Vedas don’t mention Hindu pilgrimages. When did they become mainstream?

Representational image | A Naga sadhu at the Kumbh Mela | Photo: Vitthal Jondhale, via Wikimedia Commons

Today we think of Hinduism as an eternal religion, somehow unchanged since the days of the Vedas in the 2nd millennium BCE. Indeed, much of the marketing around the 2025 Maha Kumbh Mela has presented it as a 5,000-year-old practice; but the fact is that the Vedas do not mention pilgrimage at all. How did this remarkable tradition evolve? The answer lies in unexpected places: in Buddhism, in popular practice, and in both medieval and modern advertising.

Origins of Indian pilgrimage

Hinduism is, above all, a religion in motion. More importantly, the loud online proclamations of what Hinduism “really” is is part of the religion’s endless flexibility—the evidence says one thing, while religious entrepreneurs say another. So let’s begin at the beginning, and take it from there.

As historian Knut A. Jacobsen notes in Pilgrimage in the Hindu Tradition, the Vedas are barely interested in specific sacred sites. In fact, they are overwhelmingly focused on personal names—of gods, sages and teachers—rather than on places. And this makes sense, because Vedic ritual was interested in inviting gods to temporary sacrificial halls: there was no conception, in early Hinduism, of the gods permanently residing in one place.

In fact, it is Buddhist texts that first mention the concept of pilgrimage in India. Early Pali sutras tell us that in the monsoon season, when monks ceased their wandering in search of alms, they would gather wherever the Buddha was. This practice continued after the Buddha’s death, with laypeople visiting sites where his relics were enshrined in stupas. By the 3^rd century BCE, this practice was popular enough that the Mauryan emperor Ashoka declared in his inscriptions that he had visited and worshipped at Lumbini, the site of the Buddha’s birth. Ashoka also made various arrangements for pilgrims along highways.

In the centuries after, as the Buddha’s relics were distributed into more and more stupas, pilgrimage sites sprung up all over the subcontinent—such as Mathura in the Gangetic Plains, and Amaravati in the Krishna-Godavari delta. And since many Buddhists were craftspeople and traders, these relics ended up in existing trading centres, leading to a long-running overlap between commerce and pilgrimage. These wealthy Buddhist institutions invested in art and architecture; all this would later impact Hindu pilgrimage traditions.

Pilgrimage enters Hindu tradition

From about the 1^st century CE, we begin to see the first definite mentions of pilgrimage in Hindu texts such as the Manusmriti. Oddly enough, though, the Manusmriti (Book eight verse 92) claims that pilgrimage is not compulsory, and displays a marked preference for Vedic rituals. But the mention itself is significant. Clearly, change was in the air, and some Brahmin commentators were taking note.

Indeed, at Mathura around that time, Hinduism was undergoing a tremendous shift. As one of the regional capitals of the vast Kushan Empire, Mathura was a cosmopolitan centre, with vigorous exchanges of ideas. Concepts and practices flowed not just between religions, but also between popular and elite traditions.

Sculptor workshops at Mathura—accustomed to portraying Buddhist figures and nature-deities—developed the first icons of Hindu deities such as Durga and Skanda. Mathura had Buddhist relics as well as the permanent presence of the god Krishna—once the hero of the local Vrishni clan, but increasingly conceived of as a cosmic deity.

In Before Kṛṣṇa: Religious Diversity in Ancient Mathura, historian Kanika Kishore Saxena shows epigraphic evidence, dating to the 1^st century CE, of Brahmins building water tanks, gardens, pillars, and stone slabs with images of the goddess Sri. So, it seems that especially in cosmopolitan centres, elite Hindus were amenable to the idea of permanent shrines associated with gods, and of facilities to serve pilgrims at these shrines.

Within the next century, this popular practice had changed Hinduism itself. As Jacobsen writes in Pilgrimage in The Hindu Tradition, in the later layers of the Mahabharata, dating to the 2^nd to 4^th centuries CE, pilgrimage appears as a fully-evolved tradition. Pilgrimages to sacred river fords or tirthas, and the feeding of Brahmins at these tirthas, are described as generating religious merit.

The rewards are presented as superior to the great Vedic sacrifices, including (but not limited to) the cleansing of all sins, ascent to heaven, riding celestial chariots, the merit of gifting anywhere from 500 to 100,000 cows, of being born as the son of a goddess, and so on. Elite rituals were still an important part of Hindu tradition, but pilgrimage granted Hinduism mass devotional appeal—and with it, commercial and financial muscle.

Expansion of pilgrimage

It is this version of Hinduism, with its charismatic gods and many routes to salvation and power, that exploded out into the rest of Asia under the Gupta Empire (4^th century CE–6^th century CE), wrote Jacobsen. Gangetic elites began to build magnificent temples, developing rituals to permanently fix gods there; Brahmin composers assembled compendious Puranas containing myths, legends and rituals about these gods, and—importantly—lists of tirthas and descriptions of their powers.

The brilliance of this “Puranic” Hinduism, as scholars call it, is that it could easily be picked up and transplanted elsewhere. There could only be one place where the Buddha was born, but there could be a dozen places where a Hindu sage or a god had an adventure. And all these adventures could then be added back into older legends, as historian Diana L. Eck puts it in India: A Sacred Geography.

For example, a famous goddess shrine could be declared a Shakti Peetha, where a body-part of the goddess Sati had fallen. In Hampi/Vijayanagara, the royal Ram temple was declared the site of Kishkinda. The Pandavas are widely considered to have stayed near many popular sites today. Now, we take these legends at face value, assuming they are proof that Hindu myths were “real” in some distant past. They actually point to the opposite: the brilliant ability of new places to link themselves to older traditions. This legitimised them and, effectively, advertised them to pan-Indian audiences.

To add to its appeal, Puranic Hinduism was quite comfortable with sharing sacred space. As historian Michaela Soar writes in her chapter in Ellora Caves: Sculpture and Architecture, titled ‘The Tīrtha at Ellora’, that the waterfall at Ellora was declared a tirtha even though it already had Buddhist monasteries there.

But thereafter, both Buddhist and Hindu temples shared sculptors and patrons, who came from the nearby trading-town-turned pilgrimage centre. The growing reputation of Ellora benefited all local religions, drawing patrons from further and further away to commission new structures. Similarly, the reputation of Buddhist sites in North India continued to grow in the medieval period, drawing pilgrims from as far away as Java.

Ultimately, the political utility of Puranic Hinduism outpaced Buddhism. In Tirupati and Puri, for example, the association between gods and kings created vast temple complexes to accommodate thousands of pilgrims. Literary and cultural productions spread the reputation of these sites. By the 12^th century, Buddhism was well on its way out, and a new religion had arrived in North India: Islam.

Evolution of pilgrimage

Just as Hinduism had absorbed ideas from Buddhism, Indian Islam also absorbed ideas from Hindu practice. In particular, Indian Islam developed a system of saint veneration at a scale unparalleled in the rest of the world. Muslim sacred sites also popped up near existing Hindu sites (as at Khuldabad, near Ellora), or, unfortunately, on top of them (as at Varanasi).

Yet, despite occasional persecutions, major Puranas and texts devoted to pilgrimage were composed in North India in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. As art historian Catherine B Asher writes in ‘Making Sense of Temples and Tirthas: Rajput Construction under Mughal Rule’, Mughal armies and caravans connected new markets, allowing sites such as Vrindavan to draw audiences from Rajasthan to Bengal—an unprecedented scale of connectivity.

Similarly, Muslim sacred sites such as Ajmer Sharif drew pilgrims from the distant Deccan, while, as historian Sunil Amrith shows in Crossing the Bay of Bengal, Tamil Nadu’s Nagore Sharif received pilgrims from as far as Malaysia. Alongside pilgrimage came commerce, with vast melas growing in Haridwar and Allahabad. And with a growing awareness of the rest of India, early modern North Indian Puranas increasingly mentioned South Indian sites as well.

Paradoxically, even as interregional connections were growing, we also see a stronger sense of regional identity linked to pilgrimage. Maratha poet-saints, for example, promoted Pandharpur as the definitive pilgrimage site for all Marathis; the anthropologist Iravati Karve remarked, after visiting the place: “I found a new definition of Maharashtra: the land whose people go to Pandharpur for pilgrimage.”

In the 1600s, Tamil-language Puranas dedicated to specific temples emerged, alongside clear lists of the sacred sites of the Shaivite and Vaishnavite poet-saints. These Sthala-Puranas, dedicated to individual sites, listed the legends of these temples and the various boons that visits to them would grant. Today, they are often better-known than the actual history of these sites, and can be purchased either in pamphlet form or in well-produced coffee table books.

By the late 19^th century, print media and railway connections led to a massive boom in pilgrimage all over the subcontinent. Simultaneously, notions of a singular Hindu identity also took firm shape. Religious entrepreneurs advertised pilgrimage sites far and wide, but the most hallowed aura belonged to the Ganga River, praised in myth and legend for over 2,000 years by this point.

And so, it was around this time that the Kumbh Mela at Prayagraj became known as the most important of all Hindu pilgrimages, and the state became interested in organising these vast gatherings, recognising their commercial and political potential. This continued past Independence: post the 1962 India-China war, military roadworks in the Himalayas increased the popularity of Kedarnath and Badrinath. Pilgrimage texts gradually became intertwined with tourism brochures, writes historian Andrea Marion Pinkney in her paper ‘An Ever-Present History in the Land of the Gods: Modern “Māhātmya” Writing on Uttarakhand’.

Today, the age-old tradition of pilgrimage continues to grow and evolve with new-age wellness, spirituality and nationalism. Where once Sanskrit texts spoke of the glories of tirthas, influencers broadcast the Maha Kumbh in a multilingual chorus; entrepreneurs offer “digital baths”, printing out your photos and immersing them in the Prayagraj Sangam.

This article is a part of the ‘Thinking Medieval‘ series that takes a deep dive into India’s medieval culture, politics, and history.

Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian. He is the author of ‘Lords of Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire’, and the award-winning ‘Lords of the Deccan’. He hosts the Echoes of India and Yuddha podcasts. He tweets @AKanisetti and is on Instagram @anirbuddha. Views are personal.

(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)