Pehowa (Prithudak Tirtha)

Pehowa, on the banks of the now largely seasonal Saraswati river in Haryana’s Kurukshetra district, is one of Hindu tradition’s most significant Pitru Tirthas — sites where pilgrims perform pind daan and shraddha rites for deceased ancestors. Lying within the traditional 48 Kos Parikrama that marks out the wider sacred geography of Kurukshetra, the town is known in this context as Prithudak Tirtha, and resident pandas here maintain genealogical registers documenting generations of pilgrim families who have come to perform these rites on the Saraswati’s banks. Local tradition holds that Krishna himself brought the Pandavas to Pehowa in the lead-up to the Mahabharata war, adding an epic-era layer to the site’s ancestral significance.

Pehowa’s antiquity as a pilgrimage and temple town is independently attested by inscriptional evidence rather than legend alone: a Kartikeya temple at the site is attributed to around the 5th century, ninth-century inscriptions record the Tomara dynasty’s construction of three separate Vishnu temples here, and a further inscription dated 882-883 CE describes Prithudaka as host to a major fair especially known for horse trading — evidence of the town’s importance as a religious and commercial hub over a thousand years ago. An ancient Saraswati temple on the riverbank continues this multi-deity character today, making Pehowa a rare Haryana site combining a documented Saraswati-river association, Shaiva and Vaishnava temple history, and living ancestral-rites pilgrimage in one place.