The Himalayan Char Dham of Uttarakhand shows, more clearly than almost any pilgrimage in the atlas, what motor roads do to a sacred journey.
Water, then Shiva, then Vishnu
The four shrines are visited in a fixed west-to-east order: Yamunotri, Gangotri, Kedarnath, Badrinath. The sequence is not decorative. Yamunotri and Gangotri are the sources of the two rivers, and the order moves from the waters to Shiva, a jyotirlinga at over three thousand metres, and then to Vishnu. The mountains close the route for half the year, and the deities are carried down to their winter seats when the temples shut.
What the roads brought
Within living memory this was a strenuous walk of several weeks made by comparatively few. Motor roads reached the valleys in the 1960s and 1970s and turned it into a mass pilgrimage, and the consequences arrived in June 2013, when a cloudburst and glacial flood destroyed Kedarnath town during the yatra season with the shrine full of pilgrims. The state figure was around 5,700 presumed dead, and the state auditor found the disaster preparedness of the route substantially inadequate. The road was rebuilt and the traffic returned larger than before, which is the pattern these routes now follow.