MOUNTAIN WATER ROCK GOD UNDERSTANDING KEDARNATH IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY LUKE WHITMORE Luminos is the Open Access monograph publishing program from UC Press. Luminos provides a framework for preserving and reinvigorating monograph publishing for the future and increases the reach and visibility of important scholarly work. Titles published in the UC Press Luminos model are published with the same high standards for selection, peer review, production, and marketing as those in our traditional program. www.luminosoa.org Mountain, Water, Rock, God Mountain, Water, Rock, God Understanding Kedarnath in the Twenty-First Century Luke Whitmore UNIVERSIT Y OF CALIFORNIA PRESS University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2018 by Luke Whitmore Suggested citation: Whitmore, L. Mountain, Water, Rock, God: Understanding Kedarnath in the Twenty-First Century . Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.61 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND license. To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Whitmore, Luke, 1973- author. Title: Mountain, water, rock, god : understanding Kedarnath in the twenty-first century / Luke Whitmore. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Whitmore, Luke 2018 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND license. To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses | Identifiers: LCCN 2018024588 (print) | LCCN 2018027937 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520970151 (e-edition) | ISBN 9780520298026 (pbk.) Subjects: LCSH: Ecology—Religious aspects—Hinduism. | Siva (Hindu deity) | Kidarnath (Temple : Kedaranatha, India) | Natural disasters—Religious aspects—Hinduism. Classification: LCC BL1215.N34 (ebook) | LCC BL1215.N34 W45 2018 (print) | DDC 294.5/35095451—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018024588 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 C ontents List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Note on Transliteration xiii Introduction: In the Direction of Kedar 1 1. In Pursuit of Shiva 29 2. Lord of Kedar 56 3. Earlier Times 84 4. The Season 107 5. When the Floods Came 145 6. Nature’s Tandava Dance 168 7. Topographies of Reinvention 197 Glossary 211 Notes 217 Bibliography 227 Index 251 vii Illustrations F IG U R E S 1. Approaching Kedarnath 2 2. Approaching Kedarnath 3 3. The Kedarnath temple 5 4. Panorama of Kedarnath village from above the Bhukund Bhairavnath shrine 6 5. Waiting in line, with many one-use plastic raincoats attesting to recent rain. Temporary tents belonging to several renunciants can be seen to the left of the queue, with Mahant Chandragiri’s free food kitchen directly behind and a cell tower off to the right 34 6. The Bhukund Bhairavnath shrine overlooks Kedarnath 66 7. The Kedarnath doli procession leaves Ukhimath in 2011 109 8. The Kedarnath doli procession on the way to Kedarnath in 2011 110 9. A Garhwali deity enters the temple along with her insignia and her fellow human yatris in 2007 115 10. A jar of ghee next to several partially prepared puja trays 122 11. A helicopter lands in Kedarnath in 2011 128 12. A Brahma lotus 138 13. The Kedarnath temple on opening day in 2014 175 14. A side view of Kedarnath temple on opening day in 2014 with the garlanded divya shila just behind the temple and the remnants of the rock-debris-flood leading back up to Chorabari Tal in the background 176 15. Kedarnath in 2017. Photograph by Madelyn P. Ramachandran 201 viii Illustrations M A P S 1. Uttarakhand. Courtesy of University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Geographic Systems Information Center xv 2. Uttarakhand North Central Region. Courtesy of University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Geographic Information Systems Center xvi 3. City of Kedarnath. Courtesy of University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Geographic Information Systems Center xvii ix Acknowled gments This work came into the world with the help, support, guidance, knowledge, and advice of so many other people that in certain ways it feels strange to count myself as the author. I am deeply grateful for the guidance of many great teachers. In particular I would like to thank my PhD adviser Laurie Patton for her unflagging support and inspiration. She possesses the brilliant and special ability to respond to and elevate the work of others by showing them the original ideas already latent in their own work. I would also like to thank the other members of my committee: Paul Courtright, Joyce Flueckiger, and Don Seeman. I have learned and continue to learn a great deal from each of them; collectively I was truly fortunate to work with a dissertation committee who were so deeply insightful and intellectually generous in the guidance they gave and continue to give. I am indebted to the many fabulous teachers at the Landour Language School, the American Institute of Indian Studies-Jaipur Hindi program, and the American Institute of Indian Studies-Pune Sanskrit program for their fantastic language instruction. It must be acknowledged that without the cooperation, hospitality, and guidance of many people in Garhwal this work would be nonexistent. Some of those people are no longer living. Here is a necessarily partial list: Sandeep Bartwal, Vijay Ballabh Bhatt, Mritunjay Hiremath, Brahamacari Jai, Bablu Jungli, Harshvardhan Kapruwan, Lokesh Karnataki, Madhav Karnataki, Rajesh Kumar Kotiyal, Darshan Lal, Pashupatinath Lalmohariya, Pradeep Lalmohariya, Gangadhar Ling, Shankar Ling, Shri Jagadguru Bheemashankar Ling, Bhupendra Maithani, Shivprasad Naithani, Deepak Negi, Vijay Negi, Anand Posti, Srinivas Posti, Ram Prakash Purohit, Bharat Pushpwan, Bhupendra Singh Pushpwan, Biru Singh Rana, Jitendra Singh Rana, Baghmbar “Shailu” Singh Rawat, B. R. Semwal, Om Prakash Semwal, x Acknowledgments Sridhar Prasad Semwal, Umadutt Semwal, Pankaj Shastri, Shiv “Shibu” Singh, J. P. Shukla, Omkarnath Shukla, Bhagavati Prasad Tiwari, Tej Prakash Trivedi, Dhruv Vajpayee, Neelkanth Vajpayee, and Shankar Vishwanath, as well as many members of the Badrinath-Kedarnath Temples Committee and the Kedarnath Tirth Purohit Association and numerous others throughout the Kedarnath valley system, par- ticularly in Ukhimath, Guptkashi, Gaundar, and Lamgaundi. A complete list would run into the hundreds if not thousands. I would also like to thank specifically the following individuals who have both personally and professionally contributed in substantial and invaluable ways to the completion of this work as friends, teachers, and intellectual interlocutors: Amy Allocco, Connie Anderson, Michael Baltutis, Gil Ben-Herut, Nadine Beraradi, Rakesh Bhatt, Rikhil Bhavnani, Noah Bickart, Jessica Birkenholtz, Edwin Bryant, Ritodhi Chakraborti, Christopher Key Chapple, Corin Colding, Lisa Crothers, Maggie Cummings, Ian Curran, Corinne Dempsey, Antoinette DeNapoli, Spencer Dew, Diana Dimitrova, Tara Doyle, Lalita Du Perron, Diana Eck, Jennifer Saunders Forman, Susan Friedman, Parashar Gaur, Asher Ghertner, Radhika Govindrajan, Jonathan Greene, Udi Halperin, James Hare, Ann Harris, Josie Hendrickson, Arthur Herman, George Alfred James, Stephanie Jamison, Aftab Jassal, Tori Jennings, Paul Dafydd Jones, Maheshwar Prasad Joshi, Samantha Kaplan, Daniel Kapust, Advaitavadini Kaul, Molly Kaushal, Alice Keefe, David Koffman, Nirmila Kulkarni, Jon Levenson, Shanny Luft, Jim Lochtefeld, Preetha Mani, Brad Mapes-Martins, Sara McClintock, Afsar Mohamed, Rahul Bjorn Parsons, Kimberley Patton, Rafi Peled, Brian Pennington, Andrea Pinkney, Karin Polit, Neil Prendergast, D. R. Purohit, Madelyn P. Ramachandran, Rakesh Ranjan, Mani Rao, Keith Rice, Deborah Roberts, S. Brent Rodriguez-Plate, Leah Anderson Roesch, Jordan Rosenblum, Joseph Russo, William Sax, Pankaj Semwal, Megan Sijapati, Rana P. B. Singh, Fred Smith, Abigail Sone, Shashank Srivastava, Padmanabhan Sudevan, Urmila Thapliyal, Roy Tzohar, Peter Valdina, Phillip Webb, Michael Witzel. I would like to thank those whose generous funding and logistical support contributed to the work of this dissertation. The Fulbright Student Program and the Sinclair Kennedy Traveling Fellowship funded my first research trip to India in 1999–2000. The American Institute of Indian Studies provided me language- study grants and predissertation research funding in 2004–5, funded my disserta- tion fieldwork from 2006 to 2007, and graciously provided logistical support on other occasions. I am particularly grateful to Elise Auerbach of AIIS-Chicago and Purnima Mehta of AIIS-Delhi. The Laney Graduate School of Emory University provided funds at several key moments, including a SIRE fellowship to complete my dissertation. I also thank the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts for hosting me during my dissertation fieldwork and then later my work as a research scholar, and HNB Garhwal University (Srinagar) for providing an extraordinarily collegial research environment at many different times over the years. Acknowledgments xi I gratefully acknowledge the support of both the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and the Institute for Research in the Humanities at UW–Madison for their support through a UW System fellowship for a year at the IRH. I thank the South Asia Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for their collegiality and support. I would also like to give special thanks to Susan Friedman, who directed the IRH at UW– Madison during my fellowship year there in 2014–15. Her personal guidance and her presence at the Institute were critical for finding the voice I achieved in this book. I also gratefully acknowledge support for the publishing of this work that came from the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs at UW–Stevens Point. I owe a great debt to my colleagues in the Philosophy Department and on the fourth floor of the Collins Classroom Center more generally at UW–Stevens Point for their logistical, psychological, and intellectual support at key moments during the researching and writing of this book. I gratefully acknowledge the help of Keith Rice and the UW–Stevens Point Geographic Information Systems Center in preparing the maps for this book. I would also like to thank the editorial team at University of California Press, particularly Eric Schmidt, Maeve Cornell- Taylor, Kate Warne, and Elisabeth Magnus, for their fantastically competent work on this book and for their enthusiasm for and thoughtful engagement with this project. I am grateful to Cynthia Col for her thoughtful preparation of the index. I would like to thank my wife Judith and my daughter Talya for their support and patience with me during the long process of researching and writing this book. I could not do this without the two of you. Talya Ima Abba . I would also like to thank my parents David and Lois Whitmore and my sister Flora for supporting me and showing me the way as I learned to trust my own creativity. Thank you to the Sones collectively for their constant support and to Abigail Sone in particular for her fantastic editing and Jonathan Greene for his unstinting intellectual support. Notwithstanding my gratitude to all those who have helped me in the production of this work, any faults or errors found in this work are wholly my own responsibility. xiii Note on Transliteration This book contains words, phrases, and passages that are translated from Hindi, Sanskrit, and occasionally Garhwali. In English-language scholarship on South Asia there is no universally agreed-upon system of transliteration and translation for this particular multilingual translation situation. I have therefore made a set of choices that both keep the work accessible to readers without a background in South Asian languages and at the same time provide linguistically inclined readers with a bit more information where it is especially relevant. In the text itself I eschew diacritics and instead render the word in plain roman transliteration in a way that most closely approximates its pronunciation and indicates the specific language being used: for example, “They are writing” (Hindi: Ve likh rahe hain). If a specific word or proper name already has a known and common convention of use in English, such as Shiva or linga or Ramayana, then I use that spelling. On occasion I will add an English plural suffix to a Hindi or Sanskrit word (e.g., Hindi: yatri, meaning “pilgrim/traveler” would become yatris after the English plural suffix “s” has been added). For transliterated words that exist in more than one language I adjust the default language of reference between Sanskrit and Hindi (e.g., Mahabharata as opposed to Hindi: Mahabharat ) according to my own judgment of what best serves the multiple audiences of this work. Bibliographic information will, where appropriate, be given with diacritics. Where they are particularly relevant I provide transliterations of longer passages in Hindi and in Sanskrit in the endnotes in which diacritics are employed. Unless otherwise mentioned, all translations are my own. 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 Kilometers B h a g i r a t h i R i v e r Y a m u n a R i v e r G a n g e s R i v e r A l a k n a n d a R i v e r K o s i R i v e r Uttar Pradesh (INDIA) Himachal Pradesh (INDIA) Tibet (CHINA) NEPAL H a r y a n a (In di a) U t t a r a k h a n d (INDIA) Gangotri Yamunotri Kedarnath Gaurikund Fata Guptkashi Ukhimath Badrinath Dehra Dun Haridwar Madmaheshwar Tungnath M a n d a k i n i R i v e r K u m a o n R e g i o n G a r h w a l R e g i o n INDIA Uttarakhand Srinagar Rishikesh Rudraprayag Gopeshwar Hemkunt Sahib Rudranath Kalpeshwar Map 1 : Uttarakhand. Courtesy of University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Geographic Systems Information Center. Badrinath Gopeshwar Kedarnath Chorabari Taal Vasuki Taal Bhukund Bhairavnath Shrine Linchauli Rambara Gaurikund Sonprayag Phata Kalimath Madmaheshwar Lamgaundi Ukhimath Guptkashi Rudraprayag Srinagar Hemkunt Sahib Rudranath Kalpeshwar Tungnath A l a k n a n d a R i v e r D h a u l i R i v e r D h a u l i g a n g a R i v e r 0 20 40 30 10 Kilometers North Central UTTARAKHAND 9 N UTTARAKHAND Alaknanda & Mandakini River Area S a r a s w a t i R i v e r B h a g i r a t h i R i v e r B h ilang n a R i v e r B h i l a n g n a R i v e r A l a k n a n d a R i v e r A l a k n a n d a R i v e r M a n d a k i n i R i v e r A l a k n a n d a R i v e r N a n d a k i n i R i v e r M a n d a k i n i Map 2 : Uttarakhand North Central Region. Courtesy of University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Geographic Information Systems Center. 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 meters Bhukund Bhairavnath Shrine Kedarnath Temple UTTARAKHAND Kedarnath KEDARNATH ( u n n a m e d ) g l a c i e r s t r e a m M a n d a k i n i R i v e r Map 3 : City of Kedarnath. Courtesy of University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Geographic Information Systems Center.