Notes

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.
SACRED LANDSCAPE AND REGIONS

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