Sacred To

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

India gathers fourteen cities recording five living religious traditions, more members than any other city grouping the atlas records for a single country.

Sikhism centers on Amritsar, where Guru Ram Das began excavating the sacred pool in 1577 and Guru Arjan built the Harmandir Sahib in its middle, and reaches into Delhi and Patna, whose gurdwaras mark a martyrdom and a guru's birthplace. Vaishnava Hindu tradition holds Dwarka as the kingdom Krishna established after leaving Mathura, his identified birthplace and the center of the wider Braj pilgrimage country that includes Vrindavan, dense with temples built by the Gosvamis whom Chaitanya sent there. Buddhism and Jainism share a landscape in Bihar: Rajgir, where the Buddha taught on Vulture Peak and tradition places the first council, and Vaishali, where the Buddha taught repeatedly and Jain tradition places Mahavira's birth, while Valabhi in Gujarat hosted the council that wrote down the Svetambara Agamas and Shravanabelagola in Karnataka holds the monolithic statue of Bahubali.

Sufi Islam runs through Ajmer, home to the most visited Sufi shrine in South Asia, Delhi's dargah of Nizamuddin Auliya, and Fatehpur Sikri, Akbar's short lived capital where he convened interfaith debate among Sunni, Shia, Sufi, Hindu, Jain, Zoroastrian and Jesuit thinkers. Kolkata's Kalighat temple anchors Bengali Shakta devotion to Kali. Varanasi, among the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, sits apart from any one tradition, its riverfront ghats making it Hinduism's holiest city while a Buddhist pilgrimage site lies ten kilometres from its center.

Fourteen cities, five traditions, and almost none of them confined to one alone.