Heeding her words, the king then performed a penance that lasted for a millennium for Shiva at Kailasa, and sought his cooperation in allowing Ganga to flow through his hair.

Bhagiratha performed another penance to please Shiva, until the deity shook his hair and allowed a single drop to descend upon the Indo-Gangetic plain, which became the Ganges.

[6] The mythical pātāla where the sage Kapila meditated is identified with the Sāgar Island, at the confluence of the Bhagirathi stream of the Ganges (flowing by Kolkata and revered as Ganga) and the Bay of Bengal.

It was with the insistent entreaties of Bhagiratha that the sage consented to push the river out through his ear, which offered the goddess the epithet Jahnavi.

The deity instructs the king to worship Vishnu, who is the equivalent of Shiva, and informs him of his future of freeing his ancestors from Naraka by causing the descent of the Ganga.

[citation needed] This story may first be attested in the Bengali-script recension of the Sanskrit Padma Purana; it recurs in the influential, probably fifteenth-century CE Bengali Krittivasi Ramayan, and thereafter in other texts from Bengal such as Bhavananda's Harivansha, Mukundarama Chakravartin's Kavikankanachandi, and the sixteenth-century Ramayana by Adbhutacharya.

However, the baby is deformed (in the Padma Purana version, for example he is boneless, while in the Krittivasi Ramayan he is merely a lump of flesh) until he encounters the crippled sage Ashtavakra, who transforms him into a beautiful, strong child/youth.

A sculpture of Bhagiratha can be seen beneath the spout of almost every dhunge dhara (hiti) or tutedhara (jarun, jahru, jaladroni), two types of drinking fountain found in the old settlements of Nepal.