India: A Sacred Geography by Diana L Eck – review

In the hot May of 1792, an East India Company Orientalist named Jonathan Duncan was wandering along the ghats of Varanasi when his attention was attracted by a dreadlocked holy man attended by 16 disciples. Puran Puri was not easy to miss. He was sitting regally on a tiger skin, naked but for a loincloth, and he had both his arms raised up in the air and locked together, as they had been for the previous two decades.

This form of yogic penance had not, however, stopped Puri from getting about. He told Duncan that he had made pilgrimages far afield, visiting the holy places of Tibet, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, even travelling as far as Moscow, where he was forced to turn back because of the crowds he attracted. But the main focus of his wanderings had been the sacred places of India. He had twice circled the length and breadth of the subcontinent, looping from Benares in the north via Puri in the east to Kanyakumari in the far south, and round again via the holy places of Gujarat. The more celebrated pilgrim sites such as the source of the Ganges at Gaumukh, the Cow's Mouth, he had revisited many times, measuring out the sacred geography of India with his footsteps.

As Duncan was aware, remarkable as it was, Puri's circumambulation – or pradakshina – was by no means unique. The ghats of Benares then, as now, were alive with devout and intrepid pilgrims who had arrived there from distant villages, stopping to bathe in the Ganges before heading on to other pilgrim sites across south Asia. This was something the very first European visitors to India had encountered millennia earlier. In the fourth century BC when Alexander the Great first marched his armies over the Pamirs and across the Indus, he arrived at the great city of Taxila, near present-day Islamabad, and questioned the holy men of the town about the land they came from. From personal experience on the pilgrim roads, they were able to give remarkably precise information.

India may not have achieved political unity until centuries later, but already there was great clarity about the sacred geography of the land the Greeks called Indika – the lands beyond the Indus – but which the holy men would already have called Bharat, still the official name of the Republic of India today.

As the Harvard Indologist Diana Eck puts it: "Considering its long history, India has had but a few hours of political and administrative unity. Its unity as a nation, however, has been firmly constituted by the sacred geography it has held in common and revered: its mountains, forests, rivers, hilltop shrines." For Hindus, as also for many Indian Buddhists, Muslims, Christians and Sikhs, India is a holy land. The actual soil of India is thought by many rural Hindus to be the residence of the divinity and, in villages across India, is worshipped as the body of the Goddess. The features of the Indian landscape are understood to be her physical features. Her landscape is not dead but alive, and littered with tirthas, crossing places between different worlds, "linked with the tracks of pilgrimage".

Some Indian liberals might be a little uncomfortable with the ideas Eck writes about so beautifully in her book. They would no doubt point out how rightwing Hindu nationalists have abused and politicised ideas of India's sacredness to marginalise and occasionally massacre Indian Muslims: the Bharatiya Janata party's murderous mobilisation of India's holy men and the Hindu faithful in the 1990s to destroy the mosque at Ayodhya, said to occupy Lord Ram's birthplace, is still a raw wound. Others might be concerned that any study of Indian holy men and holy places, especially by a foreigner, is in danger of exoticising what should be properly looked at as a forward-looking modern nation.

But the idea of Indian sacredness is not some western concept grafted on to the subcontinent in a fit of mystical Orientalism: it is instead an idea central to India's mythological conception of itself, which "continues to anchor millions of people in the imagined landscape of their country". Hindu mythology consistently visualises India as a spiritually charged and "living landscape in which mountains, rivers, forests and villages are elaborately linked to the stories of the gods and heroes. The land bears traces of the gods and the footprints of the heroes. Every place has its story and, conversely, every story in the vast storehouse of myth and legend has its place … In this mental map, geography is overlaid with layer upon layer of story."

Indeed this idea of India as a sacred landscape predates classical Hinduism, and, most important, is an idea that in turn was passed on to most of the other religions that came to flourish in the Indian soil. The origins of the idea of Indian sacred geography seems to lie in India's ancient pre-Vedic religions where veneration was given to sprites known as nagas or yakshas. These godlings were associated with natural features of the landscape, such as pools and sacred springs and the roots of banyan trees, and were believed to have jurisdiction over their own areas. Over the centuries, the myths associated with such features changed, so that a particular sacred pool might in time come to be associated with Ram and Sita, or a mountain linked with Krishna or the wanderings of the Pandava brothers of the Mahabharat. Just as the sacredness of the landscape percolated from pre-Vedic and tribal folk cults into classical "Great Tradition" Hinduism, so in the course of time the idea slowly trickled from Hinduism into Buddhism, Sikhism, Indian Islam and even Indian Christianity.

The dramatic revival of religion in India has recently been the subject of The God Market, a study by Meera Nanda, who has argued that globalisation may be making India richer, and arguably more materialistic, but it is also making it more religious while at the same time making religion more political. "Globalisation has been good for the gods," she writes. "As India is liberalising and globalising its economy, the country is experiencing a rising tide of popular Hinduism which is leaving no social segment and no public institution untouched." India now has 2.5m places of worship, but only 1.5m schools and barely 75,000 hospitals. Pilgrimages now account for more than 50% of all package tours, while the bigger pilgrimage sites now vie with the Taj Mahal in popularity: the Balaji temple in Tirupathi had 23 million visitors last year, while more than 17 million trekked to the shrine of Vaishno Devi.

There could be no better guide than Eck to the complexities of the theologies and mythologies that lie behind this transformation. India: A Sacred Geography is the summation of a lifetime of study, observation and travel. It is at times as rambling as its subject, and there are some repetitions that should have been removed by a good editor: we are told no less than four times that the Victorian civil servant Sir John Strachey used to lecture his pupils "that there is not and never was an India". Some readers might also feel that her study of India's sacred geography says too little about the sacred sites and pilgrimages of Indian Christians, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains in its overwhelming concentration on places of Hindu worship – though to this Eck would no doubt reply with the Vedic aphorism: "Truth is one. The wise speak of it in many ways."

This book remains a landmark of scholarship and learned empathy, and reminds us of a much older and more profound India underlying the media-land of call centres and software firms. As Eck writes in her conclusion: "The affirmation of the everywhere of the sacred – this is the peculiar genius of the theology given expression in the landscape of India." No one, she writes, "says it better than the poet saints of south India who praise the supreme lord who is right here where the rivers meet, right here where the herons wade, right here where the hillock rises, right here where the palms sway over the estuary, right here where the mango blossoms are fragrant. The places they praise are different. The taste of the lord is different in each. But each one is a 'beloved place', and each one enables the pilgrim soul to catch a glimpse of the vast reality of God."

William Dalrymple's The Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan will published by Bloomsbury next year.

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