Pandukeshwar, Architectural Knowledge, and an Idea of India

The Ganga’s Descent and the Drāviḍa’s Ascent

Pandukeshwar’s geographical location and cultural position are just as striking as the range and fineness of its temples and sculptures. The village is situated near a ravine’s end. From there, a road winds its way up a mountain and then down into an elevated alpine valley.[33] Bisecting the valley is the Alakananda-Ganga, a torrent born from the mouths of glaciers and rivulets trickling down from the surrounding snow-capped peaks. The seasonally inhabited hamlet of Badrinath is sited at the alpine valley’s center near four steaming sulfur pools. Meadows—sometimes carpeted with snow and at other times with wild flowers, medicinal herbs, aromatic shrubs, and herds of domesticated yak—encircle Badrinath. As a watercolor painted on-site makes clear, the sole trail leading northward and out of Badrinath initially veers past corrals of yak herders before meandering through ice-laced slopes and mounds of moraine. It eventually reaches Mana Pass (fig. 24),[34] through which the watercolor’s painter crossed into the windswept Tibetan plateau. Mana Pass has long been a corridor for the movement of men and goods.[35]

24. Hyder Young Hearsey (1782–1840), A View of the Badrinath Valley, 1808. Photo courtesy of the British Library, London

Badrinath (ancient Badrī, Badrikā, or Badrikāśrama) has occupied an immensely important place in the Indic imaginary for millennia. In the Mahābhārata, a Sanskrit epic redacted between 400 BCE and 400 CE, Badrinath is celebrated as the site where Nara, the primordial man, and Nārāyaṇa performed a protracted penance side by side.[36] According to the epic, many ages later when Nara was reborn as the Pāṇḍava Arjuna, he returned to the Ganga’s upper reaches. There, after an intense combat with Śiva—in his guise as a Kirāṭa, a wild man of the mountains—Arjuna received a formidable weapon. While Arjuna was away, his brothers and co-wife gradually made their way to nearby Badrinath, where they received the blessings of assembled hermits. They then dispelled the fatigue that they had accumulated during their travels to countless tīrthas by wandering around Badrinath’s sublime environs. These landscapes, in the epic poet’s understanding, were adorned with trees bearing lush fruits, expansive snowfields, mountains streaked with luminescent minerals, and cascading streams.[37]

From the post-Gupta period onward, the events narrated in the Mahābhārata were elaborated and recounted in the Purāṇas, courtly poems (mahākāvyas), and sculpted reliefs. Furthermore, Badrinath came be celebrated as the stage for more wondrous events. For instance, the redactors of the Skanda Purāṇa identified this tīrtha as the place where the legendary sages Nārada and Mārkaṇḍeya gained an auspicious sighting (darśana) of their cherished deity and where Viṣṇu as Varāha and Narasiṁha retreated after performing heroic deeds.[38] The Ganga’s upper reaches and Badrinath also feature in the Kirāṭārjunīya, Bhāravi’s (sixth-century) acclaimed poetic transcreation of Arjuna’s combat with Śiva.[39] It is also plausible that a large relief carved on the eastern wall of the sixth-century temple at Deogarh in the Gangetic plains depicts Nārāyaṇa instructing Nara at Badrinath.[40] Finally, it is likely that a scene included in the enormous seventh-century relief at Mamallapuram—featuring a preceptor and his students studying on the banks of a cascading river in the foreground, a Drāviḍa alpa vimāna honoring Viṣṇu in the middle ground, and ascetics performing penances in the background—is, in fact, a rendition of Badrinath and its environs (fig. 2).[41]

Neither archaeological remains nor inscriptional evidence assignable to the very centuries in which Indian sculptors and versifiers were valorizing Badrinath have survived in the alpine valley. However, documents preserved elsewhere establish that the village has attracted travelers for centuries.

Captain Raper, a British explorer who reached Badrinath in 1808 along with the previously mentioned watercolor painter, calculated that at the time some 45,000 to 50,000 pilgrims were visiting the tīrtha annually. Raper added that “the greater part of these were fakirs who came from the most remote quarters of India.”[42] That number had risen to 175,000 by 1975. A decade before this count, the ethnographer Surinder Bhardhwaj found that the average pilgrim to Badrinath traveled 789 kilometers from his or her hometown.[43] According to records kept by the temple committee, 981,000 Hindu pilgrims visited the tīrtha in 2011.[44]

Finally, it should be noted that at least since the late nineteenth century—when colonial authorities began documenting activities at Badrinath—local residents have recounted legends of the great South Indian Advaita philosopher Ādī Śaṅkara’s (788–820 CE?) visit to Badrinath.[45] One priestly account, first recorded by Edwin T. Atkinson, author of a pioneering study on Himalayan religion, runs as follows:

Another priestly account first recorded by Atkinson—and still communicated to pilgrims visiting Badrinath today—also credits the philosopher with the restoration of tīrtha’s ancient Hindu temples.[47] According to yet another local legend, the hill ruler Kanak Pāla helped Śaṅkara to expel Buddhism from the region and erect the Badrinath temple.[48]

Badrinath is not the sole Himalayan settlement associated with the great philosopher. Like their forefathers, the current residents of Joshimath (ancient Jyotirmaṭha)—a large village perched on a slope just south of Pandukeshwar—speak about how Śaṅkara established a maṭha (monastic center of learning) there to propagate his teachings. Furthermore, like many other modern Hindus, Joshimath’s residents believe that Saṅkara established at least three other maṭhas: at Puri in coastal Orissa, at Dwaraka in marine Gujarat, and at Kanchipuram in the Kaveri delta in Tamil Nadu.[49] Today, these monastic institutions are directed by Saṅkarācaryas, pontiffs who have taken the early medieval philosopher’s name, and are visited by thousands of Hindu pilgrims during their circumambulation of the land. [50]

In considering the previously mentioned scenarios, it is important to bear in mind that the great philosopher wrote nothing about his travels. However, it is equally important to recall that one of the few points of agreement in all seven premodern Sanskrit hagiographies of Saṅkara is his pilgrimage to Badrinath. All seven hagiographers report that upon reaching at Badrinath, Śaṅkara heroically defeated resident sages in debate, vanquished Buddhist heretics, restored the tīrtha’s purity, and wrote commentaries on theological texts.[51] The veracity of episodes recounted in these hagiographies cannot be independently confirmed, as they were composed many centuries after the philosopher’s life. Yet the possibility of Śaṅkara’s epic journey to the four quarters of India remains quite likely. As Siddha Kuśaladeva’s biography attests, learned individuals from South India did undertake long-distance journeys to the Himalayas despite uncertainties and privations.[52]

The earliest plausible record of an association between Pandukeshwar and Badrinath is found in an inscribed copperplate discovered in the mid-nineteenth century at the Nārāyaṇa temple. Bearing a date corresponding to 853–54 CE, this inscription directs priests based at Garuḍagrāma to aid celibates (brahmacārīs) at Badrinath. Given this copperplate’s findspot and Pandukeshwar’s position in a ravine at the threshold of the elevated valley, it is likely that the village historically occupied a subordinate position to Badrinath and was named for Garuda, Viṣṇu’s loyal attendant. Pandukeshwar’s stature has grown in the millennium since this order was issued. Today, Namboodri Brahmins from Kerala, Śaṅkara’s home state in southern India, officiate at its temples. In the summer, the Namboodris attempt to relax the pace of pilgrims hurrying on to Badrinath by recounting a meandering narrative about how Arjuna’s father, Pāṇḍu, performed a penance there in the guise of a deer. Furthermore, the Namboodris effectively transform Pandukeshwar into Badrinath each winter. This conversion begins at winter’s onset when the principal image of Viṣṇu in the Badrinath temple is laid in a supine position and a calamūrti is brought out of the temple in a palanquin. The temple doors are then locked, and the calamūrti is transported in fanfare to Pandukeshwar. Accommodated in the Yogabadrī temple’s crowded sanctum, it is regularly worshipped until its return to Badrinath at the start of summer, when the doors are unlocked, and the supine image is restored to an upright position and ritually reawakened.

It is undeniable that this custom parallels the seasonal migrations of other deities as well as administrators, pastoralists, priests, and traders in other Himalayan districts.[53] It is also evident that Pandukeshwar has enjoyed an enviable location on a transregional knowledge corridor—a passageway that connected far-flung places of learning—at least since the construction of its temples.[54] Still, questions remain. Who took the awareness of diverse architectural forms to Pandukeshwar? And who paid for the construction and upkeep of these monuments?

One possibility is that the Pandukeshwar temples were built by a hill dynasty who concurrently wished to celebrate and draw people to a spot sited at Badrinath’s threshold into their little kingdom, welcome the many and varied pilgrims passing by, and accommodate their equally diverse ritual practices. Keeping this scenario in mind, it is worth asking if Tamil architects (sthāpatis) and skilled builders, who occasionally traveled to distant lands to design temples for special patrons,[55] could have built the Yogabadrī temple in its entirety. Several conceptual, formal, and aesthetic discrepancies between “proper” Drāviḍa vimānas in Tamil Nadu and the vimāna at Pandukeshwar, however, make this possibility unlikely.

Another possibility is that an energetic, learned, and determined North Indian sūtradhāra conceived of pairing a Drāviḍa vimāna and a matched Nāgara mūlaprāsāda and enlisted the services of Central Himalayan artisans to construct them. Even if this scenario seems feasible, it is important to ask just how this sūtradhāra and the master masons, stone carvers, and laborers working under his supervision learned about the Drāviḍa typology.

It is tempting to imagine that the sūtradhāra was familiar with the general appearance of a South Indian temple from compendia that predated the encyclopedic Samrāṅgaṇasūtradhāra and like it had chapters on the construction of Drāviḍa and Nāgara temples.[56] However, this proposition has problematic aspects. No such ninth- to tenth-century śilpa śāstra compendium has come down to us. And even if one assumes that such works did exist, it is hard to know whether its prescriptions—with all their idiosyncrasies and contradictions—would have been intelligible to a sūtradhāra more familiar with Nāgara conventions. Furthermore, as śilpa śāstra texts tend to say little about anatomical articulation, construction techniques, and other important aspects, one wonders whether a sūtradhāra sitting in windswept Pandukeshwar systematically read them.[57]

Given Pandukeshwar’s position on a knowledge corridor, it is possible the sūtradhāra learned about the general appearance of a South Indian temple and its characteristic proportions from discourses given by Joshimath’s erudite monks; conversations with Badrinath’s priests from the South who were connected to Śaṅkarā; or even chance encounters with well-traveled pilgrims undertaking epic journeys to tīrthas in India’s four corners.[58] From encounters with such individuals, the sūtradhāra may have also learned something about listing, ranking, and scaling different types of temples, kings, and subjects as well as about linguistic, numerical, and categorical homologies connecting them to subjects as diverse as astronomy, medicine, and prosody.

The previously mentioned encounters also may have brought the sūtradhāra and artisans—who already possessed a wide repertoire of skills—into contact with models of different types of temples and icons (fig. 25). These models most likely would have taken the forms of miniature shrines and diminutive images of deities with which pilgrims sometimes traveled rather than purpose-built, scaled replicas of existing or potential buildings.[59] Indeed, the more private practice of carrying miniature shrines and icons of one’s favorite deities on a pilgrimage and the more public ritual of processing a mobile image in a palanquin around a sacred landscape continue to the present day.[60]

25. Medieval “model” of a Drāviḍa vimāna. Photo courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

In all, such activities allow me to reconsider the precision of a conclusion once reached by architectural historian M. A. Dhaky: