Over the millennia, Hindus have developed an enormous number of pilgrimage places, pilgrimage-related practices, and texts extolling the virtues of, and benefits to be gained by, pilgrimages to powerful places and persons. Some of the more prominent themes that emerge in Hindu pilgrimage are the importance of water, the effects of powerful persons on particular places, the centrality of purity and asceticism, the association of pilgrimage with death, and the growing popularity and commercialization of pilgrimage as it becomes associated with tourism.

In Sanskrit and related languages, the central term for pilgrimage place is tīrtha, a crossing place or a ford where one leaves the mundane world and crosses over into a more powerful or spiritual location. The term already points to the centrality of water, rivers, and bathing in Hinduism. It is possible that this centrality was already present in the ancient Indus Valley...