Place · river-source tirtha · India
Amarkantaka
The 1,065-metre plateau in the Maikal Hills of Madhya Pradesh from which three rivers rise: the Narmada flowing west, the Son flowing east, and the Johila north-east. Sacred since the Puranas as the tapasya ground of the sage Mandalika; the Narmada temple complex on the source tank was built by the Kalachuri kings in the 11th century. The place also figures in modern scholarship — Rahul Sankrityayan among them — as an alternative candidate for Lanka in the Ramayana, a reading set against the standard Sri Lanka identification.
- Periods
- Republic and Living Practice
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Tradition
- River lore; modern geographic speculation
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered — The river source and sacred landscape are identifiable; proposed locations for Lanka are a separate geographic speculation.
- Location
- 22.672, 81.759
Worth knowing
Amarkantak is where the Narmada begins its journey. Hindu tradition personifies Narmada as a sacred Goddess, and pilgrims often undertake a Narmada Parikrama, travelling around the entire river. This transforms a river’s source into the beginning of an enormous sacred pilgrimage circuit.
Connections (5)
- River flowOmkāreshvara
Amarkantak in the Maikal hills is the Narmada's source, Omkareshwar its mid-course island shrine, and Bharuch its mouth on the Gulf of Khambhat — the three anchor points of the river's ritual geography. Together they define the parikrama, the circumambulation of the entire river down one bank and back up the other, a walk of some 2,600 kilometres that takes about three years and is the longest pilgrimage in India.
- Site adjacencyKalachuri group of temples
The cluster of stone temples round the source tank at Amarkantak is largely Kalachuri work, and it is the oldest built fabric at the river's head. The same dynasty built at Bhedaghat and Tripuri downstream, so the upper Narmada reads as a single patronage landscape — one medieval power marking the source, the gorge and the capital of its own river, which is how a river becomes a political as well as a sacred object.
- Parikrama legBhedaghat
The Narmada rises at Amarkantak in the Maikal hills and runs west to cut the marble gorge at Bhedaghat below Jabalpur, where the cliffs rise on both banks and change colour with the light. Both are stages of the parikrama, the circumambulation of the entire river that takes about three years on foot. Above the Bhedaghat gorge stands the Chausath Yogini temple, so the river's most dramatic reach also carries one of its strangest shrines.
- PilgrimageNavamukunda, Malappuram
Thirunāvāya on the Bhāratappuzha is Kerala's principal site for ancestral rites, as Amarkantak is on the Narmada. Both put a temple where a river is held to carry the dead, and both draw people for Bali Tarpanam rather than for the deity — a use of sacred geography that has little to do with sect.
- River flowNarmadā
The Narmada rises at Amarkantak and is the one great Indian river walked in full, down one bank and up the other, conventionally over three years. That makes its source a beginning and an end at once: the parikrama closes there. The Son rises on the same hill and runs the other way to the Ganges, so one plateau feeds both the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Amarkantak”. D.C. Sircar, The Śākta Pīṭhas (1948, rev. 1973), and the pīṭha lists of the Devī Bhāgavata and the Pīṭhanirṇaya.
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