I began thinking about this book in the city of Banāras on the River Gangā in north India more than twenty-five years ago. I was then writing a book about that great city, a place I presumed to be the most important sacred city of India. Over the centuries, many visitors to Banāras, or Vārānasī, have compared this city in sanctity and preeminence to Mecca, Jerusalem, and Rome, as the holiest center of Hindu pilgrimage. For example, in the 1860s, a British civil servant, Norman Macleod, wrote effusively, “Benares is to the Hindoos what Mecca is to the Mohammedans, and what Jerusalem was to the Jews of old. It is the ‘holy’ city of Hindostan. I have never seen anything approaching to it as a visible embodiment of religion; nor does anything like it exist on earth.”1 The singling out of a center toward which an entire religious community turns in collective memory or in prayer made sense to Macleod, as it does for many who have been schooled in the habits of thought shaped by Western monotheistic consciousness. Even in India, there have been many who would agree on the central and supreme significance of Banāras, which Hindus also called Kāshī, the Luminous, the City of Light.2 This is a powerful and ancient city, its dense maze of alleyways as dark as its riverfront is radiant. Its morning bathing rites facing the rising sun and its smoking cremation grounds right there along the riverfront are the heartbeat of a city that never fails to leave a lasting imprint on the visitor or pilgrim.
I lived off and on for years in Banāras. Even as I investigated the legends and temples of this city, however, I began gradually to understand what most Hindus who visit the city already know—that Banāras does not stand alone as the great center of pilgrimage for Hindus, but is part of an extensive network of pilgrimage places stretching throughout the length and breadth of India. The very names of the temples, the ghāts, and the bathing tanks of the city are derived from this broader landscape, just as the names of Kāshī and its great Shiva temple of Vishvanātha are to be found in pilgrimage places all over India. I began to realize that the entire land of India is a great network of pilgrimage places—referential, inter-referential, ancient and modern, complex and ever-changing. As a whole, it constitute what would have to be called a “sacred geography,” as vast and complex as the whole of the subcontinent. In this wider network is pilgrimage, nothing, not even the great city of Banāras, stands alone, but rather everything is part of a living, storied, and intricately connected landscape.
The bathing ghāts of Kāshī’s great riverfront
At first, I resisted the complexities of this peripheral vision, still interested as I was in establishing what makes this one place special, different from the rest. It became clear to me, however, that I could understand Banāras only in the context of a much wider system of meanings in which significance is marked not by uniqueness, but by multiplicity, even in the great city of Kāshī. Everything about the holy city seemed to be duplicated elsewhere, set amid a pattern of symbolic signification that made Banāras not unique, but inextricably part of a wider landscape shaped by the repetition and linking of its features. I began to realize that Kāshī was not the center, but one of multiple centers in a fascinating and poly-centric landscape, linked with the tracks of pilgrimage.
The most important of the religious claims of this sacred city is that Kāshī, the City of Light, is a place of spiritual liberation, which is called moksha or mukti. Kashyām maranam muktih, they say. “Death in Kāshī is liberation.” Pilgrims come to Kāshī from all over India to live out their old age and die a good death there. In this, Kāshī is special, famous for death, some would say preeminent. And yet Kāshī is also said to be one of seven cities that bestow moksha, including Ayodhyā, Mathurā, Hardvār, Kānchī, Ujjain, and Dvārakā. These seven are all called mokshadāyaka, the givers of spiritual freedom. Kāshī is also said to be the earthly manifestation of Shiva’s luminous sacred emblem, the linga of light, where Shiva’s infinite shaft of light pierced the earth. And yet so are at least eleven other places, all renowned throughout India, the whole group known as the twelve lingas of light. As I studied Banāras years ago, their names were just names to me, although each of these renowned sites of Shiva was represented by a temple within the sacred structure of Kāshī, as well. I began to realize that the famous goddesses of Kāshī are also linked to hundreds of goddesses in a network of association called the shākta pithas, or “power seats,” of the Goddess. The River Gangā, skirting the city, with its famous bathing ghāts, is one of the “seven Gangās” of India, including the Narmadā, Godāvarī, and Kāverī Rivers, each of which lays claim to the heavenly origin and gracious power of the Gangā that flows past Banāras in north India. This whole sacred zone of Kāshī is said to have a radius of five kroshas, about ten miles, and this zone is circled by a famous five-day pilgrimage called the panchakroshī, with five stops along the way. Gradually, I discovered that the panchakroshī is not a unique pilgrimage, but a type of fivefold pilgrimage that is also found in Ayodhyā, in Omkāreshvara on the Narmadā River, on Mount Brahmāgiri in Maharashtra, and in dozens of other places. And, to top it off, Kāshī itself is duplicated, with cities and temples all over India called the “Kāshī of the South,” the “Kāshī of the North,” or the “Hidden Kāshī” of the Himalayas.
One afternoon on an early trip into the Himalayas, I stopped at one of these other Kāshīs: Gupta Kāshī, the “Hidden Kāshī,” high in the valley of the Mandākinī River, one of the tributaries of the Gangā. Here, in this small village, I found a stout Kāshī Vishvanātha temple. In front of the temple there was a finely built kund, a bathing tank, called Manikarnikā after the bathing tank at Manikarnikā, the great cremation ground, in Kāshī. The bathing tank was fed by cold springs, the waters of which were said to come directly from Gangotrī and Yamunotrī, the Himalayan headwaters of the Gangā and Yamunā Rivers. Gomukh, the Cow’s Mouth, as we shall see, is the name of the place high above Gangotrī where the first trickle of the Gangā emerges from the edge of a glacier. I recalled that in the great Kāshī down on the plains, Manikarnikā Kund is also fed, so they say, by an underground spring flowing directly from Gomukh. The clear connections that linked this small village, its temple, and its bathing tank with Kāshī and the larger sacred geography of India made real for me the notions I had read in the texts for many years. I found that Gupta Kāshī is also linked to the great stories of the Mahābhārata, as are many places in the Himalayas. The Pāndava brothers and Draupadī came this way as they climbed into the mountains on their last earthly journey, they say. Here the five Pāndavas left their war clubs, which they would need no more, and the clubs are there today, in the small temple of Shiva’s manifestation Bhairava.3
During these subsequent years, I have traveled many thousands of miles on the pilgrim tracks of this wider sacred geography, trying to understand from the ground up the ways in which India has been composed through the centuries as a sacred landscape. I took careful notes of the duplication of sacred places, the networks of sacred rivers, the systematizing of lingas of light, the proliferation of seats of the Goddess. I visited the headwaters of four of the seven sacred rivers—the Gangā, the Narmadā, the Godāvarī, and the Kāverī. I traveled down the Western Ghāts, along the narrow stretch of land between the mountains and the sea called Parashurāma Kshetra, the land said to have been retrieved from the sea by one of the avatāras of Vishnu, Parashurāma. I discovered time and again how intricately and elaborately storied each part of the land of India really is. I sought out the places associated with Krishna’s life and lore—from the birthplace of Krishna in Mathurā to the place he is said to have died in peninsular Gujarat. I came upon countless places said to have been visited by the heroes of the Mahābhārata as they roamed the forests of ancient India in exile, or by Rāma, Sitā, and Lakshmana in the forest journey described in the Rāmāyana. It became increasingly clear to me that anywhere one goes in India, one finds a living landscape in which mountains, rivers, forests, and villages are elaborately linked to the stories of the gods and heroes. The land bears the traces of the gods and the footprints of the heroes. Every place has its story, and conversely, every story in the vast storehouse of myth and legend has its place.
This landscape not only connects places to the lore of gods, heroes, and saints, but it connects places to one another through local, regional, and transregional practices of pilgrimage. Even more, these tracks of connection stretch from this world toward the horizon of the infinite, linking this world with the world beyond. The pilgrim’s India is a vividly imagined landscape that has been created not by homing in on the singular importance of one place, but by the linking, duplication, and multiplication of places so as to constitute an entire world. The critical rule of thumb is this: Those things that are deeply important are to be widely repeated. The repetition of places, the creation of clusters and circles of sacred places, the articulation of groups of four, five, seven, or twelve sites—all this constitutes a vivid symbolic landscape characterized not by exclusivity and uniqueness, but by polycentricity, pluralism, and duplication. Most important, this “imagined landscape” has been constituted not by priests and their literature, though there is plenty of literature to be sure, but by countless millions of pilgrims who have generated a powerful sense of land, location, and belonging through journeys to their hearts’ destinations.
In the early 1990s, the political dimensions of this sacred geography burst into flame with the contestation over the Rāmjanmabhūmi, the Birthplace of Rāma, in Ayodhyā, a site said to have been destroyed in the sixteenth century by one of the generals of the Mughal emperor Babur and forever sealed by building a mosque right on top of it. A strident new form of Hindu nationalism vowed to rebuild Rāma’s temple. The throngs of activists voiced the slogan Hum mandir vahīn banāyenge. (“We’ll build the temple at that very place.”) The sustained controversy over the exact locus of Rāma’s birth raised sharply the very meaning of uniqueness in the symbolization of Hindu sacred geography. Even in Ayodhyā, there had been many places that claimed Rāma’s birth as part of their sacred lore. How very dissonant the pledge to reclaim “this very place” sounded, given India’s long history of multiplying the sacred in a complex landscape, rich with a sense of plenitude. Of course, the traditional religious advertisements and praises of Hindu India’s hundreds of sacred places do indeed extol “this very place.” They even employ the poetic license of exaggeration to amplify the greatness and glory of “this very place.”4 But such praises are always set in the context of a wider peripheral vision in which the places praised are not unique, but ultimately numberless, limited not by the capacity of the divine to be present at any one of them, but by the capacity of human beings to discover and to apprehend the divine presence at all of them. The dissonance, of course, arises from a discourse of exclusivity and uniqueness, more typical of the monotheistic traditions of the West, now arising in a Hindu context in which patterns of religious meaning have traditionally been constructed on the mythic presuppositions of divine plurality and plenitude.
This is a book about India, the pilgrim’s India. For a time, I was discouraged about the writing of it, fearing that somehow the image of a sacred geography enlivened by the presence of the gods and interlinked through the circulation of pilgrims would further feed the fervor of an exclusive new Hindu nationalism. But the reality I describe and interpret here is clearly one not of religious exclusivity, but rather of complexity, mobility, and plurality. This is a book about the ways in which networks of pilgrimage places have composed a sense of location and belonging—locally, regionally, and transregionally. I do not say “nationally,” for this way of articulating a land and landscape is far older than the modern nation-state. The pilgrim’s India reaches back many hundreds of years and brings to us an astonishing picture of a land linked not by the power of kings and governments, but by the footsteps of pilgrims.
This narrative way of construing the land is germane, however, to understanding the communities of emotion and ritual practice that give power and depth to the Hindu nationalism of today. While some of the scholarly analyses of Indian nationalism and, more recently, Hindu nationalism have recognized this living landscape, most pay little heed to the pilgrimage practices that have long generated a relationship to the land we call India. In his book The Felt Community, Indian intellectual historian Rajat Kanta Ray makes a strong case for looking at what he refers to as “communities of emotion,” drawing on Weber’s “communities of sentiment.” He looks carefully and appreciatively at the forms of cultural belonging that are deeply rooted in the Hindu and Indo-Muslim past. He writes, “The prehistory of every national movement lies in emotions, identities, and notions. These constitute the mentality and culture of the body of people who are or have been seized by the idea of becoming a sovereign national state. That idea may be new, but the mentality and emotions are rooted in the past.”5 As Sheldon Pollock has so masterfully demonstrated, this is also a literary world, in which the use of Sanskrit for royal inscriptions and praise poetry created a geographical sphere, a “Sanskrit cosmopolis,” that stretched across what we call “India.”6
There is no question that the “pilgrim’s India” provides an important perspective for understanding India, not simply in the past, but in the present. As arcane as lingas of light, shrines linked by the body of the Goddess, and sacred rivers falling from heaven may seem to those who wish to get on with the real politics of today’s world, these very patterns of sanctification continue to anchor millions of people in the imagined landscape of their country.
The places pilgrims seek out are called tīrthas, literally “fords” or “crossings,” coming from a verbal root meaning “to cross over.” It is the first word we need to know in exploring the sacred geography of India. In ancient times, the tīrtha was literally a place to ford the river, and many of India’s religious tīrthas are, to be sure, on the banks and at the confluence of its great rivers. More broadly, however, the tīrtha is a place of spiritual crossing, where the gods are close and the benefits of worship generous. At a spiritual crossing place, one’s prayers are amplified, one’s rites are more efficacious, one’s vows more readily fulfilled. Tīrtha, with its many associations, is a word of passage and, in some ways, a word of transcendence.7
In the early Vedas and Upanishads, there are many spiritual uses of the term tīrtha and its notions of crossing.8 In the Vedas, the fire altar in its many forms is constructed as a place of crossing and communication between this world and the beyond, the aniconic sacred fire itself being the vehicle of crossing. The gods descend to take their place in the ritual arena of the sacrifice, and the prayers of the priests on behalf of the sponsor of the sacrifice ascend to the heavens. Indeed, the sponsor of the ritual is assured ascent to the heavens as well. In the wisdom traditions of the Upanishads, “crossing over” often refers to the soul’s spiritual transition and transformation from this world to what is called the world of Brahman, the Supreme, the world illumined by the light of knowledge. Here, it is a crossing made not by the elaborate Vedic rituals, but by spiritual knowledge, a crossing that must be made with the aid of a guide, a guru, and the knowledge he imparts. The Prashna Upanishad, for instance, ends with the student’s praise of the guru: “You truly are our father—you who lead us across to the shore beyond ignorance.” In the Isha Upanishad, a person crossing over death gains immortality by virtue of knowledge. In the Mundaka Upanishad, sorrow and sin are crossed over to reach immortality. The knower of Brahman, it is said, becomes Brahman. “He crosses over [tarati] sorrow. He crosses over [tarati] sin. Liberated from the knots of the heart, he becomes immortal.”9
In the Mahābhārata and the popular literature of the Purānas, the term tīrtha comes to common use as the spiritual ford that is the destination of pilgrims. During the first millennium C.E., pilgrim journeys, called tīrthayātrās, were increasingly prominent in religious life and literature. The term tīrtha continued to bear all the symbolic meanings of the river, the ford, the crossing, and the far shore that had been developed with great subtlety and richness in the Upanishads. But alas, this age of ours, the Kali Age, is one in which the great Vedic rites of sacrifice and the pursuit of illumining wisdom are hard to come by. Nonetheless, pilgrimage to the tīrthas is still a viable spiritual path, and tīrthayātrā has become an important substitute for the more difficult and expensive rites and sacrifices. It is the path for our time. Not surprisingly, the benefits of pilgrimage to this place or that are often compared to the benefits one would gain from a powerful rite of sacrifice. For example, the famous Dasāshvamedha tīrtha in Banāras is the place where ritual bathing bestows the fruits of “ten ashvamedha” sacrifices. There are thousands of such equivalences articulated in sacred lore as the benefits of pilgrimage.
At the outset of the section of the Mahābhārata dealing with tīrthayātrā, we find a passage that makes clear the equation of pilgrimage with sacrifice:
The fruits of sacrifices, completely and accurately expounded in due order by the sages in the Vedas, cannot be obtained by the poor man, O King. Sacrifices, with their many implements and their many various requisites, are the province of princes, or sometimes very rich men, but not of single individuals who are deficient in means and implements and who do not have the help of others. But hear, O King, of that practice which is accessible even to the poor, equal to the holy fruits of sacrifice. This is the supreme secret of the sages, O King: the holy practice of pilgrimage [tīrthayātrā] excels even the sacrifice!10
The māhātmyas, the texts of praise that sing the hymns and tell the stories of how the tīrthas became sacred and enumerate the benefits of pilgrimage, constitute a large body of Sanskrit literature. Over the centuries, they have been rendered into the vernacular literatures of India’s regions, condensed into penny-pamphlets as part of local lore. If one were to judge from the sheer volume of literature of this type, pilgrimage, over the course of the past two thousand years, became one of the most extensive forms of religious practice in India.
One might go on pilgrimage to fulfill a vow, called a vrata, for prayers that have been answered, or one might make a vow to undertake the journey when one’s prayers are answered. Particular places, like Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh, seem to specialize in vratas made for healing, for family well-being, for financial recovery or success. Or one might go on pilgrimage to bring the ashes of the beloved dead to a nearby river or even to one of the great tīrthas that specialize in rites for the dead—Gayā, Kāshī, or Prayāga. One might go for a sense of spiritual purification, for the praises of tīrthas constantly elaborate the ways in which sins and sorrows burn like puffs of cotton on entering the tīrtha. One might go simply to behold the place itself, for the darshan of a sacred place, a mountain, a river, an image of the divine that confers spiritual benefit. One might go to be in the presence of the ascetics and sages, who often reside at the tīrthas and amplify the power of the place.
In many ways, the pilgrim becomes an ascetic of sorts, leaving the household behind and taking up the privations and hardships of the road. There is a very real sense in which it is the pilgrims themselves who make the tīrthas. As the Mahābhārata hero Yudhisthira once said to the wise Vidura, who had returned from a long pilgrimage, “Devotees like you, who have become tīrthas themselves, are the ones who make the tīrthas into tīrthas by embodying the presence of God there.”11 Through many years, with their increasing numbers and the power of their cumulative devotion, India’s pilgrims have continually made their tīrthas into tīrthas.
The tīrtha māhātmyas also make clear that going to a tīrtha is not only a matter of the feet, but also a matter of the heart. The “tīrthas of the heart” (mānasatirthas) are as important as the geographical tīrthas. These tīrthas, too, are enumerated, first in the Mahābhārata and then in many of the Purānas: truth, charity, patience, self-control, celibacy, and wisdom—these are the tīrthas in which one must bathe to become truly clean.12 If water alone were enough to purify, they say, then the fishes of the Gangā would all be transported to heaven. It is by bathing in the tīrthas of the heart, as well, that one may truly cross over. “The one who always bathes in earthly tīrthas as well as in the tīrthas of the heart goes to the supreme goal!”13
In India today, the word tīrtha is primarily associated with those crossing places that bring the traditions of the gods and goddesses, heroes, heroines, and sages to living embodiment in India’s geography. The most famous tīrthas attract pilgrims across linguistic, sectarian, and regional boundaries. In addition, there are the countless local and regional tīrthas visited by pilgrims from their immediate vicinity. No place is too small to be counted a tīrtha by its local visitors. In a sense, each temple is a tīrtha, especially consecrated as a crossing place between earth and heaven.
For at least two thousand years, pilgrimage to the tīrthas has been one of the most widespread of the many streams of religious practice that have come to be called “Hindu.” The modern world has not seen the waning of pilgrimage traditions but has made transportation more readily available for a burgeoning pilgrim traffic. The high Himalayan shrines are no longer accessible to the hearty few alone but may be reached by pilgrimage bus lines that puff up the roads to the shrines of Badrīnāth and Kedārnāth, to the source of the River Gangā at Gangotrī, and the source of the Yamunā at Yamunotrī. Package tours to these four holy abodes, the four dhāms of the Himalayas, are advertised on the Internet. For those who want the full circuit of India, there are video coaches to take them on the four-dhām pilgrimage around India to Badrīnāth in the north, Purī in the east, Rāmeshvara in the far south, and Dvārakā in the far west. India is a land of ten thousand tīrthas, and on any given day, literally millions of pilgrims are on the road.
The tīrthas are intricately related to a vast corpus of stories, ancient and modern. These tīrtha māhātmyas and sthala purānas tell how each place became holy and what benefits one might gain from visiting it. Looking at both pilgrimage literature and pilgrimage sites, what are some of the ways in which holiness is articulated? How does the language of pilgrimage, with what I have called its “grammar of sanctification,” create a landscape out of this vast corpus of places and their stories? As I have noted, myths literally “take place” as their mighty events are linked to landscape, and throughout this book we will look in some detail at just how the great rivers, mountains, and hillocks of India are linked to the myths of the gods and heroes.
Wendy Doniger observes in her book Other Peoples’ Myths, “A myth cannot function as a myth in isolation; it shares its themes, its cast of characters, even some of its events with other myths. This supporting corpus glosses any particular myth, frames it with invisible supplementary meanings, and provides partially repetitious multiforms that reinforce it in the memory of the group.”14 Her observations about Hindu myth are equally true of Hindu sacred places—the places called tīrthas or “crossings,” pīthas or “seats of the divine,” or dhāms, “divine abodes.” They do not stand in isolation. Even those in the most remote places, in the farthest mountain reaches of the Himalayas, where the rivers rise and the shrines are snowbound half the year, are not singular, but part of a complex fabric of reference and signification, a cumulative landscape replete with its own “invisible supplementary meanings.” To paraphrase Doniger, this supporting corpus of tīrthas glosses every particular tīrtha, framing it with wider meanings and linking it to other places that amplify its significance from the local to the translocal.
In its simplest terms, geography is the description, study, and classification of the earth and its features. While many branches of geography are scientific in perspective and method, what is clear from the study of Hindu India is that its geographical features—its rivers, mountains, hills, and coastlands—no matter how precisely rendered, mapped, or measured, are also charged with stories of gods and heroes. It is a resonant, sacred geography. But it is also a landscape, in that these features are connected, linked to a wider whole. While I use the term “imagined landscape,” it is far from imaginary. It is lived landscape that may focus on a particular temple, hillock, or shrine but sets it in a wider frame. Landscape is relational, and it evokes emotion and attachment. In his brilliant study of the mythic subsoil of Western landscapes, Simon Schama writes, “For although we are accustomed to separate nature and human perception into two realms, they are, in fact, indivisible. Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from the strata of memory as from layers of rock.”15 Here, of course, Schama refers to the painted landscape, but if we translate this to our context in India, we see that the scenery of the sacred landscape, while not painted, is also built up with the strata of myth, memory, and association that shape the human perception of nature.
The footsteps of pilgrims are the point of departure in creating the lived landscape. Pilgrims leave home, and the tracks of their journeys create a circuit of meaning and connection. Individual pilgrimage is not easy to document in India, for there is little tradition of personal pilgrimage memoir, such as the fifteenth-century Book of the Wanderings of Friar Felix Fabri, an exuberant record by Friar Felix himself of his journeys to the Holy Land. In India, we have very few such records. We do have, of course, the advertisements recorded in the voluminous tīrtha māhātmyas, exhorting pilgrims to visit this place, that place, every place. And we have the places themselves, which give their own form of evidence over the centuries of countless journeys. The footsteps of pilgrims converge, drawn by the magnetism of a particular place. Many of the “catchment areas” of India’s pilgrimage landscape are very extensive; others are more local and create a sense of regional identity.
Among the great examples of this regional magnetism is the pilgrimage to Pandharpūr in Maharashtra, the site of the manifestation of the deity Vithobā, said to be a form of Krishna. Every year, the Marathi songster saints—from thirteenth-century Jnāneshvar to seventeenth-century Tukārām—make their pilgrimage to Pandharpūr for his darshan. Traveling in company with these saints are today’s pilgrims, who sing the well-known songs of the saints all along the way. As they travel, they carry with them palanquins bearing the saints’ silver footprints. There are twenty-eight such processions, originating in cities and towns all around Maharashtra, some more than one hundred miles away. These palanquins, called palkhis, and the processions of pilgrims that travel with them converge, day by day, on the town of Pandharpūr. In the end, they meet just outside town to form one great procession to the temple of Vithobā. At the largest of the four times of Pandharpūr pilgrimage, this is today a convergence of some half a million people.
The Marathi anthropologist Iravati Karve, who went on the pilgrimage in the late 1940s, famously wrote in her account of the journey, “I found a new definition of Maharashtra: the land whose people go to Pandharpūr for pilgrimage.”16 Anne Feldhaus has amplified and complicated this picture through her rich and textured research in Maharashtra. She demonstrates the many different ways in which “religious imagery and pilgrimage traditions enable people in Maharashtra to experience and conceptualize regions.” There is not a single geographical imagery, but more “an overlapping, ragged, unfinished patchwork of regions.”17 Pandharpūr comes closest to gathering in the whole of Maharashtra, but very likely the pilgrims to Pandharpūr themselves are not really thinking about “experiencing Maharashtra.” As Feldhaus puts it succinctly, drawing on her long on-the-ground experience, “Most of them are intent on the goal of Pandharpūr and joyful at having reached it. They are worried about where to spend the night, how to evade the pickpockets, and how long they will have to wait in line for the bus back home. The unity they experience is mostly that of the immediate group of pilgrims with whom they have been traveling for many days, rather than some imagined Maharashtrian whole.”18 Even so, their travels on the many spokes leading to Pandharpūr have given them an experienced cultural knowledge of Maharashtra.
The pilgrimage to Pandharpūr is not an easy journey, and so, too, is another great pilgrimage: to the mountain shrine of Lord Ayyappa at Sabarimala in Kerala. This, too, is largely a regional pilgrimage, but one that now draws pilgrims not only from Malayalam-speaking Kerala, but from Tamil Nadu and throughout south India. The discipline undertaken on this pilgrimage is extraordinary. Each pilgrim must take a forty-one-day vow of vegetarianism; abstinence from sexual relations; discipline; and humility. Having been initiated to the vow, the pilgrims will take the name of Ayyappa and call one another by the single name Swami. The pilgrimage is open to all, regardless of caste, class, or religion, but only to men and to women who are either prepubescent or past the age of childbearing. After all, Ayyappa is the celibate mountain deity, who is present both at the destination and in the company of pilgrims.
The pilgrims travel barefoot, taking only a bundle wrapped up on their heads—half of it the offerings they bring to Lord Ayyappa and half of it the provisions they bring for the journey. They trek together in groups through the forests and hills of Kerala. The longest of the routes is nearly sixty miles, although the most popular is the short route of only about four miles. Especially for those who undertake the longer journey, the barefoot pilgrimage is demanding. For weeks in the high pilgrimage season, from November to January, these pilgrim ascetics, wearing black clothing and carrying their distinctive bundles, press toward Sabarimala chanting Swamiye Sharanam Ayyappa! “I take refuge in Lord Ayyappa.” The pain, the thirst, the blisters of the journey are constant. Anthropologist E. Valentine Daniel, who made the trek with Tamil pilgrims from a village in Tamil Nadu, describes his own experience and also records the experience of those in his small party of seven. He writes, “In the words of one pilgrim, who reflected on this stage of the climb, ‘there is nothing else I knew, heard, or felt. I was too tired to feel tired. All I heard was my voice calling out, “Ayyappo, Ayyappo, Ayyappo.” Nothing else existed except my call and I. This was when I began to know my Lord in the true sense.’ ”19 The final ascent up the famous eighteen steps to the temple is considered the climax of the pilgrimage. Indeed, only those who have observed the forty-one-day vow can set foot on the steps. It is an ascent that brings them face-to-face with Lord Ayyappa.
On the whole, the landscape created by the pilgrimage routes is the landscape of Kerala, enlivened with the story of Lord Ayyappa, clearly a local hero-deity. It is the tale of an abandoned child, found and adopted by a childless king and raised to succeed him. But a jealous queen, wanting her own son to become king, asked the boy to fetch some tigress milk to help cure a dangerous illness from which she was suffering. The boy boldly took the challenge and successfully brought home the milk of a tigress—riding on a tamed tiger! This local Dravidian hunter god of the south also became known as the incarnation of Shiva and Vishnu together in one form, thus taking on a much wider Hindu pedigree. Even so, this is very much a regional pilgrimage and one that attracts more and more pilgrims each year. In 2007, it was estimated that well over ten million pilgrims visited the shrine, with as many as 5,000 an hour having darshan of Ayyappa during the high season.20
Many of India’s great places of pilgrimage have a transregional magnetism, and the circulation of pilgrims to these tīrthas creates a broader arc of experience for people all over India. Some tīrthas that today have a pan-Indian magnetism were once more-regional sites of pilgrimage, like the mountain shrine of Tirupati in what is today southern Andhra Pradesh and the seaside shrine of Jagannātha Purī on the coast of Orissa. In the far north on the trail to Kedārnāth or on the beach of Rāmeshvara in the south, pilgrims will find themselves in multilingual crowds with fellow pilgrims from many parts of India. Many Indian scholars have noted the significance of the network of pilgrimage places in constructing a sense of Indian “nationhood,” not as a nation-state in the modern usage of the term, but as a shared, living landscape, with all its cultural and regional complexity. For example, K. V. Rangaswami Aiyangar, introducing the Sanskrit text of the Tīrthavivecana Kānda, Lakshmidhara’s twelfth-century digest of pilgrimage places, writes: “Long before wise statesmanship attempted or accomplished Indian unification, Akhand Hindusthān [One Hindusthān] had sprung from the wanderings of pilgrims.”21 Aiyangar wrote in the early 1940s, the last years of the Indian independence movement and several decades before new forms of political Hindu nationalism made scholars more aware of the political resonance of such expressions. He was writing of a twelfth-century context, but as a scholar he also participated in a twentieth-century context in which pilgrimage to the tīrthas had scarcely diminished in importance but had grown considerably with the expansion of mass transportation.
Pilgrims on the trail to Kedārnāth
The very idea that the imagined landscape cast by the network of India’s tīrthas has contributed immensely to an indigenous Indian sense of “nationhood” is articulated today in a political context charged with the contemporary disputation about Hindu nationalism. Thus, it is difficult, but all the more important, to investigate what it has meant historically and what it still means today in the context of Hindu pilgrimage. It is indisputable that an Indian imaginative landscape has been constructed in Hindu mythic and ritual contexts, most significantly in the practice of pilgrimage. The vast body of Hindu mythic and epic literature is not simply literature of devotional interest to the Hindu and of scholarly interest to the structuralist, comparativist, or psychoanalytically minded interpreter. Hindu mythology is profusely linked to India’s geography—its mountains, rivers, forests, shores, villages, and cities. It “takes place,” so to speak, in thousands of shrines and in the culturally created mental “map” of Bhārata.
But mapping the land of India was not the domain of pilgrims alone. With the British East India Company in the eighteenth century came the British surveyors and cartographers, with a very different eye and purpose. Scientific mapping was integral to the imperial project. In introducing his book Mapping an Empire, Matthew Edney writes, “Imperialism and mapmaking intersect in the most basic manner. Both are fundamentally concerned with territory and knowledge.… To govern territories, one must know them.”22 But the knowledge was of a particular kind. In this mapping enterprise, Edney writes, “At one uniform scale, all portions of Indian space became directly comparable and normalized. Knowledge of India was homogenized; particular variations and contingencies were subsumed within a ‘house of certainty.’ Each town and district was identified and assigned its own particular location within the fixed and immobile mesh of meridians and parallels.” Mapmaking became what Edney has described as “a technology of vision and control, which was integral to British authority in South Asia.”23 Thus, Bombay, Banāras, and Rāmeshvara are equally dots on a graphic map. While useful for the purposes of commerce and control, this homogenization of space was stripped of cultural meaning and memory.
This kind of representational map was not part of the culture we are describing here. Nonetheless, Hindu literary and ritual culture had deep traditions of geographical awareness. In a range of Hindu traditions, imaginative “mapmaking” became the domain of both cosmologists and mythmakers. It is arguable that the imagined landscape they created is far more culturally powerful than that displayed on today’s most geographically precise digital map of India. The imagined landscape bears imprints of meaning: the self-manifest eruptions of the gods, the footprints of the heroes, the divine origins of the rivers, the body of the Goddess. In this mental map, geography is overlaid with layer upon layer of story and connected in a storied landscape. In a broad sense, each village, river, and hillock has a story. Some of these stories are local, but some places are linked through their stories to several other regional shrines, and some are linked through their stories to a network of shrines all over India.
What, then, are the systematic elements that constitute this landscape? What are those elements that are repeated, duplicated, and classified into networks so as to construe a wider landscape? What are the “sets” of the system—some ancient, others more recent—that participate in creating a landscape knit together by its repetitions and homologies? Throughout this book, my examples are drawn deliberately from a wide variety of sources—textual and ritual, ancient and modern, from the Rig Veda to the popular Purānas to the ephemeral pamphlets of today’s tīrthas, from so-called classics of literature to folk art and wall paintings, and from countless hours on the road in dozens of India’s tīrthas. In this book, we will begin to see some of the ways in which a sacred landscape is constructed and inhabited.
There are many strategies through which the sacred features of India’s landscape are established and the divine presence experienced, named, and storied. Pilgrims may ask, “How did this place come to be sacred?” The stories to be told are, in many instances, part of the implicit cultural knowledge they bring with them. Perhaps the place descended from heaven to earth like the rivers, or it was retrieved from the sea by the gods, like the coastlands. Perhaps the divine erupted from the earth here, like the many jyotirlingas of Shiva. Or perhaps this divine image was once put down here and then clung spontaneously to the earth and could not be moved by human hands. Perhaps this place is part of the body of the divine Goddess, distributed throughout the land. Perhaps this hill is a piece of the Himalayas transported to Gujarat; this river is the Gangā gushing up from underground in Orissa; this temple is Kāshī Vishvanāth, re-created in the south. All these ways of speaking of divine presence begin to constitute a linked landscape, patterned with sacred places.
This systematic structuring of the landscape of India is, of course, based on the cosmology in which the entire universe is construed as a system, with its multiple ring-shaped islands and ring-shaped seas, each with its own rivers and mountains. As we will see in Chapter 3, these texts often begin with the story of creation and then proceed to explain the structure of the entire universe. This cosmology is instructive for us in that it establishes a “systematic geography” in which geographical features are noteworthy not for their uniqueness, but for their repetition in the ordered, systemic whole.
It fell from heaven to earth, and so it is sacred. There could be no better pedigree of the sacred here on earth. Divine descent from heaven to earth is certainly one way in which this world is connected to the heavens. The words avatarana, avatāra, and tīrtha all come from that same Sanskrit root meaning “to cross over.” The language of crossing creates a world of descending and ascending, linking heaven and earth, this world and yonder. The most famous of the divine descents are the avatāras of Lord Vishnu, but the notion of “descending,” avatarana, is common to many gods and to great tīrthas, too, such as Krishna’s capital city of Dvāravatī, said to have been the heavenly city of Amarāvatī descended to earth. As avatāras descend “downward,” tīrthas are those fords where one crosses the other way—from this shore to the far shore of a river, or to the far shore of the heavens. This language of crossing has a wide symbolic reference, from the descending and ascending flow of life between this world here below and the worlds of heaven above, to the ultimate crossing of the “river” of birth and death to the “far shore” of liberation. Tīrthas are fords because they facilitate such crossings.
The rivers, of course, are the great descenders. Many of India’s rivers, the Gangā foremost among them, are said to have crossed over from heaven to earth. The story of the descent of the Gangā is told in many of the Purānas and at the very outset of the Rāmāyana.24 Gangā was originally a divine river, streaming across the heavens. As we shall see in Chapter 4, through the asceticism and prayers of the sage-king Bhagīratha, she agreed to descend from heaven to earth to raise the dead ancestors of the solar kings of Ayodhyā. To break the force of her fall, Gangā fell first upon the head of Lord Shiva in the Himalayas and then flowed across the plains of north India. Other sacred rivers, such as the Godāvarī and the Narmadā, repeat this pattern of divine descent. The Narmadā flows from the body of Shiva at Amarakantaka, in the hills of eastern Madhya Pradesh. The Godāvarī was brought to earth by the prayers of the sage Gautama and descended on the top of Brahmāgiri in the Western Ghāts of what is today Maharashtra. The priests of the Godāvarī area claim, “South of the Vindhya Mountains the Gangā is called Gautamī (after the sage Gautama), while north of the Vindhyas she is called Bhāgīrathī (after the sage Bhagīratha).” The two rivers are symbolically the same river—descended from heaven and repeated, duplicated, in two geographical settings.
In investigating how systems of geographical meaning are constructed, India’s rivers are important, for they are not simply individual rivers, but part of a system of rivers. They are linked together in groups—in this case, the seven Gangās. They commonly issue from the “same” place—the “Cow’s Mouth,” Gomukh, calling to mind the image of heavenly waters released by Indra from Vritra’s blockade, running out upon the earth as mother cows might be freed from the pen to nourish their young, evoking what has become a well-known homology: that of rivers and cows, waters and milk.25 The rivers are especially sacred where they join in a sangam, a confluence. But three rivers joining are even better. The three are knotted together in braids—like the many trivenīs, or “triple braids,” where a confluence of two rivers is joined by a third, understood to be the deep, symbolic waters of the underground Sarasvatī, which long ago vanished from her visible, earthly riverbed. The best-known trivenī is at Prayāga, today’s Allahabad, but there are other trivenīs all over India that express the triple confluence of rivers. In sum, India’s rivers are joined by the inter-referential symbolic language of their heavenly origins, their sources, confluences, and mouths. Indeed, wherever waters drip from a pot above a linga of Shiva in the sanctum of a temple or are poured lavishly upon the shaft of the linga, the avatarana of the Gangā is ritually repeated.
Here, they say, the divine presence erupted from the earth and was manifested of its own accord! Innumerable places are said to be tīrthas because the divine burst forth in that very place. A particularly powerful example of this form of sanctification is the hill called Dawn Mountain, Arunāchala, rising from the flatlands of Tamil Nadu in south India. There is a temple at the base of the hill, the very old temple of Tiruvannamalai, its inscriptions indicating a recorded history some thirteen hundred years long. It is composed of several large, rectangular enclosures with a tall gopura, or tower, in each of the four directions. Inside is the linga of Shiva as Arunāchaleshvara, in a sanctum aglow with row upon row of oil lamps. But here, the most powerful presence of Shiva is said to be the mountain itself. It is said to have erupted from the earth at the very dawn of creation, flaming as the pillar of Shiva’s fire. Brahmā and Vishnu could not fathom it. They tried but could not find its top or bottom; they exhausted themselves seeking the measure of this refulgence. Lord Shiva showed his face to them and granted them a boon. And what did they choose? That Shiva’s eruptive brilliance would become a mountain and remain here on earth. Shiva said, “Since this linga rose up, looking like a mountain of fire, it shall be known as Dawn Mountain, Arunāchala.” In those days, it was a mountain of flame; today, in this Kali Age, it is a mountain of bare volcanic rock, carpeted with green in the rainy season. It is some twenty-six hundred feet high and circumambulated on a well-worn path more than eight miles long. One climbs on the hill itself only barefoot.
One of the great festival days of the year, Krittikā Dīpa, in the lunar month of November-December, recalls this luminous eruption of Shiva. Thousands of people converge on the town of Tiruvannamalai to have darshan in the temple, to witness the lighting of the special oil lamps, or dīpas, and above all, as night falls, to witness the kindling of a huge fire at the top of the hill. For weeks, the devout have carried ghee and wicks to the summit, and on this day they stream barefoot toward it to touch the great ghee lamps before they are lit. They return to the temple below to stand and cheer as the huge fire erupts from the hilltop. They circle the hill and its many wayside shrines just as they would circle the sanctum of the temple. The blaze at the summit will last for many days, a testimony to Shiva’s words, “Here I stand as Arunāchala.”
The language of the divine as “self-manifest” in the natural environment is very much part of the symbolic grammar of sanctification. Holy as it is, Arunāchala is but one of hundreds of such places. The term svayambhū, “self-existent,” is used to describe these places and images where God is said to have appeared miraculously, or some would say naturally: without human intervention or supplication. Apne āp prakat hui, they say in Hindi. “It appeared here of its own accord.” Here the agency is completely that of the holy. This is the very meaning of hierophany, the “showing forth” of the holy. These natural manifestations are not established by human hands or by royal patronage but are said to be the spontaneous eruptions of the divine, whether as Shiva, Vishnu, Devī, or a local divinity. As we will see, one of the most prominent myths of divine hierophany is that of the appearance of Shiva’s linga of light, the jyotirlinga, appearing from below and spanning earth, the sky, and the heavens above.26 While there are said to be twelve jyotirlingas in India—from the northernmost at Kedārnāth to the southernmost at Rāmeshvara—it is clear that many local temples understand the sanctity of their own image of Shiva to be svayambhū, self-manifest.
The notion that aspects of nature are “self-manifestations” of the divine is widespread, both in Shaiva and Vaishnava traditions. Special stones are called svarūpas, literally God’s “own form,” not the divine images humans create, but God’s own. Keep in mind that in consecrated temple images, mūrtis, made by the hands of the artisan, divine presence is established and the prāna, the breath of life, imparted to the image in the rites of prāna pratishthā, literally “establishing the breath.” A svayambhū image or a svarūpa, however, has no need of prāna pratishthā. Symbolically speaking, the divine breath is already there and has been there from time immemorial. The shālagrāma stones found in the Gandakī River in Nepal are svarūpas, natural manifestations of Vishnu, sacred without so much as a mantra of invocation. And so are the stones found along the beaches of Dvārakā, called Dvārakā chakras, the “wheels of Dvārakā,” pure white stones imprinted with intricate wheels, the emblems of Vishnu. Likewise, bāna lingas, the smooth stones found in the bed of the Narmadā River, are natural embodiments of Shiva.
Beyond these natural manifestations, there are countless local stones, rocks, outcroppings, and mūrtis that are called svarūpa by the acclamation of those who worship them. For example, the small, jet-black image of Krishna as Rādhāraman in one of the temples of Vrindāvan is a shālagrāma stone, now in anthropomorphic shape. The smooth stone form of Kāmākhyā Devī in Assam or Vaishno Devī in Kashmir, or the local folk image of Draupadī at the cult center of Gingee in Tamil Nadu, are all spoken of as svayambhū.27 Self-manifest images are considered especially powerful in attracting pilgrims, whether locally, regionally, or nationally. Our point here, however, is not to enumerate the multitude of such divine manifestations, but to call attention to the grammar of sanctification through which a landscape is created: The sacred appeared here, spontaneously, unbidden, self-manifest.
The linga called Vaidyanāth in what is now rural Bihar is one of Shiva’s self-born lingas of light. It is to be found in a sturdy stone temple set in an impressive complex, all within a spacious compound. Spacious, of course, except on great festival days, like Shivarātrī, or virtually every day during the summer month of Shrāvana, when this temple is filled to bursting with pilgrims. In Shrāvana, pilgrims converge on the temple carrying pots of Gangā water on either end of a shoulder pole. These pilgrims, called kanwarias, “pole-bearers,” have made a vow, perhaps for the health or well-being of a spouse or child, and have walked the distance from the Gangā at Sultānganj sixty-five miles away. For a month, the road is a steady stream of saffron-clad figures, both men and women, undertaking a pilgrim’s discipline that most try to accomplish within the course of twenty-four hours. Shiva as Vaidyanāth is, after all, the great physician.
According to the Vaidyanāth legend, Shiva once gave this great linga to the powerful asura king Rāvana who ruled in Lanka. Rāvana had meditated long at the feet of Shiva in the Himalayas and had accumulated the powerful energy called tapas, the energy of asceticism. Even demons like Rāvana accumulate such power by virtue of spiritual discipline.28 In giving him this linga, however, Shiva told Rāvana that he must not put it down on the way from the Himalayas to Lanka. The gods of the heavens were understandably fearful that if Rāvana established such a powerful linga in Lanka, his asura kingdom would become even stronger. As a result, they conspired to have him put the linga down on the way. Varuna, the deity associated with water, entered into Rāvana, who then experienced the acute feeling of having to relieve himself. He set the linga down to attend nature’s call. When he returned to pick it up again, it would not budge. And there it remains to this day.
When I visited Vaidyanāth and first heard this well-known myth, I thought it was a very odd story: an immovable divine image that stuck to the earth under such peculiar circumstances? The point of the myth, of course, is precisely this immovability, the creation of a bond so strong it cannot be broken. Here a sacred place was created not by falling from heaven or erupting from the earth, but by spontaneous adhesion. When an image of the divine is established in a temple, the rites of consecration include not only prāna pratishthā, but also the attachment of the image to its pedestal in the garbha griha, binding stone upon stone with the strongest of adhesives. This, too, is called pratishthā. But certain powerful images, we are told, adhere spontaneously to the earth. Here is yet another symbolic device through which a divine landscape is construed.
Months later I visited the famous shrine of Gokarna, along the coast of Karnataka, one of the few landmark tīrthas old enough to be well known even in the time of the Mahābhārata. There, in a temple not far from the palm-fringed beach, was the famous Gokarna linga, a piece of solid reddish rock, twisted like an old stump. Here, too, Rāvana had made the mistake of putting down a sacred icon. Evening had come in his journey, so they say, and he had to perform his ritual duties, for he was a piously observant asura. Therefore he gave the linga to a boy—actually Ganesha in disguise—to hold while he bathed in the ocean and performed the evening rites. But the image proved too heavy, at least that was the excuse, and Ganesha put it down. When Rāvana returned, he could not pick it up again. He tried so hard to remove the linga forcibly from the place where it stuck that he twisted it. Even so, it held to the earth right there.29
All over India, I discovered, there are mūrtis and lingas said to have adhered fast to this place or that by spontaneous natural fusion. Someone put the image down, and it could not be moved again by any amount of muscle. As we will see, such is the story of the temporary sand linga fashioned by Sītā on the seashore at Rāmeshvara, a sand image that became immovable stone. And such is the story of the image of Krishna whose cart got stuck in the mud and simply would not move from a place in the Aravalli Hills of Rajasthan. Clearly Krishna Shrināth-jī wanted to stay right there—and that is where the temple town of Nāthdvāra is located today. Hundreds of miles to the south is Shrīrangam, the island shrine of Vishnu at Tiruchirapalli in Tamil Nadu, where Vishnu’s image stuck to the earth. Rāma had given this ancestral image, called Ranganātha, to Vibhīshana, Rāvana’s brother and Rāma’s great ally, and, yes, told him not to put the image down until he reached Lanka. Even so, when Vibhīshana came to the beautiful Kāverī River, he was overwhelmed with the desire to bathe. He gave the image to a Brahman boy, again Ganesha in disguise, and the boy agreed to hold it for him, under the condition that Vibhīshana come promptly if he called for him three times. When Vibhīshana was underwater, taking his dips in the Kāverī River, the boy called out. Of course, Vibhīshana could not hear him. The boy put down the image of Ranganātha, and so it is that the image has been worshipped on the island of Shrīrangam ever since.
The multitude of such stories suggests a kind of chosen-ness, a divine selection that powerfully creates a local sense of “place.” Whereas many of the svayambhū images of the self-born divine are held to have been manifested in response to the unstinting devotion of bhaktas, here the principle of selection is ascribed to the affinities of the god. It is a divine reversal of the ishtadevatā principle, the notion that in our human diversity we each have a “chosen deity,” that form of the divine that speaks especially to us. Even in a single family, members may have different ishtadevatās—whether Shiva, Rāma, Ganesha, or Devī. Here, however, it seems that the divine does the choosing, selecting this place or that for a home. In many of these stories it seems that the fusion of god and earth could, in principle, take place anywhere. If twilight had come a few minutes later, Rāvana might not have stopped at Gokarna for his evening rituals, but farther south along the coast of Kerala. But once the contact with earth was made, the god was there to stay.
No image is as evocative as the body in suggesting the systemic whole—interrelated, with distinctive differences, and yet an organic unity. Yi-Fu Tuan, theorist of space and the human experience, sees the human body as providing one of the primary schemas for understanding and ordering space. It is our primary environment, our microcosm, and it provides an intimately indigenous pattern for viewing the wider cosmos.30 It is not surprising that the body-cosmos schema is widely employed in the patterning of India’s sacred landscape. The bards of the Mahābhārata, introducing the subject of tīrthas, allude to the very diversity of the body and its hierarchies: “As special attributes of the body have been said to be sacred, so there are particular spots on Earth as well, and particular waters, which are considered sacred.”31 This world, like the body, has its eyes and ears, its heart and head. But every part of it is interdependent, related as are the limbs and functions of the body.
As we shall see in Chapter 3, the world created in the imaginative vision of the Vedas, Upanishads, and Purānas is construed as whole, emerging from the unitary garbha, or egg, in some cases imaged as a cosmic body. It is what we might call an “organic ontology” in which the symbolism of the body is employed to create an entire worldview.32 The Vedic image is of Purusha—the cosmic person sacrificed at the time of creation into the time, space, and order of this world. From the cosmic being’s eye, the sun was born; from his mind, the moon; from his ears, the directions. And so, all that is in the world we know is related to the body-cosmos of the divine. This image is profusely employed throughout Hindu religious literature, in hundreds of mythic transformations. The most vivid of these transformations is that of the great god Vishnu, stretched out upon the serpent called Endless, floating as the one form in a sea of formlessness. Everything that will be is within the body of Vishnu, waiting to emerge and be expressed in the myriad phenomena of creation.
In the religious landscape of India, the image of the body is frequently utilized to suggest the wholeness and interrelatedness of the land. Elsewhere, it is not so unusual to invoke the land as “mother” or “father,” but here symbolic personification of the land is amplified in a detailed body-cosmos. One need only recall the Vedic homologies of sun-eye, mind-moon, veins-rivers, hair-trees, and so forth, to imagine how naturally the earth’s tīrthas would have a place in this body. The most striking instance of relation of sacred place to body-cosmos is the system of pīthas, the “seats” of the Goddess said to be the various parts of the body of the Goddess, distributed throughout India. We will look carefully at the creation of these shākta pīthas in Chapter 6, but for now let us take an overview of this body-cosmos.
On a wall on the temple in Kankhal, near where the River Gangā enters the plains of north India, there is a painted image of Shiva, striding across a field, across a stream, carrying in his arms the limp and beautiful body of the goddess Satī. The temple is called Daksheshvara and is said to be the very site of the great sacrifice rite performed by Daksha, one of the sons of Brahmā who were subcontractors in the process of creation and also, in his case, the father of the goddess Satī. Everyone in the universe was invited to the rite, except her beloved husband, the mountain god Shiva. The enraged Satī stormed down the mountain to Kankhal and committed suicide in the sacrificial arena, furious at the insult to Shiva, whom she knows to be the lord of the universe. In many tellings of the tale, the grieving Shiva then carried Satī’s body all around India, overcome with his loss.33 Eventually, all the parts of her body fell, one by one. Where they fell, sacred sites of the devī were manifest. Indeed, the whole of India became, as it were, the dismembered body of the Goddess: Hridaya tīrtha in Bihar is her heart; Bhadrakālī in Nāsik is her chin; Kurukshetra is her ankle; Vārānasī is her left earring; in the far northeast, in Kāmākhyā, is her yoni; and at Kanyākumārī in the far south is her back.
In some listings of the pīthas, there are 51, in others 108. The eminent scholar D. C. Sircar has documented the groupings of pīthas in some of the earliest Tantric texts of the eighth or ninth centuries, reaching their most elaborate form with the Pīthanirnaya in the seventeenth century.34 On the ground, however, it is clear that this system is open to a multitude of “subscribers,” who would identify their local devī with Mahādevī through the body-cosmos of the shākta pīthas, creating as many Hindu claimants to the body of the Goddess as claimants to fragments of the true cross in medieval Europe. Just which pīthas are “really” part of the group is far less significant than the fact that there is a grouping in which, ultimately, every goddess may be said to participate.
In this perspective, the whole of India adds up to the body of the Goddess, for dismemberment and distribution are, from another perspective, universalization. Satī, distributed in the landscape, is not dead but alive; not fragmented but whole. As one Hindu nationalist writer put it in the 1920s, “India is not a mere congeries of geographical fragments, but a single, though immense organism, filled with the tide of one strong pulsating life from end to end.”35 Some historians, political scientists, and interpreters of the modern period in India have traced the popularization of the idea of Bhārat Mātā, or “Mother India,” to the rise of Indian nationalism in the late nineteenth century, and to Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s “Vande Mātaram,” “I Bow to Thee, Mother,” a hymn of praise to the motherland first raised in the opposition to the British partition of the province of Bengal in 1905.36 But such a view lacks a longer historical perspective, for clearly the identification of devīs with the land has much older roots in the symbolization of the body-cosmos as inscribed in the system of devī shrines. A considerable history of pilgrimage to the multitude of India’s hilltop, cave, and cliffside devīs preceded the use of the rhetoric of the motherland in twentieth-century Hindu nationalism.
What is true, however, is that not only did the cartographic surveying of India yield a map of imperial mastery, but that that familiar triangular shape also became a powerful icon of territorial India, especially when joined with the image of the Goddess as Bhārat Mātā. This map-goddess emblem became a pictorial representative of the idea of India, popularized and deployed in nationalist, and later explicitly Hindu nationalist, contexts.
The twentieth-century Bhārat Mātā Temple in Hardvār displays in concrete form the imaginative vision implicit in the body-cosmos: A bountiful Bhārat Mātā stands upon the map of India, holding a handful of grain and a pot of water. In New Delhi, at the headquarters of the Vishva Hindu Parishad, the World Hindu Organization, a niche in the courtyard displays a different version of the image: the goddess Durgā superimposed on a relief map of India. Such images, which so clearly display the relation of land and devī, are disquieting in the context of the politicization of Hindu symbolism in today’s India, but it is important to recognize that this body-cosmos is not a new image, despite the seeming novelty of its nineteenth- and twentieth-century renderings. It is, rather, a very old and pervasive one, which is precisely why its power can be so effectively deployed.
“This is a dhām, not a tīrtha,” insisted a young man, a self-appointed guide to the holy places of Krishna near Mathurā. “A dhām is the home of God.” The point he made as we sat together in a baked-clay homestead in Gokul, the village where Krishna is said to have lived as a baby, seemed very important to him. I wanted to be clear just what he meant. The word tīrtha, of course, conveys a sense of “crossing,” for a tīrtha is a ford, the spiritual ford that enables us to cross from “here” to “there.” But the term dhām (Sanskrit dhāman) conveys the sense of “dwelling.” A dhām does not necessarily transport us to the world beyond, but rather gives us a clearing in which to dwell right here. A dhām suggests not so much that we “cross over” to the divine, but that the divine dwells among us now. Jan Gonda, who has studied in detail the uses of this term in the ancient Vedic literature, writes that a dhāman may be described as both the location and the refraction of the divine, a place where it manifests its power and where one experiences its presence.37 The very notion of a dhāman, a divine abode, conveys to us that the sacred takes form, is located, and is apprehended. In the Vedic ritual context this meant, for example, that the fire god Agni’s dhāman was the fire altar, the place where the tejas, or luminous power, of Agni was manifest.38
Krishna’s temple at Dvārakā, the western dhām, on the seacoast of Gujarat
As the term comes to use in the systematizing of sacred geography, there are four famous dhāms in India, sited at the four compass points of the land. Ritual enactment of the pilgrimage of the chār dhām is one of the most extensive ways in which a systematic geography has been construed. The standard four claim virtually unanimous agreement. In the north is Badrīnāth, the Himalayan shrine now associated with Vishnu, sitting on the banks of the Alakanandā River, one of Gangā’s tributaries, within a few miles of the Tibetan border. In the east is Purī, the abode of Krishna Jagannātha, whose temple complex on the Bay of Bengal is one of the largest in all of India. In the south is Rāmeshvara, the Shiva linga said to have been dedicated by Rāma on the shore of the southern sea.39 In the west is Dvārakā, the latter-day capital of Lord Krishna, where Krishna dwells as Dvārakādhīsha.
The chār dhām pilgrimage is one of the most popular in India, for it takes pilgrims on a circumambulation of the whole country.40 There are still Hindu pilgrims—ascetics, widows, householders, and others—who have walked the chār dhām pilgrimage on foot, but today it is most commonly undertaken by chartered bus, even by “video-coach.” The circling of India can be glimpsed in the pilgrimage routes described to the Pāndava heroes by the sages Pulastya and Dhaumya in the epic Mahābhārata, some two thousand years ago. Although their account of the tīrthas to be visited in the south is extremely sketchy, the shape of the pilgrimage they describe sweeps around the whole land. In the literature of the Purānas, the four directional dhāms have been visible for at least a thousand years and the traffic of the devout—north, south, east, and west—is certainly present. Even so, the particular name—the chār dhām—is not commonly known in the Purānas. Nonetheless, today’s pilgrimage tracts speak of the chār dhām as “established during pre-historical ages.”41 For those in the Hindi-speaking regions in particular, this is a very popular pilgrimage, as can be affirmed from the presence of Hindi language publications in the extreme south of Tamil Nadu, at Rāmeshvara.
One of the myriad Hindi booklets on the chār dhām pilgrimage begins with a discourse on the religious nature of the land of Bhārata, with its great sages who filled the world with peace and its unbroken tradition of reverence for tīrthas, even in times of subjugation. It understands the four-dhām pilgrimage to be an expression of this Indian religiousness. The guidebook tells us, “Some people come to Badrīnāth after having already visited the three other dhāms. And some, at the time of their pilgrimage to Badrīnāth, set their minds on taking water from Shrī Gangotrī to offer in the temple at Rāmeshvara.”42 As is usually the case with pilgrimage in India, there is little orthodoxy about the precise form the circuit takes. It depends on one’s own bhāvana, the disposition of one’s own heart. Badrināth is the hardest of the dhāms to get to, since the others are easily accessible by train and Badrināth requires a journey into the mountains. Until recently it was a long and arduous journey by foot, but now there is a road all the way. Even so, it is not an easy journey. At one point, the author of this pilgrim tract reveals a schema for thinking about the chār dhām: Badrīnāth is the dhām of the Satya Yuga, the perfect age of the beginnings. Rāmeshvara is the dhām of the Treta Yuga, when Rāma reigned on earth. Dvārakā is the dhām of the Dvāpara, when Krishna held forth. With the Mahābhārata war and the death of Krishna began the Kali Yuga, a difficult age for human religiousness. Purī is the dhām of the Kali Yuga.
As we have come to expect, the chār dhām yātrā is a complete pilgrimage—fourfold, as signaled by the four directions—and is widely duplicated in local and regional pilgrimages. Many of the same Hindi pamphlets published in Hardvār that celebrate the four dhāms of India also praise the growing popularity of the four dhāms of the Himalayas: Badrīnāth, Kedārnāth, Gangotrī, Yamunotrī. In rural Chitrakūt, where Rāma, Sītā, and Lakshmana are said to have halted in a forest ashram, there are also four dhāms to be visited. A modern temple in Ujjain is called the Chār Dhām Temple and boasts that it contains replicas of all four dhāms under one roof. Ann Gold’s research in the rural village of Ghatiyali in Rajasthan cites a local chār dhām yātrā in a village where very few people aspired to visit the four dhāms of India. In Ghatiyali, the exact four may vary. “More important than who are named,” writes Gold, “is the popularity of the concept.”43
The grouping of tīrthas in numbered sets creates a landscape, linking place to place and thereby spanning the land between. Some groups, like the four dhāms, the seven liberation-giving cities, the twelve lingas of light, and the fifty-one seats of the Goddess, cast their imaginative net across virtually the whole of India. Other groupings identify a cluster of places related to one another in a region or a set of places in our own town. In this textured landscape, nothing stands isolated. Rivers, as we have seen, are often gathered together in threes, creating trivenīs where they meet. Goddesses, too, tend to appear in clusters of three, either within the sanctum or in separate shrines. Near Shrinagar in Kashmir, the great rocky slab covered with orange sindūr called Shārikā Devī, massive as it is, is not singular, but joined with two smaller shrines: Kālī, covered with sindūr and silver paper, in a nearby cave, and Lakshmī, also orange with sindūr, jutting forth at the top of the hill. The triplicate goddess not only demarcates a wider locale, but also indicates the complexity of the faces of the Goddess.
Sets of four, like the four dhāms, often mark a territory, with an implication of directionality, even if they are not exactly in the four cardinal directions, and with an implication of completeness. Five adds a center to that sense of completeness. Among the sets of five are the many places that have five-krosha pilgrimages, places that group a whole microcosm of shrines into a schematic plan that encircles them all. As we have seen, one of the most famous is the panchakroshī yātrā around Banāras, the five-day circumambulatory pilgrimage that takes one quite outside the congested streets of the ancient city and swings through the surrounding countryside, creating a vast schematic circle said to have a radius of five kroshas, with shrines and temples all along the way and a rest house for each of the four nights on the road. A krosha or kos is a measurement of about two miles, and the whole of the land included in the circle is understood to be an embodiment of Shiva’s linga. The circle is far from perfect, but the symbolic circle of the panchakroshī gathers a world of sacred places together. Among the other places with notable panchakroshī pilgrimages are the cities of Ujjain and Ayodhyā, where the dimensions are quite different from the circle of Banāras, but the panchakroshī pilgrimage winds around the whole of the sacred zone and embraces all that is within. Five is also the traditional number of the primary elements, and the landscape of south India includes a set of the five elemental lingas, where Shiva is understood to be manifest respectively as earth, air, fire, water, and space.
Tiruchendur temple, one of the six abodes of Murugan in Tamil Nadu
The most prominent set of six is the group of Murugan shrines located across the various landscapes of Tamil Nadu, from the hilltop temple at Pālani to the seacoast temple at Tiruchendur. These six constitute, again, a distinctively regional set of pilgrimage places that focus a Tamil loyalty. Murugan, popularly known as the son of Shiva, born of the ascetic Shiva to slay the demon Tāraka, is a complex deity. At least six divinities compete for his parentage, so it is no wonder that he is a deity with six faces. His names are many: Kumāra (the Prince), Kārttikeya (son of the Krittikās or Pleiades), Shanmuga (Six-Faced), Guha, Skanda, Subrahmanya, Murugan. His temple tīrthas are among the most popular and powerful in the Tamil south. Fred Clothey, who has studied Murugan and these sites, writes, “The six sites, like the god’s six faces, connote the totality of divinity. They suggest that divinity in its fullness has been enshrined in Tamilnadu, and that Tamilnadu has become the sacred domain of the god.”44 He also sees the number six as symbolizing the fullness of the three-dimensional cosmos—the four directions, up, and down. At Swamimalai, one of the six not far from Kumbhakonam, a map depicting Tamil Nadu as a region linked by these six temples, is painted prominently on one of the walls leading to the entry. Some pilgrims may visit all six, but the point is not really to visit them all, but rather to live in a Tamil world linked and protected by these shrines.
And then there are the sevens, especially the seven sacred rivers, of which we will learn more, and the seven cities of liberation—Ayodhyā, Mathurā, Hardvār, Kāshī, Kānchī, Ujjain, and Dvārakā. Regions, like Maharashtra, have their own set of seven, such as the seven shrines for goddesses who are related to one another as sisters. Farther south, in coastal Karnataka, the Mookāmbikā Devī Temple sits on the Western Ghāts, slightly inland from the sea. She is one of the great devīs of the south, but is she alone? Not at all. She is related to the goddess Lakshmī in Kolhāpūr in southern Maharashtra, and her domain is one of the seven mukti-sthalas, liberating sacred places, established by Parashurāma when he forced the sea to retreat.45
There are many circles of eight Ganeshas arrayed to perform the task for which this deity, also called Vināyaka, is famous: guarding the threshold and removing obstacles. In Vāranāsī, there is a circle of eight Ganeshas around the center of the old city. Beyond the center, there is an imaginative set of seven concentric circles of eight Ganeshas each, creating an entire grid of protective Ganeshas around the holy city. These fifty-six Ganeshas are said to be situated at the cardinal and intermediary directions. Amazingly, most of those mentioned in the texts can actually be found, somewhere. They are not arranged in a truly circular or concentric way at all, but they are there. The surrounding circles of eight Ganeshas embrace and protect the whole. In her work on Maharashtra, Anne Feldhaus tells us of the Ashtavināyakas, the Eight Ganeshas, located in the general vicinity of Pune. She tells us that pilgrims make an outing to the eight in cars and buses, in organized tours, on weekends or anytime they can spare a day or two to make the journey. The eight Ganeshas are not particularly arranged in a circle, and nobody visits them in order, for there is no systematic order. And there are hundreds of other Ganesha temples in the same area. So, she asks, what is it that brings these eight together? It is simply the number eight and the region they comprise. She says, “The Pune region is the region within which the circumscribed set of Ashtavināyak temples is located.”46 It is not even that people visit them on pilgrimage that makes them important in this way, she writes:
Many more people in the Pune region are aware of the Ashtavināyak than have ever been to any of these places. Even most of those who have gone on pilgrimage to one or more of the Ashtavināyak temples have not, or not yet, managed to travel to all of them. Nevertheless, the existence of the Ashtavināyak as a numbered set makes possible a sense of their area as a region. Even without traveling to all of them, residents of this region can think of the eight of them as a unit by saying the name “Ashtavināyak” or by looking at the combined holy picture that is multiplied many times over on living room walls, on refrigerator doors, and in household shrines throughout the region.47
The grouping of places in numbered sets brings them together in the mind’s eye, whether or not they are visited by pilgrims.
A dramatic series of peaks known today as Girnār rises from the rolling agricultural land of Gujarat’s Saurashtra peninsula. While Girnār is largely a regional pilgrimage center for Gujarat, this is one of many places where I meditated upon the interconnectedness of India’s broader pilgrimage landscape. There is plenty of time to do so, for the pilgrim journey begins at four in the morning and includes many hours of climbing up what are said to be ten thousand steps to the needle peaks of the Girnār range. Girnār, sometimes called Raivataka Hill in the Sanskrit Purānas, is a mountain shrine including both Jain and Hindu temples, though most of the Gujarati pilgrims would find the either-or distinction of “Jain” or “Hindu” an unfamiliar way of designating identity. The Nemināth Temple, dedicated to the twenty-second tirthankara, or spiritual pioneer, of the Jain tradition, was built in the twelfth century and is the largest and most elegant building complex on the mountain. Nemināth is said to have renounced the world for the life of an ascetic when, as his wedding approached, he observed the penned animals that would be slain for the wedding feast. Unable to countenance this suffering, he renounced the life of society, and eventually, so did his intended spouse. It is here, years later, they say, that he finally left his earthly body. His footprints are here in marble.
The Hindu temples, one on each peak, are not so grand. The largest is dedicated to the goddess Ambā, and there are other shrines to Gorakhnāth, Dattātreya, and Mahākālī.48 Girnār is one of countless hilltop and mountaintop shrines all over India, many dedicated prominently to forms of Devī, like the many Ambās scattered through the hill country of Gujarat and Rajasthan. The pilgrim trail up the peaks is so well established that it has long been made into a giant steep, winding staircase, cut into the rock itself. Near the base of the mountain is an inscription of fourteen rock edicts of the Mauryan Emperor Ashoka, warning against large festivals and the animal sacrifices they entail and enjoining respect for parents and devotion to the moral principles of the Buddhist Dhamma. This inscription at Girnār, one of five places in India carved with these fourteen edicts, indicates to us the significance of this place some three centuries B.C.E., in the time of Ashoka.49
In the textual and ritual language of Girnār, we see the use of a number of motifs that are widely employed in the description of Hindu sacred geography, including some that we have just surveyed. But first, the story, as told by a local penny-paperback māhātmya:
Girnār or Girinārāyana was the brother of Pārvatī, the wife of Lord Shiva. Both Pārvatī and Girinārāyana were the children of Himālaya, the mountains personified. Both of their names derive from the mountains—giri and parvat mean “mountain peaks.” Like other mountains of Hindu myth, Girnār originally had wings and moved about the heavens like the clouds, creating a good deal of instability here below. Only after Lord Brahmā commissioned the god Indra to stabilize the earth by cutting off the wings of the mountains did they become known as achala, literally “the immoveable ones.” As the local story goes, when Indra came after Girnār to cut off his wings, Girnār got permission from his father to hide in the sea, and he did. But his sister Pārvatī yearned for him and implored the gods to find him. Vishnu, Shiva, and the other gods discerned Girnār’s hiding place and sang praises to the sea. For their praises, they received a boon, and as their boon, they asked the sea to retreat a certain distance. So it is, according to the māhātmya, that Girnār, a piece of the Himalayas, now rises abruptly from the farming land of Saurashtra, some distance from the seacoast. In order to protect her brother, Pārvatī herself came from the Himalayas to dwell on Girnār as Ambā, the mother of all the earth.
I thought about this rendition of the story as I climbed Girnār, stopping frequently to observe the life of a wayside shrine, to catch my breath, and to enjoy the sweeping view of the plains below. What struck me was the way in which those who speak of this place utilize the many motifs of sanctification as they express its significance.
This is part of the Himalayas, they say. The Himalayas are not only the “abode of snows,” but are also devālaya, the “abode of the gods,” filled with the lore of the gods, and with temples and tīrthas. The transposition of Himalayan peaks from the north to other parts of India is a widespread motif, creating a landscape dotted with mountains transported from the snowy north. Girnār is not the only piece of the Himalayas to be found elsewhere in India and thus to partake of this symbolic transposition. Govardhan, the sacred hill of Krishna’s homeland, is said to be part of the Himalayas, brought to that place by Hanumān. In Tamil Nadu, the two hills of Pālani were carried from the Himalayas by the asura Idumban, who bore them on either end of a long shoulder pole. On top of the larger of the two hills is one of the six famous shrines of Murugan, or Skanda. The hills of Tirumala bearing the shrine of Shrī Ventakeshvara are also acclaimed as transposed Himalayan peaks. Ganesha Rock at Tiruchirapalli in Tamil Nadu is called Dakshina Kailāsa, the Kailāsa of the South, and one of the three hills at Kālahasti in southern Andhra Pradesh is also called Kailāsa. Mount Gandhamādana, the Himalayan peak in the Badrīnāth area of the far north, has a duplicate the full span of India to the south, at Rāmeshvara. Clearly the currency of the Himalayas has value across the length and breadth of the land.
The sea retreated and left this place on dry ground, they say. The sacred land that emerged from the sea is another motif with wide resonance in Hindu sacred geography. All along the coasts of India are stretches of land said to have once been lost in the waters. Most extensive is the long west coast of India, from present-day Goa to Trivandrum, a coastland said to have been retrieved from the sea by Parashurāma, one of the avatāras of Vishnu. When the waters of the Gangā descended from heaven, they understandably filled the seas to overflowing and submerged part of the seacoast, especially the west coast with its lush, green, low-lying lands and its myriad holy places. In ancient times, they say, the sages propitiated Parashurāma to help rescue the land from the sea again.50 There are many tellings of the tale. In most, Parashurāma stood on the hills of the Western Ghāts and drew back his bow. Threatened with Parashurāma’s great arrow, the sea god Varuna recoiled in fear and agreed to withdraw from the coastlands. In other tellings, Parashurāma actually shot the arrow, or hurled his battle-ax, or threw a sacrificial ladle—and in so doing claimed from the sea the distance he was able to measure with the strength of his mighty arm.
However the tale is told, people along the western coast speak of the land as Parashurāma Kshetra, the “Land of Parashurāma.” Some say Parashurāma Kshetra is Kerala; others say that it extends from Kanyākumārī to Gokarna in what is today northern Karnataka, or that it extends farther still up the Konkan Coast. In any case, there are countless temples that link themselves to this story: the hill in present-day Mangalore where Parashurāma performed austerities; the place at the top of the ghāts near Udupi where he stood to shoot the arrow; or the linga at Gokarna that was reclaimed after he forced the sea to retreat.
The sacred images, or mūrtis, of many shrines are also said to have come from the sea. As we will discover, this is a major part of the mythology of Dvārakā, or Dvārāvatī, the westernmost tīrtha in India today, sitting on the seacoast of the Saurashtra peninsula of Gujarat. At the time the city of Dvārāvatī was built for Krishna as his capital, the architect of the gods asked the sea to retreat a distance in order to accommodate the plan he had drawn up. So it happened. But the ancient Dvārāvatī is said to have been submerged again by the sea as soon as Krishna died. Not surprisingly, as we shall see, many other important shrines in India are linked to the disappearance of the ancient image of Krishna at Dvārakā and claim to have found the image that was submerged. Today, Dvārakā is a busy pilgrimage town dominated by the great temple of Krishna, and other shrines that link their sanctity to this place include Udupi on the coast of Karnataka and Guruvāyūr on the coast of Kerala—both with images from Dvārakā that were rescued from the sea.
The Gangā descended to earth right here, they say. The descent of the Gangā from heaven to earth is also recapitulated here at Girnār. Partway up the steep path of stairs to the summit of Girnār’s first peak is an ashram and a spring called Gomukhī Gangā. Of course, the Gangā as a whole is duplicated throughout India, but here at Girnār, one particular facet of the river’s course is duplicated: Gomukh, the Cow’s Mouth, referring to the place high in the Himalayas where the first trickle of the river emerges from the edge of a glacier. As we have already glimpsed, Gomukh also has numerous duplications. For instance, on the cliffs of Brahmāgiri in Maharashtra, the Godāvarī River has its own Gomukh where the source waters of the river come forth. In many temple tanks, the spring filling the tank will issue from a Gomukh spout in the shape of a cow’s head, as it does at Gomukh Kund on the steep slope of Mount Abu or at Manikarnikā Kund in the Himalayan town of Gupta Kāshī, for example. And, of course, the spout that carries the waters of the abhisheka out of the inner sanctum of a Shiva temple is often called Gomukh, signaling the sanctity of these waters.
Four dhāms are to be visited here, they say. Puffing with pilgrims up the steep Girnār steps and stopping to talk at Gomukhī Gangā while we viewed the vast flatlands below, I became aware that pilgrims here also refer to the chār dhām, the four divine “abodes” of the Girnār journey. The first is the dhām we were then visiting—Gomukhi Gangā. Farther ahead on the trail was the goddess Ambājī, then the shrine of the great yogi Gorakhnāth, who is said to have lived in these parts, and the shrine of Lord Dattātreya, the powerful offspring of Brahmā, Shiva, and Vishnu, all three. At each of these stations on the pinnacle hills of Girnār, pilgrims receive a sindūr stamp on their hands or arms, the signet of having reached each dhām. As we have seen, the term dhām means “divine abode,” and the term “four dhāms” is widely used to signify a pilgrimage of the completed whole, here a fourfold pilgrimage that is widely patterned into India’s Hindu landscape.
Girnār is very much a regional pilgrimage place, but even here we begin to glimpse something of the vast systematizing of India’s pilgrimage geography through the use of powerful and widely shared symbols and stories. Nothing stands isolated, but each place, each tīrtha, participates in the references and resonances of a wider system of meanings. Observing the ways in which this singular set of peaks in Gujarat participates in a complex grammar of sanctification, we begin to see the patterning of the landscape. There is duplication and transposition—of the Gangā, the Himalayas, the four dhāms. There is disappearance and discovery—of Girnār itself, the coastlands of Gujarat, and the whole coast of western India. And beginning at Girnār, we encounter yet another great fact of Indian sacred geography: that there are many overlapping worlds, like the Hindu and Jain shrines on the mountainside—virtually identical arduous mountain pilgrimages, visiting some of the “same” places, and yet calling them by distinctive names and bringing distinctive meanings to them. And, of course, the fact that Ashoka’s major rock edicts are here speaks to the antiquity and layering of traditions that can be found at pilgrimage sites the world over.
In this book, we will explore in greater detail the ways in which patterns of sanctification have created a strong sense of the imagined landscape—locally, regionally, and transregionally. Whether the divine is present on earth by divine descent, divine eruption, or divine adhesion, these forms of sanctification participate in the creation of a landscape of polycentricity and duplication, no matter how deeply the heart’s devotion may be attached to a particular place or manifestation of the divine.
As we have seen, both mythology and topography provide for people and cultures the “maps” of the world. Again, let us recognize that to speak of an “imagined landscape” is not to speak of something fanciful, for the imagined landscape is the most powerful landscape in which we live. No one really lives in the India displayed on a digitally accurate map, or in any other two-dimensional graph of the world. Such a map can locate our hometown, or the road that took us from Rishikesh to Gangotrī, or the rail line from Rāmeshvara to Madurai. There is no question of the utility of such a map. But all of us, individually and culturally, live in the mappings of our imagined landscape, with its charged centers and its dim peripheries, with its mountaintops and its terrae incognitae, with its powerful sentimental and emotional three-dimensionality, with its bordered terrain and the loyalty it inspires, with its holy places, both private and communally shared.
The extent to which mythology and topography overlap or diverge in the shaping of an imagined landscape is a critically important question for students of religion, culture, and politics today. As we shall see, in India, the inscribing of the land with the prolixity of Hindu myth is so vast and complex that it has created a radically locative worldview. The profusion of divine manifestation is played in multiple keys as the natural counterpart of divine infinity, incapable of being limited to any name or form, and therefore expressible only through multiplication and plurality. The land-god homologies create a multitude of imagined landscapes, lived-in maps, among the many peoples who might speak of themselves as Hindus. What they have in common is an imagined landscape constituted of such homologies, whether personal, local, regional, or national. The challenges of diaspora have not loosened that locative quality. As Hindus have moved around the world, they have taken their places with them. Among the Indian diaspora—whether the older diaspora in Thailand, Cambodia, and Indonesia or the recent diaspora communities of the West—many of India’s most important sacred sites are replicated. In North America today, Hindus have built upon the patterns of duplication and sanctification found in India. They have built Kāshī’s Vishvanāth Temple in Flint, Michigan; Tirupati’s Shrī Venkateshvara Temple in Pittsburgh; Madurai’s Shrī Meenākshī Temple in Houston. In Lanham, Maryland, they have re-created the whole of south India’s sacred geography within the complex of the Shiva-Vishnu Temple. Whether in Delhi or Detroit, Hindus invoke the waters of the Gangā and the Yamunā Rivers into the waters with which they consecrate Hindu images and temples.
How does all this relate to the modern notion of “nation”? The imagined landscape may coincide with the kind of “imagined community” the political theorist Benedict Anderson speaks of as a “nation,” or it may not. Many of the tensions described as “communal” in modern India arise from the challenges of bringing into being a multireligious, secular nation-state in the context of multiple, though overlapping, imagined landscapes. The Indian national anthem, “Jana Gana Mana,” names an imagined landscape, reciting the evocative names of the regions of India, circling from the Punjab, to the south, and back to Bengal, and reciting the names of mountains and rivers—the Vindhyas and Himalayas, the Yamunā and Gangā. Even as the mind’s eye circles India, people of multiple communities will imagine different, but overlapping, landscapes. “Vindhya, Himāchala, Yamunā, Gangā …” will be evocative in very different ways to those of the north and south, to Hindus, Muslims, and secular environmentalists. This book will be an attempt to illumine some of the particular ways in which that lyric is evocative for Hindus because of the elaborate patterns of inscribing myth on earth.
