The Char Dham as an Imagined Landscape

Abstract

Uttarakhand Tourism’s flagship religious tourism offering is the Char Dham, a four-site circuit in which visitors travel to temples at Yamunotri, Gangotri, Kedarnath, and Badrinath.  The first two sites are sacred to the Yamuna and Ganges rivers, which Hindus also understand to be Goddesses in material form, the third is devoted to Shiva, and the last is associated with Vishnu.  This circuit thus invokes all three primary Hindu deities—that is, the deities that people regularly worship—and completing it is portrayed as an inclusive act of worship through the Hindu pantheon.  The image of totality is also conveyed by the phrase “Char Dham,” since this name also refers to four-site pilgrimage circuit roughly encompassing India’s geographic boundaries—Badrinath in the north, Jagannath Puri in the east, Rameshvaram in the south, and Dvaraka in the west.  Despite its contemporary preeminence, the Himalayan Char Dham network is relatively recent.  Each site has its own long-attested history, but the network seems to have been created in the latter half of the 20^th century.  Before this, evidence clearly shows that the four sites were envisioned not as a unified quartet, but as two linked pairs—Yamunotri-Gangotri and Kedarnath-Badrinath.  Many factors helped drive this conceptual shift from two pairs to a quartet, including politics, infrastructural development, and the growth of Himalayan tourism, but closer examination reveals that even now this older pattern still runs just below the surface