The Land of the Gods and the Four Abodes

Uttarakhand is where the Ganges and the Yamuna come out of the mountains, and its religious identity is organised almost entirely around that fact. The state is commonly called Devbhoomi, the land of the gods.

Four high shrines make up the Char Dham circuit of the region: Yamunotri and Gangotri near the sources of the two rivers, Kedarnath in a glacial valley at over three thousand metres, and Badrinath on the Alaknanda. All four are open only in the warmer months; the deities of Kedarnath and Badrinath are taken down to winter seats in lower villages and carried back up in spring, so the pilgrimage year has a shape set by snow. Kedarnath is one of the twelve jyotirlinga shrines of Shiva and Badrinath one of the principal Vishnu sites, so the circuit joins the two great devotional streams in one journey.

Lower down, Haridwar stands where the Ganges reaches the plain and Rishikesh a short distance upstream. Haridwar is one of the four cities that host the Kumbh Mela in rotation, and both towns are long-established centres of ascetic settlement, monastic orders and teaching institutions. Rishikesh became widely known abroad in the 1960s as a destination for foreign students of yoga and meditation, and the resulting concentration of institutions there is now itself a feature of the region's religious economy.