Somewhere in every Hindu family there is a story of a journey: a grandmother who walked to Pandharpur, an uncle who did the Char Dham after retirement, a cousin who went to Tirupati with a shaved head and came back glowing. Pilgrimage is the one religious act that almost every Hindu, orthodox or casual, has done or means to do. The country is mapped by it; the roads and railways follow routes that pilgrims wore down first.
This article explains the idea behind pilgrimage, walks through the best-known circuits and places, describes the Kumbh Mela, and ends with the tradition's own warning that the journey outward is only a rehearsal for the journey in.
What a tirtha is
The Sanskrit word tirtha comes from a root meaning "to cross over". A tirtha is a ford, the shallow place where a river can be waded. The word was chosen deliberately: a holy place is where the crossing is easy, where the distance between the ordinary and the sacred is at its narrowest. To go there is tirtha-yatra, a journey to the crossing. (The Jains use the same root for their teachers, the Tirthankaras, "makers of the ford".)
Rivers, confluences, springs and the sea are the oldest tirthas, which is why so many pilgrimages end in a bath. Later the word stretched to any place made holy by a deity's presence, a saint's life or an event in the epics. A dham, "abode", is a tirtha where the deity is understood to actually dwell.
The great circuits
Char Dham and Chota Char Dham
The classic circuit of the whole country is the Char Dham, the four abodes, traditionally associated with Adi Shankara in the eighth century and set at the four compass points: Badrinath in the Himalaya, where Vishnu sits in meditation as Badri Narayana; Dwarka on the Gujarat coast, Krishna's city; Puri in Odisha, home of Jagannath; and Rameswaram on its island in the far south, where Rama worshipped Shiva. A popular saying has Vishnu bathe at Rameswaram, dress at Dwarka, dine at Puri and sleep at Badrinath. Completing the circuit was once the work of a lifetime and is now the work of a few weeks.
The Chota Char Dham, the "small four", lies within the mountains of Uttarakhand and is what most people now mean by "going on Char Dham". It runs west to east: Yamunotri, source of the Yamuna; Gangotri, source of the Ganga; Kedarnath, Shiva's shrine at nearly 3,600 metres, reached by a long trek on foot or pony; and Badrinath again. The shrines open around Akshaya Tritiya in late April or May and close around Diwali, when the images are carried down to winter homes in the valleys. The 2013 floods that devastated Kedarnath are a reminder that these are living mountains.
Lingas of light and seats of the Goddess
Shaivas have their own map in the twelve Jyotirlingas, "lingas of light", at places where Shiva is said to have appeared as an endless column of fire whose ends neither Brahma nor Vishnu could find. The twelve, listed in a stotra that every Shiva devotee learns, run from Somnath in Gujarat and Mallikarjuna at Srisailam through Mahakaleshwar at Ujjain, Omkareshwar on the Narmada, Kedarnath, Bhimashankar, Kashi Vishwanath, Trimbakeshwar, Vaidyanath, Nageshwar, Rameswaram and Grishneshwar near Ellora. A few sites are claimed by more than one town; the devotion is undisturbed by the dispute.
Shaktas follow the Shakti Peethas, the places where pieces of the body of Sati fell to earth. When Sati gave up her life at her father Daksha's sacrifice, Shiva carried her body in grief across the universe, and Vishnu cut it away piece by piece to free him. Where each piece fell, a seat of the Goddess arose: fifty-one by the common count, from Kamakhya in Assam and Kalighat in Kolkata to Jwalamukhi in Himachal and Hinglaj in Balochistan.
Four places of great crowds
Kashi, Varanasi, is the tirtha of tirthas, Shiva's own city, where death itself is said to grant liberation.
Vaishno Devi sits in a cave in the Trikuta hills above Katra in Jammu. The climb is about thirteen kilometres, done on foot by most pilgrims, many through the night, to the cry of Jai Mata Di. Inside the cave the Goddess is not an image but three natural rock forms, honoured as Maha Kali, Maha Lakshmi and Maha Saraswati.
Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh, properly the hill of Tirumala above it, is the home of Venkateswara, a form of Vishnu, and among the most visited shrines on earth. Pilgrims climb the hill by thousands of steps, offer their hair in gratitude for prayers answered, and carry home the famous laddu.
Sabarimala in the forests of Kerala belongs to Ayyappa, son of Shiva and of Vishnu in his form as Mohini. What makes it unusual is the preparation. Pilgrims take a vratam, a vow, of forty-one days beginning in mid-November: they wear black or blue, go barefoot, eat simply, abstain from meat, alcohol and intimacy, and address each other as Swami, seeing Ayyappa in every fellow pilgrim. At the end they walk through the forest carrying the irumudi, a two-chambered bundle holding a ghee-filled coconut, climb the eighteen sacred steps, and break the coconut before the deity. Entry has traditionally been limited to men, children and older women, a custom much debated in recent years.
The Kumbh Mela
The Kumbh Mela is the largest gathering of human beings for any purpose anywhere. Its story comes from the churning of the ocean. When the gods and demons churned the milk ocean for amrita, the nectar of immortality, it rose in a kumbha, a pot, and in the struggle over it drops fell at four places: Haridwar on the Ganga, Prayagraj at the Sangam, Nashik on the Godavari and Ujjain on the Shipra. When the planets return to the positions they held at that moment, the river is held to run with nectar again.
The timing is astronomical. The key is Jupiter, Brihaspati, which takes nearly twelve years to circle the zodiac. Haridwar's Kumbh falls when Jupiter is in Aquarius (Kumbha, the sign of the pot) and the Sun enters Aries; Prayagraj's when Jupiter is in Taurus and the Sun in Capricorn, in the winter month of Magha; Nashik's and Ujjain's when Jupiter is in Leo, which is why they are also called Simhastha. Each site therefore hosts a full Kumbh roughly every twelve years, Haridwar and Prayagraj hold an Ardh (half) Kumbh in between, and after twelve full cycles, every hundred and forty-four years, Prayagraj holds a Maha Kumbh.
What the pilgrim sees is a temporary city of tents on the river sands; the processions of the akharas, the monastic orders, with their ash-smeared naga sadhus leading the way to the water on the principal bathing days; and families from every state bathing side by side. Some stay for the whole of Magha as kalpavasis, living on the sand, eating once a day and bathing at dawn. For most, one dip at the Sangam on the right morning is the memory of a lifetime.
Walking to Pandharpur
Not every pilgrimage ends at a mountain or a river. Every year in the month of Ashadha the roads of Maharashtra fill with warkaris, "those who make the wari", walking to Pandharpur to stand before Vitthal, Krishna on his brick with his hands on his hips. The palanquins carrying the sandals of Sant Dnyaneshwar and Sant Tukaram set out from Alandi and Dehu and are joined by hundreds of thousands who walk for some three weeks, singing the abhangs of the saints, tulsi plants balanced on the women's heads, to arrive on Ashadhi Ekadashi. The tradition is some seven centuries old, and it is as much about the road, the singing and the company as about the darshan at the end.
The body as the tirtha
Having laid out this whole geography, the tradition then undercuts it, and the undercutting is part of the teaching. The pilgrimage chapters of the Mahabharata list hundreds of tirthas and then say that the person whose hands, feet and mind are restrained, who has learning, austerity and good repute, obtains the fruit of all of them. The saints repeat the point without mercy. Kabir left Kashi to die at Magahar, a town said to send its dead to hell, to show that liberation depends on the state of the heart and not on the place of death. The Marathi saints insisted that Vitthal is found as surely in the devotee's heart as on the brick at Pandharpur. The yogis speak of an inner Prayag, where the three channels of the subtle body meet between the brows, and call the body itself the true tirtha. The sacred places exist, in this view, to teach the pilgrim how to find the ford that was always inside. One goes out in order to learn how to go in.
If you go
A first yatra is easier with a little counsel. Go in season; the Himalayan shrines are closed half the year, and the hot months are hard everywhere. Travel light, dress modestly and keep a pair of socks for stone floors. Make a sankalpa, a stated intention, before you set out; the journey holds together better around a purpose. Expect queues, and let them be part of the practice. Accept the help of a local panda, the hereditary priest-guide, but agree the cost before, not after. Eat the prasad, bring some home, and bring back a little water from the river. And when you return, do not be surprised if the deepest moment was not the darshan but something on the road.