Naag Pazun/Cleaning the Spring

I have never witnessed how they do it but have often wondered how they do it. How do they drain all the water from the spring? What do they find? Cleaning the spring is supposed to be a very privileged service. As my mother saw the photographs, she recalled how as a kid she witnessed naag pazun of Vichar Nag. ‘There was gold,’ she claims.

Cleaning of Kheer Bhawani Spring. July 2010.

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Update: A note on cleaning of the spring and origins of the spring from ‘Archaeological Remains In Kashmir by Pandit Anand Koul, 1935’ [book link] :

This place of pilgrimage was not visited by the Hindus during the Muhammadan rule of the country, and had been altogether forgotten by the people until about 350 years ago, when a man, named Krishna Pandit Tapilu (whose descendants are still living at Bhori Kadal in Srinagar, and whose profession is fortune-telling by looking into a book called Brihad Katha), discovered it, and since then the people have again commenced visiting it.
The worshipers offer milk, rice and sugar to the goddess, throwing them into the spring. The upper layer of the sediment formed by these things was removed only once within living memory in 1867 A.D. by a man named Diwan Narsingh Dyal. A virulent epidemic of cholera followed, and its appearance was superstitiously attributed to the wrath of the goddess having been aroused by this disturbance of the spring. Since then nobody would dare touch the spring for fear of again incurring the displeasure of the goddess. The result was that the spring had got nearly full of sediment, and the water was slowly disappearing, which caused much anxiety to the Hindus. The late Pandit Vidh Lal Dhar, the chief rais of Kashmir, boldly decided to clean the spring, and he had the enormous amount of sediments, that had been deposited in it for ages past, cleared out. The digging unearthed an ancient temple in the centre, built of large slabs of sculptured white stones, some of them nine feet long and three feet broad, and several most beautiful stone images of Hindu deities, which are marvels to the artists of the present time.
The whole shrine was repaired with money raised by pubic subscription. The late Maharaja Pratap Singh erected a pretty little marble temple on the old site in the centre of the spring.

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