WHAT THESE ROADS GAVE BACK (Series Wrap)

✍️ Written by Saket Suman

There is a moment on the Kedarnath trail when the body understands something that the mind has been resisting. The trail does not care how much you have read about this place. The altitude does not make exceptions for preparation. The shrine ahead is where it has always been, and you are where you are, and the distance between the two is exactly what it is, and the only way to close it is to keep walking.

I have been thinking about that moment for the length of this series, which is to say for the length of the journey that the series is the record of. Sixteen shrines. Several thousand kilometres. Trains and buses and shared sumos and ferries and treks and one ropeway and one Pamban bridge railway crossing at sea level above the Palk Strait that I will not be forgetting for a long time. The Bharat Darshan series began as an act of journalism and became, somewhere between the Nallamala forest and the Gangotri glacier, something harder to categorise.

Let me try anyway. At Somnath, where the series begins, the pillar points south and says there is nothing between this shore and the Antarctic. The sea has been arriving at this specific point on the Saurashtra coast for as long as the coast has existed. The temple has been destroyed twelve times and rebuilt twelve times. The civilisational question that Somnath keeps asking is not a devotional one. It is a question about persistence — about what it means to decide, twelve separate times, that this place is worth building on again. Most institutions do not survive one destruction. The tradition at Somnath has survived twelve. Whatever that is, it is not fragile.

At Mallikarjuna in the Nallamala forest, the road runs forty kilometres through a tiger reserve before you reach the shrine. Shiva here is the jasmine-lord, the forest god, the deity whose presence is inseparable from the ecology around him. The Bhramaramba Devi temple — one of the eighteen Maha Shakti Peethas — stands in the same complex, Shiva and Shakti at the same address. The forest that keeps this shrine has been keeping it for two thousand years. What the Nagarjunasagar-Srisailam Tiger Reserve is doing, whether it knows it or not, is the same thing the tradition has always done: protecting what is inside it from what is outside.

At Mahakaleshwar in Ujjain, the city wakes at four in the morning to apply cremation ash to the Shivalinga, and the observatory two kilometres away still calculates astronomical positions, and the Kal Bhairav temple receives wine at its deity's lips and the wine disappears and nobody has explained it. Ujjain is a city that contains the sacred, the scientific and the inexplicable simultaneously, without finding any contradiction between them. It is one of the oldest continuously functioning cities in India. The Shipra river is not the Ganga. It does not need to be.

At Omkareshwar, the river performs the circumambulation so you do not have to. The Narmada shaped an island into the form of the syllable that the tradition holds as the first sound of the universe, and Shankaracharya sat in a cave on that island and found his guru and the idea that reorganised the way a civilisation thinks. The cave is small. The idea was not. This is, I think, the most important fact in the series: that the places where the largest ideas happened are almost always smaller than the ideas themselves.

At Kedarnath, the glacier is retreating. The temple survived the 2013 flood because a boulder lodged against its rear wall at exactly the right moment. The boulder is still there. The glacier is not where it was. The shrine that the tradition holds as one of the oldest Shiva sites in the Himalayas is watching its glacier leave, and the question this raises — about what we are doing to the landscapes that hold our sacred sites — is one that the pilgrimage circuit forces you to sit with in a way that the newspaper story about glacier retreat does not.

At Bhimashankar, the giant squirrel in the canopy above the temple has not been informed that this is a sacred site. It is here anyway. The wildlife sanctuary and the Jyotirlinga share the same address. The forest department and the temple trust manage this with the pragmatic coexistence that Indian institutions develop when neither side can remove the other. This is, in its own way, an ancient arrangement — the forest and the god have always shared this hill. The sanctuary is the modern version of a relationship that predates the modern.

At Kashi Vishwanath, the Ganga bends north. The city has been living with this bend for three thousand years, building itself around it, orienting its ghats and its galis and its burning pyres and its silk trade and its philosophy and its music toward the river that bends north here for reasons that the tradition and the geologist describe differently and both get partially right. Varanasi is the most complete argument this series encountered for the proposition that a civilisation is not an abstraction. It is a city. It is specific. It is here.

At Trimbakeshwar, the Godavari begins as something you could step over. By the time it reaches the sea at Rajahmundry it is 1,465 kilometres of river, the second longest in India, the longest in peninsular India, the Dakshin Ganga, the sacred river of the south. The Nashik Kumbh happens on this river because the tradition holds it equivalent in sanctity to the Ganga for the purpose of liberation. The Brahmagiri hill above the shrine is where this equivalence starts. The hill does not announce itself. The river that begins there does.

At Vaidyanath in Deoghar, the road from Bihar arrives at the place it has always been going. Eight million kanwariyas walk 108 kilometres from the Ganga at Sultanganj to the Shivalinga during Shravan. The road is closed to vehicles for one month. The state governments of Jharkhand and Bihar administer the corridor as a civil logistics exercise of the first order. The faith that produces this logistics exercise is not a private matter. It is a public fact about what eight million people simultaneously decide matters more than the comfort of not walking.

At Nageshwar on the Saurashtra coast, the underground sanctum asks you to descend before you can arrive. The land at this latitude is flat, the sky enormous, the Arabian Sea everywhere in the peripheral vision. The Saurashtra coast keeps its gods out of plain sight — Nageshwar below the earth, Krishna's Dwarka below the sea. You do not encounter them by accident. You have to know where to look, and then you have to go down.

At Ramanathaswamy on the island of Rameswaram, the corridor has 1,212 pillars and 22 wells and the water in each well tastes different and the Pamban bridge crosses the sea to get you there and Dhanushkodi at the island's tip was destroyed in one night by a cyclone in 1964 and was never rebuilt and the land ends there and Sri Lanka is 31 kilometres away and the shoals of Rama Setu are visible at low tide and the subcontinent runs out of arguments at that point and simply stops. Ramanathaswamy is where the Jyotirlinga circuit ends, geographically, and it ends at the edge of the land because the tradition understands that some things can only be fully received at the point where there is nothing further to go.

At Grishneshwar, one kilometre from the Kailasa Temple at Ellora, you can touch the Shivalinga with your own hands. This is the only Jyotirlinga where this is permitted. After eleven shrines of witnessing — of the darshan that is seeing and being seen — the twelfth allows contact. I stood in that sanctum with my hand on the stone and I am not going to tell you what happened because the piece is not the place for that. What I can tell you is that the eleven shrines before it had prepared the encounter in ways I had not anticipated. The circuit knows what it is doing. You find out what that is at the twelfth shrine.

At Yamunotri, the Yamuna begins as cold water on rock. It has no memory yet of the plains it will cross, the cities it will pass, the debates it will generate, the years of action plans and pollution reports and court orders that the plains will accumulate around it. It is entirely of the mountain. There is a lesson here about the relationship between origin and accumulation, between what a thing is at its source and what the journey downstream makes of it, that I found more useful than most things I have been taught formally.

At Gangotri, the glacier is retreating and the river it produces is still flowing and both facts are equally true and the first does not excuse ignoring the second and the second does not diminish the first. The Bhagirathi runs cold and fast past the shrine. The Bhagirath Shila — the rock where the tapasya happened — is in the compound, touched by pilgrims, pointed out by priests. The scale of what Bhagirath's patience produced and what our impatience is now dismantling is the single most uncomfortable fact the Bharat Darshan series produced. I put it here because it belongs here and because the journalism that visits sacred landscapes and reports only on the sacred is not doing its full job.

At Badrinath, Vishnu meditates under a small common unremarkable tree. The saffron and gold temple insists on its warmth between the cold Alaknanda and the cold Neelkanth peak. Joshimath below it is cracking. Mana village three kilometres beyond it is the last Indian village before Tibet, and the Vyas Gufa and the Ganesh Gufa and the Bhim Pul and the underground Saraswati are all within a short walk of the shrine and most pilgrims do not make that walk. Three kilometres from the last temple on the circuit. The pilgrimage does not end at the shrine. It ends where you decide to stop walking.

At Dwarka, the sea has been reclaiming what Krishna built for millennia. The ASI has found structures below the surface of the water off the coast. The city that the tradition says was submerged is partially there, at five to twelve metres, the archaeologist and the tradition in their permanent negotiation about what the evidence means. And at Puri, Jagannath — no arms, enormous eyes, the most abstract major deity image in the Indian religious tradition — has not left and is not leaving. The Rath Yatra brings him three kilometres down the Grand Road and back. That is the closest he gets to departure.

Dwarka is about what was lost. Puri is about what remains. The civilisational circuit that Shankaracharya mapped in the eighth century placed these two shrines at the western and eastern ends of the subcontinent as a way of holding both possibilities simultaneously — the sacred that was submerged and the sacred that endures. This is not a devotional observation. It is a structural one. The circuit was designed by someone who understood that a civilisation needs to locate both its losses and its continuities, and that the map of where to find them is itself a form of knowledge.

What does the circuit mean for an individual?

It means that you arrive at the first shrine carrying everything you brought and you leave the last shrine carrying something different that you did not bring and cannot fully name. The difference is not spiritual transformation in the register that the word suggests. It is more specific and less comfortable than that. It is the accumulation of distances — the glacier retreating above Kedarnath, the sea arriving again at Somnath, the Godavari beginning as a trickle at the foot of the Brahmagiri — understood in the body rather than the mind, because the body has been present at each of them and the mind has only read about them.

The circuit teaches proportion. Not the proportion of the motivational poster — your problems are small, the universe is large — but the more useful proportion of the geological and the theological understood together. The Deccan plateau basalt that contains the Ellora caves was formed sixty-five million years ago. The Kailasa Temple was carved from it over a century. The Grishneshwar Jyotirlinga has been present in the same village for as long as the tradition records. The legal proceedings around the publication of the book that contains the longer version of this journey have been ongoing for over a year. Each of these facts is true. The circuit teaches you to hold all of them in the same frame without letting any one of them crowd out the others.

What does the circuit mean for a civilisation?

It means that this subcontinent had, in the eighth century, a philosopher who walked from Kerala to Kashmir and back and to the four cardinal points of the subcontinent and founded monastic institutions at each corner and mapped a pilgrimage circuit that connected the high Himalayas to the coasts of three different seas — and that the circuit he mapped is still functioning, still receiving pilgrims, still producing in those who travel it something that the civilisation has consistently found worth producing across fourteen centuries of everything that fourteen centuries contains.

That is not a devotional claim. It is a historical one. And the historical claim is, in its own way, as extraordinary as any theological one.

The Bharat Darshan series on IndianRepublic.in is the journalistic record of one circuit of that map — sixteen pieces, sixteen shrines, the Jyotirlingas and the Char Dhams reported from the ground, in the register of a journalist who is also a pilgrim and will not pretend to be only one of those things. The curtain raiser said that the circuit exists because human beings need a route to understand what everywhere means. The closing piece says that the route works.

Go. If you can. The road does not ask where you are going. It only asks if you are moving. And if you cannot go — read the series. All of it. In sequence. It was written in that order for a reason.

The Bharat Darshan series — sixteen pieces on the twelve Jyotirlingas and the Char Dhams of Uttarakhand and India — is complete and available in its entirety at IndianRepublic.in.

Somnath · Mallikarjuna · Mahakaleshwar · Omkareshwar · Kedarnath · Bhimashankar · Kashi Vishwanath · Trimbakeshwar · Vaidyanath · Nageshwar · Ramanathaswamy · Grishneshwar · Yamunotri · Gangotri · Badrinath · Dwarka · Puri

BHARAT DARSHAN — COMPLETE SERIES
12 Jyotirlingas · Char Dhams of Uttarakhand · Char Dhams of India

Curtain Raiser
I Have Been on That Road All My Life

The 12 Jyotirlingas
Somnath — Where the Shore Holds Its Ground
Mallikarjuna — Where the Forest Keeps the God
Mahakaleshwar — The City That Wakes at Four
Omkareshwar — The Island the River Shaped Into a Prayer
Kedarnath — Above the Tree Line, Below the Sky
Bhimashankar — The Sanctuary Nobody Told the Squirrels About
Kashi Vishwanath — The River Bends North Here for a Reason
Trimbakeshwar — Everything Begins at the Foot of This Hill
Vaidyanath — The Road to Deoghar
Nageshwar — Where the Land Runs Out of Arguments
Ramanathaswamy — The Wells Don't All Taste the Same
Grishneshwar — The Last One. Touch It.