Parashurama

Parashurama, Rama with the axe (parashu), is the sixth avatar of Vishnu and the only brahmin among the avatars, given his weapon by Shiva. His is the most morally uncomfortable of the avatar stories. At his father's command he beheads his own mother, then asks, as his granted boon, for her to be restored to life; and when the warrior-king Kartavirya Arjuna kills his father, Parashurama destroys the entire kshatriya (warrior-ruler) class twenty-one times over, a divine slaughter of the ruling order that the tradition preserves without quite domesticating. He is one of the chiranjivi, the immortals held to be alive still, which lets the epics place him as the teacher of Bhishma, Drona and Karna in the Mahabharata, inside a story set long after his own age. Coastal Karnataka and Kerala are said to be land he reclaimed from the sea by hurling his axe, and he is a patron figure of that coast.

A pilgrimage site in the far northeast of India, Parashurama Kunda, a pool located in Arunachal Pradesh near the border with Assam, is traditionally identified as the place where Parashurama came to wash away the sin of killing his mother and, in some tellings, the blood of the kshatriyas he had destroyed, plunging his axe into the earth to cleave a route for the water to reach him or bathing directly in the pool's waters until his guilt was cleansed. The site draws a large annual gathering of pilgrims around the festival of Makar Sankranti in mid-January, when Hindu devotees, alongside members of local tribal communities for whom the site and surrounding hills carry their own separate significance, converge for ritual bathing believed to wash away sin more generally, following the precedent Parashurama himself is said to have set there.

The pilgrimage sits in a region far removed from the western coastal areas of Kerala and Karnataka more commonly associated with Parashurama's land-reclamation legends, illustrating how a single itinerant avatar figure, already noted for his unusually long and geographically wide-ranging mythological career as one of the chiranjivi, could accumulate distinct and geographically separated sacred sites across the subcontinent, each preserving a different local tradition of his wandering and his search for expiation, with relatively little textual effort made to reconcile the precise itinerary connecting the northeastern pilgrimage site to his more southerly, coastal legends.