Uttarakhand

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.

The shrines of Uttarakhand sit in steep, seismically active, glacier-fed valleys, and the relationship between the pilgrimage and the physical landscape is not decorative.

In June 2013 several days of extreme rainfall and a glacial lake outburst sent water and debris through the Kedarnath valley at the height of the season. Thousands of people died, most of them pilgrims and the workers who serve them, whole settlements along the route were destroyed, and the temple itself survived largely because a large boulder came to rest immediately behind it and split the flow. The disaster prompted an argument about carrying capacity that has not been resolved: pilgrim numbers had grown enormously, the road and hotel building that made that growth possible had cut into unstable slopes, and the state depends economically on the traffic.

The rivers themselves carry religious status that has entered law. In 2017 the High Court of Uttarakhand declared the Ganges and the Yamuna to be legal persons with the rights of a minor, appointing officials as their guardians; the Supreme Court of India stayed the order shortly afterwards on practical grounds. The attempt is part of an international pattern of granting legal standing to rivers and mountains, and in this case the reasoning drew directly on the rivers' status as deities.