Harelo Devata

In the royal palace of the kingdom of Lamjung there worked a simple and hardworking ploughman named Hare. In the month of Asar, after he had ploughed the fields and finished the work of planting, he was seized by a strong craving for tobacco.

At that time the queen herself had entered the mud of the field and was planting rice. Hare humbly asked the queen for a little tobacco. Seeing that both her hands were smeared with mud, the queen said: "My hands are muddy; take the tobacco from the inner pocket of my blouse yourself and smoke it."

Following the queen's command, Hare took the tobacco from the pocket of her blouse and smoked it. But a wicked field-worker watching from afar went to the king and falsely slandered him, saying, "The ploughman has violated the queen's honour."

In a fit of anger, without any inquiry, the king ordered the death sentence for the innocent ploughman. Thinking it better to die than to live bearing the stain of a crime he had not committed, Hare leapt into the surging flood of the Marsyangdi river with his plough and oxen and died.

After the ploughman's death, the king began to have terrible dreams at night. Hare's spirit spoke in the dream: "I lost my life without any fault. Now I shall become worms and insects and destroy all your grain crops."

And so it came to pass: a terrible blight and insects struck the crops throughout the kingdom, and famine fell. The king realized his mistake, begged Hare for forgiveness, and proclaimed him the "Harelo deity". It became the custom for farmers to worship on the first Tuesday after Krishna Ashtami each year for the protection of the grain crops, and Harelo Devata became worshipped as the protector of farmers.