Pilgrimage & Sacred Geography
Why the divine is sought in place: the meaning of tirtha and yatra, the Char Dham, the Kumbh Mela, the sacred cities, and the holy rivers of India.
Hindu pilgrimage is organised around the tirtha, a crossing place. The word means a ford, a shallow reach where a river can be waded, and the tradition applies it to any site where the distance between this world and what stands behind it is held to be short. That is the idea underneath the whole of Hindu pilgrimage. You travel somewhere because somewhere is thinner.
The map that results is unusually precise. Four abodes at the compass points of the subcontinent, the Char Dham, walked as a circuit. Twelve Jyotirlingas. Some fifty-one Shakti Peethas, marking where the parts of Sati’s body are said to have fallen. Five temples in the Tamil country, each assigned one of the elements. And the Kumbh Mela, by most counts the largest gathering of human beings anywhere on earth, timed by the position of Jupiter.
These pages set out what the sites are, why the tradition holds them sacred, and what the documentary record can and cannot confirm about their age. Kashi has a treatise to itself, since one city turned out to need twenty-three chapters.