Pilgrimage—South Asia | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Pilgrimage is the practice of journeying to sites where religious powers,knowledge, or experiences are deemed especially accessible. Such journeys are increasingly popular throughout South Asia, facilitated by ever-improving transportation. Every major South Asian religious tradition has its sacred geography, chartered in myth, oral traditions, and history. Movement over actual kilometers, whether five or five hundred, is critical to pilgrimage, for what is important is not just visiting a sacred place but leaving home. At the level of folk religion or popular practice and belief, religious journeys for South Asian Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Muslims, and Sikhs have much in common. Christians in the subcontinent also have important pilgrimage traditions, but they are not covered in this article. Sacred places offer travelers physically and aesthetically potent experiences, from climbing hills to partaking of blessed meals or hearing devotional readings and musical performances.

Power originating in one sacred place may be transferred to another site. For example, the Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment under a particular tree in northeastern India. According to legend, over two thousand years ago a branch from this tree was miraculously established at the Buddhist temple complex of Anuradhapura, in Sri Lanka, and its worship has continued through the centuries. In Nepal, the land of the Buddha's birth, many replicas of major Indian temples offer Nepalese Buddhist pilgrims blessings equal to those available in the original sites. Similar collapses of space are common in Hindu ideas about sacred centers.

The Hindu practice of pilgrimage is rooted in ancient scriptural charters. According to textual scholars, the earliest reference to Hindu pilgrimage is in the Rig Veda (c. 1000 BCE), in which the "wanderer" is praised. Numerous later texts, including the epic Mahabharata (c. 300 BCE) and several of the mythological Puranas (c. 300–750 CE) elaborate on the capacities of particular sacred sites to grant boons, including health, wealth, progeny, and deliverance after death. Texts enjoin Hindu pilgrims to perform rites on behalf of ancestors and recently deceased kin. Sanskrit sources as well as devotional literature in regional vernacular languages praise certain places and their miraculous capacities.

The Sanskrit and Hindi word for a pilgrimage center is tirtha, literally a river ford or crossing place. The concept of a ford is associated with pilgrimage centers not simply because many are on riverbanks but because they are metaphorically places for transition, either to the other side of particular worldly troubles or beyond the endless cycle of birth and death.

The institution of pilgrimage is an integrating force among the linguistically and culturally diverse Hindu peoples of the Indian subcontinent. The four places (car dham) are a widely recognized set of sacred centers in the four cardinal directions: Kedarnath in the north, Dvarka in the west, Puri in the east, and Rameswaram in the south. A pilgrim who visits all four circumambulates India. Other important Hindu pilgrimage centers include Haridwar, Gaya, Prayag, Varanasi, and Vrindavan in northern India and Cidambaram, Madurai, Sabari Malai, and Tirupati in southern India. Most pilgrimage centers hold periodic religious fairs called melas to mark auspicious astrological moments or important anniversaries.

During the period 566–486 BCE, two new schools of religious teachings, Buddhism and Jainism, emerged in India. Each was founded by an individual teacher, and in each, pilgrimage centers commemorate the life of the founder, as well as later important leaders and holy persons. Buddhist and Jain pilgrimage centers exist throughout India, and major Buddhist shrines flourish in Nepal and Sri Lanka. Whereas many Buddhist shrines developed around putative relics of the Buddha's body, Jains have no reverence for physical remains.

The best-known Buddhist pilgrimage centers in India are associated with important events in the Buddha's life. Two of these are Bodh Gaya in Bihar, northeast India, where the Buddha is said to have achieved enlightenment under the bodhi (enlightenment) tree, and Sarnath in Uttar Pradesh, India, where he preached his first sermon. Notably both sites are on the outskirts of more ancient Hindu places of pilgrimage, Gaya and Varanasi. Distinctive to Jain shrines are the somewhat abstract stone images, often beautifully sculpted, of tirthankaras (Jain teachers).

A strong Islamic presence on the Indian subcontinent dates back to the eighth century CE. In South Asia as elsewhere, Muslims have for centuries practiced shrine pilgrimage known as ziyarat or visiting. Muslim shrines usually develop around saints' tombs. However, the custom of visiting a saint begins during the saint's lifetime, when a particular holy person gains a reputation for teaching, healing, and miracles. The more celebrated Islamic shrines develop into large complexes called dargahs (palaces or royal courts).

Tombs of the Chishti Sufi saints, who flourished during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in India, stand out as places of pan-Islamic pilgrimage significance. The dargah of Mu ʿinuddin Chishti in Ajmer, Rajasthan, India, where the Mughal emperor Akbar (1542–1605) made annual pilgrimages, is generally accepted as the most important and is revered by Hindus as well as Muslims. Muslim shrines celebrate annual festivals known as 'urs, which are similar to Hindu melas.

The founder of the Sikh religion, Guru Nanak (1469–1539), spoke against pilgrimage, calling it a superficial practice. Nonetheless, a strong tradition of visiting places sacred to their own history exists among Sikhs. Sikh shrines are often associated with the ten Sikh gurus' lives and travels. They are called gurdvaras (the dwelling places of the gurus). Most celebrated is the Darbar Sahib (reverenced court), known in English as the Golden Temple, in Amritsar, Punjab, India. Among their unique features, the gurdvaras enshrine Sikhism's sacred book, the Guru Granth Sahib, and house the langar or pilgrims' kitchen, where the needy receive free food.

Ann Grodzins Gold

Aitken, Molly Emma, ed. (1995) Meeting the Buddha: On Pilgrimage in Buddhist India. New York: Riverhead Books.

Bhardwaj, Surinder Mohan. (1973) Hindu Places of Pilgrimage in India: A Study in Cultural Geography. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Buitenen, J. A. B. van, trans. and ed. (1976) "The Tour of the Sacred Fords." In The Mahabharata. Vol. 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 366–455.

Dundas, Paul. (1992) "Pilgrimage and Holy Places." In The Jains. New York: Routledge, 187–194.

McLeod, Hew. (1997) "The Principal Gurdwaras." In Sikhism. New York: Penguin Books, 153–162.

Troll, Christian W., ed. (1989) Muslim Shrines in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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