Badrinath

Badrinath's administrative arrangements preserve something that no longer exists anywhere else: a working, physical trace of an all-India religious network.

The Rawal

The head priest at Badrinath, the Rawal, is by long practice a Nambudiri Brahmin from Kerala, from the far southwest of the subcontinent, serving a temple at three thousand one hundred metres in the Uttarakhand Himalaya, roughly two and a half thousand kilometres away.

He must be a celibate, and there are restrictions attaching to the office that shape his life entirely.

A few days' walk away at Kedarnath, the head priest is traditionally drawn from the Veerashaiva community of Karnataka.

So the two great Himalayan shrines, close together in the same mountains, are served by priestly lineages drawn from two different southern states. Nothing about the local geography explains this. It only makes sense as the residue of a deliberate network.

The tradition's account

That network is attributed to Adi Shankara, the eighth- or ninth-century philosopher credited with founding monastic centres at the four corners of India and with reorganising pilgrimage into a subcontinental system, including the recovery of the Badrinath image from the hot spring, after a period in which the site is said to have been in Buddhist hands.

This should be read for what it is. Shankara's dates are disputed, the biographies are centuries later than the man, and the Buddhist episode at Badrinath is not independently established. The four-corner scheme is the tradition's account of its own organisation, not a documented eighth-century project.

But the priestly lineages are a fact, whatever produced them, and they are hard to explain by accident.

The season

The temple opens from late April to early November and is shut and snowbound the rest of the year, with the deity moved down to Joshimath for the winter. Hot springs at the foot of the steps, fed geothermally, let pilgrims bathe before entering at an altitude where nothing else is warm.

The crowds

Visits have risen from around three hundred and sixty thousand in 1990 to millions. At peak times a pilgrim who has travelled for days gets perhaps ten or twenty seconds in front of the image before being moved along, a compression of the encounter that is now the ordinary experience of every major Indian shrine.

Badrinath has hot springs at the base of a temple surrounded by some of the coldest inhabited terrain in the Himalayas, and pilgrims are expected to use them before going inside.

Revived, not simply built

Tradition credits the philosopher Adi Shankara with re-establishing organised worship at Badrinath in the eighth century, installing the black stone image of Vishnu now enshrined there after a period in which the site's earlier worship had reportedly lapsed, making the temple's founding as much a restoration as an original construction.

Bathing in Tapt Kund before entering

Pilgrims traditionally bathe in Tapt Kund, a naturally hot sulphur spring immediately beside the temple, before entering to worship, a practical accommodation to the freezing surrounding climate that has also acquired its own purificatory significance within the pilgrimage.

One of seven, not only one of four

Beyond its place among the four Char Dham sites, Badrinath is also the principal shrine among the Sapta Badri, a group of seven related Vishnu temples spread across the same Himalayan valley, each associated with a different aspect or episode of Vishnu's presence in the region, a wider devotional network that the temple's fame as a single Char Dham stop tends to obscure.