The Chota Char Dham

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.

These four shrines are seasonal, and the seasonality is not an inconvenience around the ritual but part of it. The temples open around Akshaya Tritiya in April or May and close after Diwali, at Bhai Dooj, and for roughly six months they are shut, snowbound and unattended.

The deities do not stay. They are carried down to lower temples, their winter seats, and worship continues there without interruption. Kedarnath's image goes to Ukhimath, Badrinath's worship moves to Joshimath, Gangotri's goddess goes to Mukhba and Yamunotri's to Kharsali. The descent and the return are processions in their own right, accompanied by the local community, and the villages of the winter seats hold a formal relationship to the high shrines through them.

At Badrinath a lamp is left burning inside the closed temple, tended and filled before the doors are sealed, and its condition when the doors are reopened in spring is watched. At Kedarnath the same practice is reported.

The order of the circuit is fixed and follows a logic. Yamunotri and Gangotri are the sources of the Yamuna and the Ganga, so the pilgrim begins at water, then goes to Kedarnath, a Shiva jyotirlinga at 3,583 metres, and ends at Badrinath, a Vishnu temple and one of the hundred and eight Divya Desams.

In June 2013 catastrophic floods struck the Kedarnath valley and killed thousands of pilgrims and residents. The temple itself survived, protected in the accounts by a large boulder that lodged behind it and split the flow. The reconstruction of the town and the subsequent expansion of helicopter access and road building have changed the character of the yatra considerably.