments but an unnameable yearning, like rivers returning to a hidden spring.

What they come for is not darshan, because the Goddess is not to be seen.

She is resting.

According to the legend, this is the time of the year when Maa Kamakhya, the Mother Goddess, the Great Yoni, the womb of creation itself, undergoes her menstrual cycle.

As the sun enters Mithuna (Gemini) in the Assamese month of Ahaar, the temple is closed for four days. Inside the sanctum sanctorum lies not an idol, but a cleft in the rock, shaped like a yoni, bathed in an underground spring.

It is this natural fissure, veiled by a cloth during the days of seclusion, that becomes the sacred epicentre of one of the most mystically charged festivals in India.

And so, her temple closes. No priest performs rituals. No bells are rung. No kirtan echoes through the stone corridors. No pashu bali is offered. The Goddess, being a woman, is allowed what so many women are denied: rest, solitude, and reverence in her most vulnerable moment.

Across Assam, in countless homes, mirrors are turned to the wall, clay is not touched, and cooking is done minimally. Women rest too, perhaps not as openly as the Goddess, but in a rhythm that resonates with her.

The land too is left untouched. No plough tills the field. No seed meets soil. Because the Mother is unwell, and all of creation pauses in empathy.

Her angodak, sacred fluid, is distributed after Nivritti, when temple doors reopen. The angavastra, the cloth that covers the yoni during the four days and turns red, is distributed as prasad to devotees when the temple reopens. Not hidden away. Not discarded. Not washed or purified. But folded carefully and offered, soaked in the symbolic essence of divine womanhood.

In some years, locals whisper, the waters around Nilachal run red. The Brahmaputra itself blushes. Whether it is myth, mineral, or miracle, no one can say. But the message is unmistakable: this is no place for shame.

Here, menstruation is not a flaw to be hidden, but a miracle to be honoured. It is the moment where biology meets theology, and both bow before the same truth — that all life emerges from blood and pain and patience.

Ambubachi, then, is not merely a mela. It is a theological act of reparation. A reminder that what society treats as impure is, in fact, the source of all purity. That the Goddess does not lose her power when she bleeds, she asserts it.

And if she may rest, so too must we.

It is astonishing, almost disorienting, how casually menstruation is erased from public memory in most of India. In textbooks, it’s a paragraph wrapped in medical euphemism. In homes, it’s an unspoken exile.

Women are told to stay away from temples, kitchens, and even their own beds. They’re told their bodies are impure. That their bleeding is unclean. That the very process which makes them givers of life renders them untouchable.

But once a year, atop a hill in Assam, the script flips.

Here, a bleeding Goddess becomes the centre of devotion. The very act that triggers shame elsewhere becomes sanctified. It is not suppressed. It is mythologised. And through this mythology, it is transformed into a source of divine power.

In Kamakhya, the womb is worshipped. And not metaphorically.

Kamakhya is one of the oldest Shakti Peethas, where Sati’s yoni is believed to have fallen after her body was dismembered by Vishnu’s chakra.

There are no apologies made here for biological reality. No myths to deny it. Instead, myth becomes a method of reverence. In the Ambubachi Mela, the Goddess’s menstruation is not hidden away in shame; it is awaited with devotion.

This is not just theology. It is civilisational memory, of a time when women were not seen as lesser beings, but as vessels of cosmic force. When blood was not taboo, but sacred.

Every year, the Ambubachi Mela rekindles that flame of truth in a society that has buried it under layers of modern shame.

There is no other religious festival like it in the world. No other place where menstruation becomes the reason for worship, not withdrawal. Where women are not banished, but centred. Where the fluid and the red cloth, usually associated with pollution, become prasad, bottled, folded, and taken home like a relic of grace.

Even the priests pause. Even the Brahmins stop chanting. Even the Tantrics retreat into meditation. All the machinery of religion halts, not because something profane has entered the sacred, but because the sacred has returned to its origin.

Outside the temple, meanwhile, the mela begins. And this is its great paradox: the temple remains closed, but the festival erupts. Over a million people gather on Nilachal Hill. Sadhus, babas, pilgrims, sceptics, seekers.

There are no clear rules anymore. No neat boundaries. The sacred spills into the streets, into the smoke of incense, the clang of trishuls, the rumble of devotional songs. The mountain trembles not with ritual, but with energy.

This is not a controlled holiness. It is wild, feminine, and fertile. It flows like blood. And it cannot be contained.

In a time when feminism is debated in seminars and menstrual health is a talking point for policy panels, the Ambubachi Mela offers a lesson that is neither academic nor performative. It is spiritual. And it is unflinching.

The Goddess bleeds. And the world celebrates.

The Mountain Watches

By the time I reached the foothills of Nilachal, the sun had already begun to assert its presence, not gently, but like a blazing eye cast over the city. Guwahati shimmered in heat and motion. The asphalt breathed steam. Horns blared without rhythm. But above this hum of the ordinary, a strange energy seemed to throb in the air, the kind that signals you are approaching a place not entirely of this world.

The steps to Nilachal Hill rose like a spine into the sky, cracked, ancient, and flanked by makeshift stalls. Pilgrims trudged upward barefoot, the soles of their feet blackened with dust and penance. Some carried their children on their backs; others walked with closed eyes, whispering mantras into the void. Old women clutched walking sticks wrapped in red cloth. Men wore rudraksha beads and sweat-stained vests. The air smelled of roasted peanuts, cow dung, incense, and human proximity — intimate and overwhelming.

At each turn in the climb, the mountain offered a glimpse of something holy or grotesque, depending on how you looked at it: a sadhu covered in ash crouching beneath a tarpaulin; a girl in a school uniform pressing her forehead to a stone; a naga baba with dreadlocks coiled like a crown, smoking from a chillum and staring through you rather than at you. Every step felt like a crossing, not of distance, but of layers: from the secular to the sacred, from the mundane to the mythic.

Because that was the irony of it: the temple doors were closed.

Around me, the slopes of Nilachal had transformed into a wild encampment. Families slept under open skies, their heads resting on rice sacks. Hawkers sold banana leaves, prasad baskets, and makeshift idols. Yogis offered blessings in exchange for coins or conversation. The loud were louder. The quiet were quieter. And at the centre of it all, above the throng, the spire of the Kamakhya Temple pierced the sky like a prayer unsaid.

But it was not the temple that drew my attention. It was the sadhus.

They were everywhere — standing, sitting, floating in postures that defied anatomy. One man stood on a single leg; Another had his right arm raised above his head, locked at the shoulder, the fingers curled into a twisted claw, the skin sagging like dry bark. Some were naked but for ash and beads. Others wore saffron robes that shimmered like flame. A few remained completely still, unblinking, untouched by the crowd that swirled around them.

There was a rhythm to their stillness, as if they were not inert but vibrating inwardly at a frequency we could not hear.

I found myself drawn to one in particular, an elderly sadhu, dressed in leopard skin-patterned robes, seated cross-legged beneath a neem tree, his hair coiled atop his head like a serpent, his forehead marked with three horizontal lines in sandal paste. He did not speak, nor gesture. But something about him stilled me.

I waited beside him, unsure of why I had stopped or what I expected. A moment passed. Then another.

Finally, he turned and looked at me, eyes clouded, ancient, and strangely kind. Without saying a word, he reached into the folds of his cloth bag and pulled out a one-rupee coin.

He placed it in my palm. His voice came low, gravelly, like something spoken from under the earth.

“Rakhibi,” he said. “Keep it. One day, this may help you.”

Then he smiled, not a wide, performative smile, but the kind that fades even as it appears.

I slipped the coin into my pocket, unsure of whether I had received a blessing, a warning, or a prophecy. All I knew was that I was not the same person who had begun the climb. Nilachal, like all true places of power, had begun to rearrange me.

And the Goddess hadn’t even opened her doors.

The Many Faces of Faith

It is said that during the Ambubachi Mela, Nilachal Hill becomes a magnet for madness and miracles. What the temple denies in darshan, the mountain returns in revelation. The Goddess may be behind closed doors, but her disciples walk in open view — fierce, fragile, unpredictable. They are the sadhus.

You do not find them. They appear.

They do not speak often, but when they do, it is in the language of dreams — fragmented, symbolic, and utterly sincere.

On the third bend past the temple gate, I saw a man buried up to his neck in soil. His body, if it still existed, was underground, as if growing roots in the hill itself. Only his head remained above the earth, eyes half-closed, breath shallow, lips whispering inaudibly. A few coins lay near his mound, respectfully placed. No one disturbed him. Children watched him with the wide-eyed awe they usually reserved for fire-breathers and magicians.

A little further up, a naga sadhu stood on one leg, his other foot tucked into the crook of his knee. His arms were stretched to the sky, trembling but resolute. His matted hair flowed openly touching the ground. Flies crawled over his chest; he did not flinch. Around his body, a circle of devotees sat in silence, not chanting, not praying, just watching. Their phones stayed in their pockets. Some things could not be captured.

Behind a row of banyan trees, a pair of sadhus were engaged in what looked like an argument, but may well have been a debate — about the Goddess, about karma, about whose beard had turned greyer first. They gestured wildly, laughed without warning, then turned solemn again, as if the weight of the cosmos had dropped between them mid-sentence.

One was brushing his teeth with a neem twig, humming a Bollywood tune. Another was oiling his knees and muttering about the price of diesel. A third offered to bless a family from Darbhanga for ₹10, ₹5 extra if they wanted "future protection."

Ambubachi draws the full spectrum: the renunciates and the charlatans, the mystics and the merchants. All of them part of the same strange tapestry. You learn not to judge. Even a trickster may carry truth in his bag.

I found myself returning to the sadhu who had given me the one-rupee coin earlier in the day. He was now seated by a stone ledge, watching the sun slide across the river far below.

I approached him slowly.

“Why me?” I asked, quietly.

He looked at me, not with amusement, but with the vague tiredness of someone who had spoken the same sentence across lifetimes.

Then, almost as an afterthought, he added: “Not all wealth shines. Not all help is loud.”

He was right, of course. The coin was not about money. It was about recognition. Perhaps in that moment, he had seen something in me — longing, confusion, doubt. Maybe a sadhaka. Or maybe he gave it to hundreds every day. It didn’t matter.

What mattered was how it had changed me. I carried it not as currency, but as a reminder.

Around us, the camp buzzed with movement.

A woman from Rajasthan wept softly as she pressed her forehead to a trident. A young boy with matted hair offered dry fruits to a group of naga sadhus. A group of pilgrims from Nepal sang bhajans in a dialect I couldn’t understand, but felt in my bones.

Some had come for healing. Others for fertility. Some just to be in the presence of something larger than their pain. Everyone brought something broken. Everyone hoped to leave less so.

And perhaps that is what the sadhus do. In their stillness, in their strangeness, in their surrender, they remind us of the many ways there are to kneel.

They do not preach. They do not convert. They simply exist outside the clock, somewhere between this world and the next, pointing, not always with fingers but with posture and silence, toward a life beyond the one we think we know.

And in doing so, they become more than men.

They become mirrors.

The Quiet Descent

It was time to descend.

As I retraced my steps down the hill, the crowds thinned in patches—families resting under banyan trees, sadhus settling into their corners for the night, the last of the morning pilgrims arriving just as the day’s energy was beginning to exhale. The air smelt of sweat, incense, fried lentils, and expectation held just a bit too long. My legs ached, but my heart felt lighter, as though something I had not even known I carried had been quietly set down somewhere on the mountain.

In my pocket, the one-rupee coin warmed against my thigh. I touched it once, absentmindedly, and felt again the soft weight of the sadhu’s words:
“Not all wealth shines. Not all help is loud.”

Around me, life returned to its natural rhythms. Vendors haggled, many sadhus performed half-hearted acts in side-altars open to public view, astrologers tried to read the palms of pilgrims. The main temple gates remained shut. But the Mela had never really needed them open. Kamakhya was not confined to stone and sanctum. She was everywhere: in the ash-smeared sadhus, in the slow movement of pilgrims, in the women who sat quietly by the side of the road with their offerings.

And she was within—in every girl told to hide her cycle, every mother who worked through cramps without complaint, every woman taught to be ashamed of her body’s rhythm. The mountain whispered to them all:
You are divine too. You are not impure. You are not alone.

The Ambubachi Mela, for all its crowds and contradictions, offered a kind of redemption. Not in grand gestures, but in a slow reordering of thought. Here, femininity was not a burden. It was the axis of the sacred. Here, pain was not hidden. It was honoured. Here, menstruation was not whispered about. It was worshipped.

I reached the foot of the hill just as the first streaks of evening lit the sky in gold and lavender. Behind me, Nilachal stood like a sleeping lioness, powerful even in stillness. The Goddess would continue to rest for three more days, undisturbed, unseen, unconquered. And we would wait, not with impatience, but with reverence.

On Nilachal Hill, I had come seeking the Goddess.

Kamakhya does not need to be seen to be known.
She speaks in absences.
She rules in withdrawal.
And she blesses in blood.