An Alternate Imagination of the Nation: Pilgrim

Cartography, Religious Nationalism, Space Making and its

Transnational Aspects
Name : Arnav Bhattacharya
Roll Number : 79 PG 2
Presidency University
Course: Religious Nationalism and the Idea of India: Colonial and Post
Colonial Times
Course Instructor:Prof. Swarupa Gupta

An Alternate Imagination of the Nation: Pilgrim Cartography, Religious

Nationalism, Space Making and its Transnational Aspects

Introduction
Ekam sat vipraha bahuda vadanti1
The above couplet taken from the Rig Veda, means that truth is one though the wise speak of
it in many ways. In considering the greater argument of the paper, perhaps no other statement
could better summarise the thrust of my argument. In this paper I look at the case of religious
nationalism. I argue that nationalism as proposed by scholars is rather limited in its appeal
and cannot explain fully the greater and diverse ways in which the idea of the nation exists in
the imagination of several people since the days of yore. For doing this I have used Peter Van
Der Veers treatment of the concept of religious nationalism and taken the aspect of ritual
communication in particular the idea of pilgrimage to construe an idea of India that has
always existed at some level in a fuzzy form. The human agency of the pilgrim becomes
significant here as there is a strong anthropometric dimension to it. Proceeding on these lines
I have analysed the way in which the nation is imagined not only in terms of pilgrimage but
that of the imperial cartographic treatment of the nation, the valorisation of the notion of
mother India and the epic imagination of the land of Bharata. Not only has the cartographic
aspect been considered but the greater transnational implication of such a national
imagination has been treated at three different stratas -that of the early connection; the
travellers from Bengal who visited South East Asia and the present day transnational
ramifications of nationalist politics drawn on the lines of religious nationalism. This has
allowed a thorough consideration of the concept of religious nationalism at different levels in
a detailed and cogent manner.

The Dominant Discourse on Nationalism

Ernest Gellner in Nations and Nationalism writes, nations can be defined only in terms of
the age of nationalism, rather than, as you might expect, the other way round. It is not the
case that the 'age of nationalism' is a mere summation of the awakening and political selfassertion of this, that, or the other nation. Rather, when general social conditions make for
standardized, homogeneous, centrally sustained high cultures, pervading entire populations
and not just elite minorities,a situation arises in which well-defined educationally sanctioned
and unified cultures constitute very nearly the only kind of unit with which men willingly and
often ardently identify. 2 Gellners argument in a particular manner epitomizes the concepts
that commentators generally associate with the emergence of nationalism. That nationalism
and the emergence of nations is a process closely linked to the emergence of capitalism and
the resultant homogenization of culture that enables the formation of a high culture, which
then becomes a standard with which everyone identifies, it is an academic trope, that appears
1
2

Diana L Eck, India: A Sacred Geography (New York: Random House,2012),p.43.

Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), p. 55.

in various forms, as also seen in Andersons seminal work on the emergence of nations3
where he describes the nation as an imagined community. What Gellners work in its
attempt to locate the emergence of nations in the beginning of an industrial division of labour
and the resultant homogenization of culture, does is that, it makes as Van Der Veer says the
story of the emergence of nations into a story of the victory of a fetishized historical force,
capitalism, which celebrates objective imperatives and ignores meaningful and innovative
action by the individuals and groups who make history in everyday life.4 Gellner therefore,
while tracing the emergence of nations sees individuals as becoming increasingly isolated as
individual entities that share a common over-arching culture and also locates in the wider
processes of economic transformation the increasing secularization of society. The local
histories too get wiped off in this process as all other cultures that may have hitherto existed
are subsumed by the emergence of the all encompassing high culture.
Benedict Andersons argument proceeds on similar lines, as in his emphasis on the
emergence of the imagined community which he closely links with the birth of print culture
and the popularization of the vernaculars which created a wider reading public, in the
aftermath of the rise of capitalism, there are two processes that he conspicuously outlines
which contribute to the rise of the modern nation state. Dynastic states that had hitherto
existed were done away with along with the classical languages such as Latin, which was an
important vehicle in imagining the greater scared space that existed in the pre-modern
world. Andersons argument in particular bases itself on developments that had occurred Post
Reformation and post Enlightenment, as he writes, At bottom, it is likely that the
esotericization of Latin, the Reformation, and the haphazard development of administrative
vernaculars are significant, in the present context, primarily in a negative sense - in their
contributions to the dethronement of Latin. It is quite possible to conceive of the emergence
of the new imagined national communities without anyone, perhaps all, of them being
present. What, in a positive sense, made the new communities imaginable was a halffortuitous, but explosive, interaction between a system of production and productive relations
(capitalism), a technology of communications (print), and the fatality of human linguistic
diversity.5
Both Anderson and Gellner, in their attempt to trace the evolution of the nation state, posit
the formation of the nation state in such a manner that it pits tradition as opposed to
modernity. Religion, pre modern dynasties, sacred spaces, cultures and classical languages
are all ascribed to the traditional which is eroded with the coming of modernity with its
insistence on capitalism, print culture, the ever expanding economy and the insistence on the
formation of a new high culture which are important constituents of the modern nation state

Andersons seminal work on nationalism Imagined Communities construes the nation as an imagined
community that could come about as a rise of capitalism and the growth of print culture together with the
rise of the popularity of the vernaculars and the gradual decline of Latin, in the aftermath of the Protestant
Reformation. See, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991).
4
Peter Van Der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California:
University of California Press, 1994), p. 14.
5
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991), p.42.

which is primarily viewed as secular6 with a clear separation of the state and the
church7.Another feature associated with the works of both authors, is their insistence on the
emergence of the nation state as an idea that was hitherto unknown, if not completely absent
and the emergence of the nation thus becomes a watershed moment ushered in by the impact
of modernity. Anderson, often slips, almost unwittingly, from an interpretation of European
history into the elusive category of world history.8 The idea of nationalism that emerges
from the works of these scholars therefore places the colonized world as consumers of a
modernity9 that emerged in the West and therefore the idea of nationalism as emerges from it
is extremely euro-centric with Europe and America being the only true subjects of
history.10 Partha Chatterjee argues that trajectory charted by the growth of nationalism in
South Asia in response to British colonialism was chiefly based not on a similarity but on a
difference with the modular forms of the national society propagated by the modern west.11
He thereby refutes derivative discourse model which sees colonial nationalism and the
emergence of the post colonial nation state simply as a reworking of the western model of the
emergence of nationalism. A similar stance is also adopted by Swarupa Gupta12, in her study
on the origins of notions of nation and nationhood in Bengal, however she makes a
significant departure from Chatterjee. Chatterjee thinks of nationalism operating in two
separate domains where aspects of culture such as family, religion or language constitute the
inner domain of national life13 where there exists a cultural difference between the
colonizer and the colonized, and while the role of nationalism in the outer domain of politics
grows stronger, there comes about a greater desire to keep the colonizer out of the inner
6

The secularization thesis was even recently accepted as a master narrative that was considered appropriate
to explain that with greater modernisation of society religious beliefs lose their appeal, however the thesis has
come under increasing criticism recently for religion has not declined but rather become more potent a force
in society and politics especially after the Iranian revolution. The present concern of this paper too holds that
religion is a viable and important force and needs to be considered when considering aspects of nationalism
and patriotism. For the debate on the secularization thesis, See, Jose Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern
World (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
7
The separation of the state and the church was a concept that emerged in Europe in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries with the formation of the nation states and the rise of capitalism. This set up of the
separation of the state and the church is often used to define secularism, however the notion of secularism in
South Asia did not evolve in the same manner that it did in the west. See, Peter Van Der Veer, Imperial
Encounters, Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (New Delhi: Permanent Black,2001), p.16, and for
notions of secularism in India See, Priya Kumar, Limiting Secularism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press,2008.)
8
Peter Van Der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
California: University of California Press, 1994), p.15.
9
The idea of modernity has been debated by scholars such as Partha Chatterjee and Sudipta Kaviraj who
propose that modernity that emerged in the West may not be directly imposed into the colonies as the
modernity that emerges in South Asia is very different from what modernity entails in the West. See, Partha
Chatterjee, Our Modernity (Rotterdam/Dakar:SEPHIS,1997) and See, Sudipta Kaviraj, An Outline of a
Revisionist Theory of Modernity in European Journal of Sociology, Volume 46 , No.3 (Dec., 2005),pp. 497-526.
10
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1993), p.5.
11
Ibid.
12
Swarupa Gupta, Notions of Nationhood in Bengal: Perspectives on Samaj, c.1867-1905
(Leiden/Boston:Brill,2009).
13
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1993), p.26.

domain14. He thereby makes a strong demarcation between the inner and the outer domains,
as two distinct water tight compartments, however, as Gupta has stated15 to completely
separate the community and the polity would be rather too simplistic an assumption and
would deride the various facets of cultural16 or religious nationalism17 that have manifested
themselves in multifarious ways in both colonial and pre-colonial India.

The Idea of Religious Nationalism

The emergence of nationalism as we have seen, has been generally considered in an
extremely limited context set within a particular temporal18, geographical19 and situational20
paradigm. When we look at nationalism and patriotism in South Asia21, national identities
can be observed in a more pluralistic fashion and the realms of culture and religion are not
antithetical to the idea of nationalism. Ideas relating to imagining the nation have been
various with regard to South Asia and can be seen in two illustrative examples, in
Maharashtra, the idea of swadeshabhimaan and deshbhakit22 hark back to that of Shivajis
idea of a Maratha homeland or even in the case of Bengal where the idea of a harmonious
society23 as the basis of unity had a more fluid connotation which at times incorporated a
more limited territory or could also be expanded to include the whole of India. In addition to
14

The debate surrounding the outer and the inner domain can be traced back to the wider debate constructed
around the private and the public in society. See, See Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Translated by Thomas Burger with the
assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1989).
15
Swarupa Gupta, Notions of Nationhood in Bengal: Perspectives on Samaj, c.1867-1905 (Leiden/Boston:
Brill,2009), p.14.
16
Cultural nationalism is one where the nation is defined by a shared culture, the attempt here is to illustrate
the western models of nationalism often ignore the cultural specificities particular to a culture which could
further explain the unique nature of a particular form of nationalism that develops in a particular context.
17
The argument of the paper is based on the concept of religious nationalism, where religion is often ignored
from the factors that constitute the imagination of the nation state. This idea has been debunked in the paper
and the role of ritual communication and pilgrimage has been stressed upon.
18
The time period that is usually considered as the marker for the process of nation formation corresponds to
th
the 18 century in European history, however, such a limited notion of time often restricts and ignores the
various other processes that were in operation at an earlier time which may have contributed to the rise of the
nation. The present paper concentrates on South Asia and tries to trace any semblances to the idea of India
that may have existed in pre-colonial India, therefore, what happens in the process is that the conventional
division of time into ancient, medieval and modern is done away with and we can trace the ideas of religion
nationalism as they evolved across the entire spectrum of time period.
19
Ideas pertaining to the rise of nationalism have been based on a Eurocentric perspective and we need to
expand the idea and see if it holds for other societies or else other areas may have had a diverse range of
factors influencing the growth of the nation state.
20
The context in which the growth of the nation state is seen too is extremely limited as it is only the factors
of print culture and the rise of capitalism that have been given maximum credence as factors for the growth of
nationalism. Other factors more suited to a diverse range of context could have also played a part in the
growth of nationalism.
21
For the detailed treatment of the concepts of patriotism and nationalism in South Asia See, C. A. Bayly,
Origins of Nationality in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998) .
22
Swarupa Gupta, Notions of Nationhood in Bengal: Perspectives on Samaj, c.1867-1905
(Leiden/Boston:Brill,2009), p.5.
23
ibid

this, though a lot has been written about Indian nationalism and Indian religion,in general
scholars of nationalism24 have treated religion as the other of modernity and the process of
nationalism.25 However, if we turn to look at the various facets of religious nationalism that
existed in colonial and post colonial India and try to trace their pre-colonial antecedents, we
see several patterns of social relations, sentiments, doctrines and embodied memories which
had come into existence before British rule was established in the subcontinent in the late
eighteenth century.26 While considering the notion of religious nationalism and trying to
draw an association between these two categories, we must realize that to trace any idea of
the nation state it is to be considered that patriotism and the drives and collective emotions
underlying ethnic and religious attachments have a psychic and emotional history that
stretches back to antiquity.27 In trying to etch out a further nuanced understanding of
religious nationalism we have to go back in time and analyse the idea of the felt
community,28 for the pre-history of nationalism lies as Ray says in the collective emotions,
identities and notions. Patriots may have been seized by the idea of becoming a nation state
but their imagined state had a landscape which drew ideas from rich indigenous notions of
religious and political formations that existed in pre-colonial India. Such an erstwhile
political and religious imagination of the state can not only be seen in the Hindu context but
the sense of a common shared community and emotion is also palpable in the idea of quam
that manifests itself several Persian and Arabic writings in medieval and early modern
India.29 While evaluating the idea of religious nationalism, religion should not be treated as a
divisive factor that fixed and one that nullified social interactions and transferring of ideas30.
In fact, both ritual, religious practice and religious discourse should be treated as constitutive
of changing social identities.31 In pre-modern India can be found conceptual realms32,
clusters of institutions, and popular sentiments33 where lie the germs for the efflorescence of
later ideas of nationalism, patriotism and political ethics. The love for the mother land and the
idea of dying for one has been ubiquitous and references to such concepts are strewn across
cultures in South Asia, such as in the Marathi ballads, mother Earth prays for the rejuvenation

24

The scholars in question would refer to Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson.
Religion is often considered as a part of the traditional and antithetical to the idea of nationalism which has
a secular ideal at its basis.
26
C. A. Bayly, Origins of Nationality in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), p.1.
27
Rajat Kanta Ray, The Felt Community (Delhi:Oxford university Press, 2003)., p.5.
28
In the Felt Community, Ray treats the idea of nationalism and its antecedents as a history that can be
described in terms of the sentiments of communities, their feelings, memories and experiences, and hence he
terms them as the felt community.
29
Rajat Kanta Ray, The Felt Community (Delhi:Oxford university Press, 2003), p. 11.
30
The British administration in India as a result of their policies, treated religious identity as fixed and
unchanging which was not true as Sudipta Kaviraj notes, in his discussion of the transition between
enumerated to fixed communities that came about in British India. Pre-colonial Indias social and political
interactions were not carried along strict lines of religion but it was a more nuanced and fuzzy state of affairs
that were prevalent.
31
Peter Van Der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
California: University of California Press, 1994), p. ix.
32
Pancha Gour, which has been discussed later can be treated as a conceptual realm that brought together
associations between the religious, the political and the cultural.
33
C. A. Bayly, Origins of Nationality in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), p.2.
25

of the martyrs of her land.34 Moreover with respect to the Rajasuya and Aswamedha Yajnas35
of ancient India, we can find a clear nexus of the political and the religious and find in such
an early period of Indian history distinct traces of the forces of religion and politics joining
hands and working in an associated pattern. Examples such as these illustrate how diverse the
ideas of nationalism could be and the role popular culture and religion could play in further
strengthening and forming a cohesive and united idea of a shared space. C A Bayly has while
researching upon the notions of nationalism in Maharashtra identified as to how it provides a
strong sense of the growth of nationalism with an emerging sense of commitment to regional
culture36 and the growth of a regional language. Here we find, an intermingling and the
enunciation of a two way dialogue between the facets that Partha Chatterjee had otherwise
restricted to the disparate realms of the inner and outer domains. The idea of religious
nationalism is closely associated with what Hobsbawm has identified as popular proto
nationalism.37
The concept of proto- nationalism is helpful in further establishing the idea of religious
nationalism as when we consider the category of proto nationalism, there is an attempt to
look beyond the usual markers that enable one to constitute an imagined community as the
voices of the larger section of the illiterate masses enter the discourse and we find in them
similar concepts relating to the idea of a community bound by a shared sense of history,
memory and sentiment.38 Deriving from this idea of a community that popular proto
nationalism provides, it is very easy for religion to then be associated with the wider category
of nationalism as religion is an ancient and well tried method of establishing communion
through common practice and a sort of brotherhood between people who otherwise had
nothing in common.39 Religious nationalism has existed in several avatars all across the
globe. Religion has been a very important part of Arab nationalism and even Polish or Irish
nationalism have not been immune to the influence of religion. Religious nationalism as it
develops in South Asia is fraught with several complexities and unearthing them often raises
several questions which may lead one to identify a communal strand of thought in the
development of the idea of religious nationalism, the most conspicuous example of it being
the partition of the nation in the wake of independence which was clearly carried out on
religious lines.

34

Ibid, p. 11.
The Rajasuya and Aswamedha Yajna were rituals prevalent in ancient which brought to fore the relationship
between the divine right of kingship and the political legitimacy that was offered to them by the Brahmanas.
The Rajasuya was the royal consecration ceremony, whereas the Aswamedha was one where a horse which if
allowed free passage across any territory of a king would mean the conquest of that province. Both
ceremonies had strong rituals enunciated by the Brahmanas which further strengthened the Brahmana
Monarch nexus.
36
C. A. Bayly, Origins of Nationality in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), p.27.
37
Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1990),p.46.
38
Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1990), p.48.
39
Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1990), p.68.
35

Religious nationalism in the Indian Sub Continent: Past and Present

The effects of the association between religion and politics have always been felt and
perceived. In pre-modern India such associations worked in more subtle and nuanced forms
that often involved the coming together of the sacred and the secular and an anthropometric
imagination of the landscape. However, modern India, witnessed the collision of religion and
politics when communalism became a potent factor in society40 and we witnessed the birth of
the Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha and the crystallization of political identities
along religious lines with the issue of separate electorates, all of which contributed in some
manner to the partition of the nation which in a way was the culmination of the processes that
had been hitherto in motion. Religious nationalism drawn on communal lines was not just
visible in colonial India but post colonial India too has witnessed the repercussions of such a
phenomena. The rise of the VHP, the Bajrang Dal, the RSS and other fringe organisations
have been active in bringing issues related to Hindutva41 in the mainstream politics and the
event of the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and the riots at Godhra have been
incidents when communalism has reared its ugly head. In this context and keeping the larger
framework of religious nationalism in mind, it would be interesting to consider the case of
secularism here. The Nehruvian idea of the state had a secular ideal in mind but as Priya
Kumar42 has shown as to how such an ideal has repeatedly been brought to question and the
religious minorities are often treated as the other which is conspicuous in the political
rhetoric of the Hindu Right wing43. However, Kumar also notes that in spite of these current
developments there has exists an ethics of coexistence44 which she finds in literature and
cinema. We can take this idea of the ethics of coexistence and trace it to the time period of
pre colonial India when religious nationalism was not as static, fixed and homogenous a
category that it is now made out to be. As we delve further into the idea of religious
nationalism, we notice that space and territory become crucial factors in making the
experience of religious nationalism all the more concrete and tangible. Tirtha(pilgrimage) and
the idea of yatra(journey) enable us to think of religious nationalism in a multifaceted manner
and it also helps us trace the idea of nationalism to the period of antiquity where we have the
formation of a nebulous category of nationalism which takes in its sway the imagination of a
cartographic unit whose boundaries were liminal, fuzzy45 and not as static as modern
cartography constructs borders and boundaries. In delving into greater depths in relation to
these issues we can focus on pilgrim constellations such as Char Dham, Saptapuri and
religio-political constellations such as Pancha Gaur.
40

Communalism as a force that is visible today was a phenomenon that has roots in the policies of the British
empire itself, when the imperial administration began to classify the census on the basis of religion and
interpret history and the past of India communally, it started the process of communalisation, the ugly effects
of which are visible even today.
41
Peter Van Der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
California: University of California Press, 1994), p.1.
42
Priya Kumar, Limiting Secularism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,2008), p xv.
43
In recent years the Hindu Right wing has been increasingly vocal about th
44
Priya Kumar, Limiting Secularism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,2008), p xv.
45
The word fuzzy is an apt word for describing the state of societal and religious relations that existed in precolonial India, such a state of fuzziness can also have a cartographic counterpart, in the pilgrim circuit and the
cartography that is thereby outlined.

Religious nationalism, Ritual communication, Space Making and

Pilgrimage
Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space46 provides a revolutionary way of looking at
space when he asserts the (Social) space is a (social) product47 and that though we often
conceive of space more as a geographical entity, it is as influenced by social processes and
any other conceptual category and that space is often conceived, imagined, inhabited and
produced in various ways to suit various purposes and often has the element of power
associated with it.48 To extend this idea of space and consider aspects of religious nationalism
creating a new idea of space, through communication, rituals and the concept of pilgrimage
would be to further extend the Lefebvrian idea of space into a new religious and cultural
dimension which can be highly insightful and academically rewarding.
Religious nationalism in colonial and post colonial India is often built upon the construction
of Hindus and Muslims as two primordial entities predating the colonial period, however, this
approach is given a fresh lease of life by anthropologist Peter Van Der Veer49 who extends
these identities further back into time and finds that in in religious communities ritual
communication plays a crucial role in forging an identity among people with very different
class backgrounds. This sociological observation entails an understanding of ritual as a
political process in which identity is discursively constructed and contested.50 This gives
religious nationalism a new dimension and allows us to consider aspects of pilgrimage and
travel networks that would otherwise be left out of the fore of nationalism and space making.
Religious centres or scared centres51 are material embodiments of beliefs and practices that
is so crucial in religious nationalism.Sacred centres are the foci of religious identity.52 A
visit to one of these centres is not only a search for ones own identity but also situated one
with respect to other community of believers and fellow pilgrims or religious travellers. The
religious identity that gets formed as result of such a process therefore is not one that is
simply acquired but it also negotiated, revised and interpreted in relation to the others.53 It is
also noteworthy to consider ritual communication, Van Der Veer cites Stanley Tambiah to
further illustrate the idea of ritual communication where he writes, ritual is a special form of
communication. Although there is no universal criterion for separating ritual from nonritual
most societies do demarcate ritual from other social action. In an important article, Stanley
Tambiah gives a working definition: Ritual is a culturally constructed system of symbolic
communication. It is constituted of patterned and ordered sequences of words and acts, often
46

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell Publisihing, 1991), pp. 1-26.
Ibid, p.26.
48
It becomes simpler to construe the process of the social production of space and the power that often is
associated with it if we consider Foucaults discourse as revealed in Discipline and Punish.
49
Peter Van Der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
California: University of California Press, 1994), p.xiv.
50
Ibid.
51
The sacred centres being referred to here in particular refer to the pilgrim networks of Char Dham and
Saptapuri, which have been discussed later.
52
Peter Van Der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
California: University of California Press, 1994), p.11.
53
Ibid.
47

expressed in multiple media, whose content and arrangement are characterized in varying
degree by formality (conventionality), stereotypy (rigidity), condensation (fusion), and
redundancy (repetition).54 South Asian history is replete with examples of ritual
communications in the form of those taking place between the brahmanas and the general
populace and various other customs and traditions that form a part of cultures across the
region. Pilgrimage fits into this structure of ritual communication in a unique way as not
only does it contain the various forms of ritual communication taking place between the
sacred and the secular realms of society, it involves the actual migration and movement of
people who create for themselves a quintessential identity and a cartographic space which is
constantly changing, negotiable and is impacted by the human actors that constantly draw and
redraw the boundaries of this pilgrim cartography. Religious nationalism helps us to imagine
through the help of pilgrimage which acts as a viable mode of ritual communication, an idea
of India that not only transcends the narrow temporal limitations of time55, space and
geography, but one where the concept of a shared space was manifest in fascinating forms
brought about by the pilgrim constellations. It is to be noted here that pilgrim constellations
in South Asia did not in any way restrict itself to the Hindu community and references to
the constellations of Char Dham, Saptapuri or Pancha Gour. Pilgrim routes to various darghas
and religious centres based on the following of a particular pir are very commonly known
across the entire sub-continent and it would be interesting to compare such pilgrim routes
with those of the existing 51 Shakta pithas56, the Char dham or the Saptapuri complexes.
Here, however, we concentrate on the Char Dham, Saptapuri and Pancha Gour constellation
of networks.

Imagining the Nation

The Earth, bearing upon her many different peoples, speaking many

languages, following different dharmas as suit their particular regions. Pour

upon us a thousand-fold streams of bountiful treasures to enrich us like a
constant cow that never faileth.57- Atharva Veda XII.I.45

It is often said that India is a land of unity in diversity. While it may seem to be a clich or a
hegemonic invention of Indias elites to keep the diversity in its proper place,58 this idea of
unity can be traced to two thousand years where we find an echo of such a theme in various
54

Peter Van Der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
California: University of California Press, 1994), p.80-81.
55
History of India has often been narrowly divided into the ancient, medieval and modern without taking into
consideration the finer nuances of the linkages between these time periods. The aspect of pilgrimages links
diverse periods of time into a single whole.
56
For a more detailed discussion of the Shakta pits associated with the shakta philosophy, See Diana L Eck,
India: A Sacred Geography (New York: Random House,2012), pp. 292-293.
57
Diana L Eck, India: A Sacred Geography (New York: Random House,2012), p.43.
58
Ibid.

10

Puranic and epic sources. The name Bharata or Bharatvarsha is an indigenous name used
since the time of the Mahabharata to describe a region whose boundary describes roughly the
territory that we today call India. While the first notion of a map of India was very much a
British enterprise in the form of colonial cartography, our aim here is to look at another idea
of India, an idea that has always existed which qualifies India as a sacred geography.59 Our
aim here is not to define India as political scientists or cartographers would define the nation.
We instead turn to imagine the idea of India contained in the extensive and intricate
interrelation of geography and mythology that has produced this vast landscape of tirthas.60
Considering the name Bharata once again, one realizes that it did not convey the meaning of
a composite political entity in the manner we imagine the nation today. Nor was it a loose
vaporous term that was devoid of meaning, it denoted a united space. The pilgrim centres
stretch across the subcontinent creating a vast web of sacred sites with roads and stories
linking them to one another. This land of the Bharata has been described mythically and
enacted ritually in the footsteps of the pilgrims for many hundreds of years.61 Therefore, the
pilgrim constellations allow us to imagine the nation on the basis of a cartography that was
actually defined by the pilgrims, the human actors who were traversing the length and
breadth of the subcontinent infusing it with a life force that enable a shared unified space
come to life and form a living community based on common emotions, feelings and
sentiments.
Before proceeding to the actual discussion of the pilgrim constellations of Saptapuri and Char
Dham and the religio-political complex of Pancha Gour, we must delve into the way the
nation has been imagined in ways other than those present in the space drawn out by the
aspect of the tirtha yatras. We find that even though the nation was mapped as an imperialist
exercise, there have always been various ways in which the nation has been imagined. I will
present a diverse range of ways the nation has been imagined before delving into pilgrim
cartography. Beginning with the way the British mapped the land we could locate in it the
first instance of an attempt o know the country through a map, As Mathew Edney writes,
Imperialism and map-making intersect in the most basic manner. Both are fundamentally
concerned with territory and knowledge.Geography and empire are thus thoroughly and
intimately interwoven.62 It is true because as Sumathi Ramaswamy notes, Colonial texts
from the early years of the nineteenth century claimed to record the 'true' geography of India,
rescuing it from the realm of mystical, irrational speculations in which it was deemed
embedded in Hindu cosmologies The 'India' they sought to cartographically create was
imagined as an abstract, rational, disenchanted place, a bounded mapped entity extending
from north to south, peninsular in shape and confined to a fixed graticular grid on the earth's
surface.63 But if the nation was to be imagined strictly in terms of a geographical and
59

Eck in her book views India as a geography that is mythically and ritualistically imagined and has antecedents
in an early period of Indian history.
60
Diana L Eck, India: A Sacred Geography (New York: Random House,2012),p.45.
61
Ibid, p.48.
62
Mathew H Edney, Mapping An Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India 1765-1843
(London/Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997),p.1.
63
Sumathi Ramaswamy, Maps and Mother Goddesses in Modern India in Imago Mundi,Vol. 53 (2001), pp. 97114.

11

abstract entity how does the nation then evoke feelings of patriotism or the desire to be a
martyr for the country. Ramaswamy looks at the anthropomorphic imagination of the nation
state, in particular the obsession64 of referring to the nation as the mother land. To make her
point she very accurately quotes a diverse range of sources starting from Tagore, where she
refers to Sandeep imagining the beauty of the nation as it is projected on to Bimala, she
refers to the cartographic imagination of mother India that was used in the freedom struggle
and the post colonial variations in the theme of the nation as the mother and the various
implications it has created.65 Why Ramaswamys work becomes significant in the scheme of
an alternate imagination of the nation state is because of the fact that these anthropomorphic
maps seldom stick to the strict cartographic boundaries etched out in the geographical and
political maps of India. They thereby become alternate means of imagining the nation as a
geo-body. However, the practice of locating a geo-body too has its antecedents in the
cosmology of the epics and Puranas of early India. As Diana L Eck notes, it is not surprising
that the body-cosmos schema is widely employed in the patterning of Indias sacred
landscape. The bards of the Mahabharata, introducing the subject of the tirthas, allude to the
very diversity of the body and its hierarchies, As special attributes of the body have been
said to be sacred, so there are particular spots on Earth as well, and particular waters, which
are considered sacred.66 The epics and the Puranas draw out for themselves a cartography
that fascinated the mindscape of the inhabitants of not only the subcontinent but also that of
South-East Asia, where we come across the kingdom of Ayutthaya whose name has a close
resemblance to that of Ayodhya, was for four centuries the capital of Thai kings, many of
whom took the name Rama.67 It was not just the Ramayana that drew out a mythic
cartography of India but also the Mahabharata especially the section entitled the Vana Parva,
and the subsection called the Tirtha Yatra Parva which in the course of describing the forest
exile of the Pandavas, displays a familiarity with the geography of India which is imagined as
a complete whole right from the Himalayas to the rivers in South India.68

Saptapuri, Char Dham and Pancha Gour

Having discussed in detail the various ways in which India as a nation may have been
cartographically represented which did not necessarily stick to the modern political
representation of India, we finally proceed to the cartographic imagination of India based on
the idea of religious pilgrimage which is the most concrete form of expression of a ritualistic
communication based on the movement of people across a wide expanse of area as has
already been explained. In discussing the religious constellations of Saptapuri, Chardham and
Pancha Gour69 the thrust would remain on the greater argument of the paper, which attempts
to conceptualise religious nationalism on the lines of pilgrimages and also its resultant effect
64

The word obsession is used within a particular context of fetishization of the female by the Hindu right wing.
Ramswamys main research deals with the representation of mother India in the Tamil text books and their
implications which she uses to cover aspects related to the issue all over the nation.
66
Diana L Eck, India: A Sacred Geography (New York: Random House,2012), p. 25.
67
Ibid, p.399.
68
Ibid,pp.70-73.
69
They have discussed in relation to the larger argument of the paper, for a detailed analysis of the pilgrim
complexes alone See, Diana L Eck, India: A Sacred Geography (New York: Random House,2012).
65

12

of achieving a cartographic unity which is imagined on the basis of a mythic or ritualistic

cosmos.
The word tirtha implies a ford70 which implies a spiritual crossing over, for a tirtha is a
ford that enables one to cross from the realm of the mundane to that of the divine, but the
word dham suggests a dwelling.71 The word dham suggests not so much a dwelling among
the divine but that the divine dwells among us.72 The Char Dham pilgrimage73 is of
particular significance as it denotes the four compass points of the land, therefore as Eck
notes, ritual enactment of the pilgrimage of the char dham is one of the most extensive ways
in which a systematic geography has been construed.74 The char dham comprises Badrinath,
associated with Lord Vishnu and situated on the banks of the Alaknanda River; in the east is
Puri associated with lord Jagannatha; Rameshwaram in the south where the Shiva linga is
said to have been dedicated by lord Rama and Dwarka, the capital of Lord Krishna in the
west. The four dhams are said to refer to the four divine abodes of God, so a pilgrimage to
these four sites not only charts out a cartography in the sense of tracing four points on the
face of the physical realm but also connects the spiritual and sacral planes of existence and
the tirtha yatris who usually conduct the yatra on foot become a part of the human-divine
complex.
Saptapuri, where sapta means seven and puri means city, refers to the seven cities of
Ayodhya, Haridwar, Mathura, Varanasi, Kancheepuram, Ujjain and Dwarka. All the cities
have their own unique religious significance. Ayodhya is famous as the birth place of Lord
Rama, Varanasi and Haridwar situated on the bank of the Ganges, are supposed to be nitya
tirthas and are supposed to contain innate spiritual powers, Dwarka and Mathura are
associated with the life of Krishna and Ujjain is a site that contains one of the twelve
jyotirlingas installed in the Mahakaleshwar temple and Kancheepuram is famous for the
Kamakshi Amma temple. The seven centres are further connected with the religious festivals
or the melas that are held in the cities, the Kumbh mela being the most famous of them all.
Both Saptapuri and Chardham epitomize the manner in which pilgrim centres serve the
motive of unifying the nation on the basis of a pilgrim circuit. It enables us to imagine a past
where hordes of pilgrims traversing the length and breadth of the nation charted out for
themselves a scared geography based on their shared sense of religious sentiments and
associations. It is also noteworthy that both pilgrim circuits represent several overlaps not
only between themselves but also between the several religious traditions that formed a part
of early India as we have the site of Shaiva worship, being criss-crossed by Vaishnavite sites
which are further punctuated by sites celebrated for their affiliation to the Shakta philosophy.
At the same time because of the human actors involved in the pilgrimages the resultant space
that is etched out is one based on human interactions and gives us an anthropometric idea of
70

Diana L Eck, India: A Sacred Geography (New York: Random House,2012),p.29.

Ibid.
72
Ibid.
73
The char dham pilgrimage is an extremely poplular one that is often undertaken by a huge number of people
even today.
74
Diana L Eck, India: A Sacred Geography (New York: Random House,2012),p.29.
71

13

the nation. The sacred and the secular realms of society meet and the resultant impact is not
one of discord but a harmonious reconciliation between the two which has kept these
journeys and the faith of millions of pilgrims alive for countless centuries.
The religio-political constellation of Pacha Gour75 has overlaps with the pilgrim networks of
Char Dham and Saptapuri in the religious sense but in addition to the sacred and the secular
what is of further importance in the constellation of Pancha Gour is the nexus between the
political and the religious. Pancha Gour76 was the religio-cultural complex in Eastern India
that encompassed the five Gours which comprised Sarasvat, Kanyakubja, Gauda, Utkala and
Mithila. What is interesting about this network is that it indicated that rulers of Bengal or
Magadha served as the monarchical focus of power for these centres77, and it brought the
outer realms of Utkal/Orissa too under its sway. To be noted is that in spite of just not being a
religious constellation Pacha Gour represented also a political unit which had cultural and
religious associations. It is fascinating that inspite of such disparate realms being held under
the sway of a single monarchical entity the entire unit is cohesive and there is no sign of
strife or discord. This could be attributed to the figure of the Panchagourehswar under whose
spectre fell not just political authority but he was the spiritual fountainhead too, which had
strong cultural and religious associations. In Pancha Gour therefore we have the meeting of a
political entity affected by notions of kingship with the sacred and the secular and the entire
structure being bound into one by a strong unified cultural association. Pancha Gour therefore
is at one level similar to the pilgrim circuits as it charts out a nebulous unified space the
boundaries of which may be fuzzy or luminal, though not implying undefined, but at the
same time the aspect if political power to comes into the fore in the Pancha gour cultural
complex.

Transnational Aspects of the Nationalist Imagination

The idea of locating the concept of religious nationalism beyond the borders of South Asia
can be developed by delving deeper into the cultural and religious contacts that the
inhabitants of the sub-continent established with those beyond the realms of South Asia. This
can be seen across the time periods beginning from the earliest where we find the impact of
Buddhism and Hinduism in South East Asia and China, to the colonial times where travellers
make journeys beyond the seas which can be seen as intellectual if not religious
pilgrimages and in the post colonial times where incidents of violence such as the Babri
Masjid demolition spark a ripple effect all across the globe and Hindu temples are targeted in
various areas.
South East Asia form the earliest times had a deep cultural, religious and political association
with the mainland of South Asia. The Cholas and Sinhala kings of South Asia had deep
75

Swarupa Gupta has discussed in considerable details the significance of the Pancha Gour complex, See,
Swarupa Gupta, Notions of Nationhood in Bengal: Perspectives on Samaj, c.1867-1905
(Leiden/Boston:Brill,2009), p.5.
76
S N Bhadra, Uttar Purba Bharat,p.25.
77
Swarupa Gupta, Notions of Nationhood in Bengal: Perspectives on Samaj, c.1867-1905
(Leiden/Boston:Brill,2009), p.259.

14

cultural and religious connection, with several Kingdoms of South East Asia. The kingdoms
of Champa, Angkor, Sri Vijaya and Ayutthaya in particular show deep cultural associations
with mainland South Asia. The epic tales of Ramayana and Mahabharata travel across south
East Asia often assuming several unique forms78 and are also dramatized and represented in
various forms on the stage. Buddhism, Saivism, Vaisnavism and Brahmanism find echoes
across South East Asia and the iconography and religious architecture on temples is a prime
example of the cultural assimilation that occurred between the two stretches of land separated
by the sea. In this respect special mention needs to be made of the Angkor Wat temple
complex in Cambodia and the Borobudur temple complex in Indonesia. Borobudur is just not
a temple complex but also an important pilgrim site for the Buddhists in South East Asia. It is
the greatest Buddhist monument in Southeast Asia, Borobudur in central Java, is not a
temple but a complex of terraces and galleries, richly decorated with narrative reliefs and
statues, which encloses a natural hill as a kind of mantle in stone.79 The Angkor Wat is a
stellar monument and represents, the most famous of all Angkorean edifices, the Angkor
Wat, was built by Suryavarman II as his personal funerary temple. It reveals devotion to the
cult of Visnu at a time when Visnu cults were also prominent in India and Java. This may
reflect an alert interest in intellectual and religious trends in the Sanskritic world and a
continuing sensitivity to the cultural authority of this world.80 The scenes depicted in the
relief and iconography of these monumental temple complexes are frequently depictions from
epic tales or the Jataka tales illustrating the life of the Buddha or as in the case of Angkor,
The ritual and cosmological symbolism of the monument is richly embodied in everydetail
of Angkor Wat's art and design, but it has also been claimed torepresent a devotional form of
Visnu worship. Such cults were strongly developed in India (especially that founded by
Ramanuja) and, to some extent, in Java, where most kings of the Kadiri period (c. 11001222) were considered incarnations of Visnu. On the other hand, it has been pointedout that
the Vaisnava character of Angkor Wat was not pronouncedeven to the extent that the
monument was later adopted by the Buddhists as their own.81
The connections between India and East Asia can be traced to the spread of Buddhism which
was partly the result of the proselytizing activities of Emperor Asoka and also commercial
routes such as the silk routes which had an impact on the spread of Buddhism in China.82
Chinese travellers such as Fa Hien and Hiuen Tsang travelled to India and recorded several
facets of the religion, society and culture that was prevalent in India. These travellers served
as the direct linkages for the exchange of ideas between China and India. Commenting on the
ideas of nationalism and the role of cultural universalism in China Prasenjit Duara, says,
viewing "culturalism" (or universalism) as a "Chinese culturalism" is to see it not as a form
of cultural consciousness per se, but rather to see culture - a specific culture of the imperial
78

A K Ramanujan has shown the diverse narrative traditions of the Ramayana and these are instances of the
cultural acculturation that was visible in early India.
79
Nicholas Tarling, The Cambridge History of South-East Asia, Volume One (Cambridge:Cambridge University
Press,1994), p.276.
80
Ibid,p.177.
81
Ibid,page 307.
82
The interconnections between India and China in the early period were not as strong as that shared with
South East Asia , however Buddhism had an impact on this in later years.

15

state and Confucian orthodoxy - as a criterion defining a community. Membership in this

community was defined by participation in a ritual order which embodied allegiance to
Chinese ideas and ethics centred around the Chinese emperor. While this representation of
political community may seem rather distant from nationalism, one should consider the fact
that the territorial boundaries and peoples of the contemporary Chinese nation correspond
roughly to the Qing empire that was held together ideologically precisely by these ritual
practices. 83Therefore , questions relating to nationalism, ritual practices and a cultural
universalism were not alien to China also. However in the present context discourse on
identity and other issues in China have come to be influenced by facets of race and race
xenophobia.
Religious travellers across South Asia and South East Asia tried to form what Sugata Bose
has called a different universalism as noted travellers such as Tagore and Suniti Kumar
Chattopadhyay84 undertook voyages to Java which could be further facilitated by the
framework of the Indo-Islamic culture that was prevalent at the time. Tagore and Suniti
Kumar Chattopadhyay travelled not as religious pilgrims but more as intellectual pilgrims to
partake in the shared cultural affiliations that bound these regions together. Particluar
mention should be made of the references to the Bangli Water Festival in Java which Suniti
Kumar Chattopdhyay called Toja Tirtha or Toia Tirtha or Tirtha Toi.85 Susan Bayly
has shown as to how individuals who were a part of the Greater Indian Society undertook a
task of Imagining Greater India86, which extended beyond the realms of the confines of
South Asia and went into the greater are of South East Asia. However, this process need not
be seen as a forceful assertion of one culture over another or an attempt to reclaim a past
culture, it was a dialogic process undertaken by the travellers and those who had undertaken
these intellectual pilgrimages.
In the present context, the idea of religious nationalism does find a global voice. But such a
voice is often used for narrow communal interests that in a way demolish the transnational
character of such an enterprise. An example of this could be the act of bringing stones from
various parts of the world by the VHP to lay its foundation stones in a pit outside the mosque
on so-called undisputed lands of the Babri Masjid. Remarkably, some of the stones most
prominently exhibited come from the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, and South
Africa, as if to emphasize the transnational character of this nationalist enterprise.87
Mobilization of public opinion has become further easier today as a result of the increase in
various modes of communication, however, the idea of religious nationalism needs to be
drawn out of the narrow confines that it is often used for and made to inhabit and widen the

83

Prasenjit Duara, On Theories of Nationalism for India and China in In the Footsteps of XUANZANG: TAN
YUN-SHAN AND INDIA.
84
Suniti Kumar Chattopadhyay, Rabindra Sangame Dvipmoy Bharat O Syam Desh, pp. 342- 358.
85
Ibid,p.358
86
Susan Bayly, Imagining 'Greater India': French and Indian Visions of Colonialism in the Indic Mode in
Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Jul., 2004), pp. 703-744.
87
Peter Van Der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
California: University of California Press, 1994),p.4.

16

discourse surrounding ritual communication and its role in the larger politics of the nation
state.

Conclusion
Religious pilgrimage in modern India has undergone a vast change due to the
commercialization of several aspects of the pilgrim and also the great advancements that have
come about in the area of communication, transport and infrastructure in general. However,
the sentiments, shared experiences and sensibilities that bind the devotees who undertake
these pilgrimages or visits to the melas have remained constant and enable us to trace it back
to antiquity and etch out an idea of India which even if luminal and fuzzy was based on the
sensibilities of human actors and the felt community.

17