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A Desert of Shrines

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A Desert of Shrines

Rajasthan is arid, and its religious geography is organised around a small number of places where people converge across long distances.

Pushkar holds a lake said to have formed where a lotus fell from the creator's hand, and one of the very few temples anywhere dedicated to Brahma. The annual fair there combines a bathing pilgrimage with one of the largest livestock markets in the region, which is a normal combination in South Asian pilgrimage rather than an oddity.

Ajmer holds the tomb of Moinuddin Chishti, who died in 1236 and whose shrine became the principal centre of the Chishti order and one of the most visited pilgrimage destinations in South Asia. Mughal emperors walked to it; its kitchens cook in cauldrons large enough to feed thousands; and its visitors have long included very large numbers of Hindus, which the shrine's own literature and independent scholarship both record as ordinary practice rather than as an exception.

The Jain temples at Dilwara on Mount Abu and at Ranakpur are built in white marble carved to a fineness that makes the ceilings translucent in places, funded by merchant families in the eleventh to fifteenth centuries.

Underneath all of this runs a dense local layer of deified heroes, snake deities and mother goddesses with their own shrines, festivals and bardic performers, which is where most everyday religious practice in the region actually happens.

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