Place · mountain goddess route · India
Nanda Devī pilgrimage region
The 7,816-metre peak of Garhwal that is India's second-highest mountain (highest wholly within India), sacred as the royal goddess Nanda Devi who returns to her mountain home every twelve years in the Nanda Devi Raj Jat Yatra. The 280-kilometre barefoot procession from Nauti to Homkund below the peak carries a four-horned ram ahead of the goddess's palanquin — the only ritual of its kind in the subcontinent. The last three jats were in 1987, 2000 and 2014. UNESCO Biosphere Reserve since 1988; the Nanda Devi Sanctuary around the peak has been closed to climbers since 1983.
- Function
- Travel & migration
- Tradition
- Regional goddess pilgrimage; ethnographic scholarship
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 30.377, 79.971 (approximate)
Connections (3)
- Site adjacencyNandaprayāg
The Nandakini river joining the Alaknanda at Nandaprayag rises in the Nanda Devi massif. This ties Nandaprayag to Nanda Devi worship, one of Uttarakhand's most important local goddess traditions, and to the Nanda Devi Raj Jat, the twelve-yearly pilgrimage across the high passes, giving the prayag a strong Devi valence.
- Site adjacencyRudranath
The meadow at Rudranath looks out on Nanda Devi, Trishul and Hathi Parvat. Nanda Devi is herself a goddess in Garhwali and Kumaoni practice, carried through the villages every twelfth year in the Nanda Raj Jat, a procession of some two hundred and eighty kilometres on foot to the foot of her mountain. So the Shaiva geography of the five Kedars sits inside a goddess landscape that is older and more local.
- Shared sacred geographyRamman, Saloor Dungra
Garhwal's ritual year runs on village deity festivals of this kind, and the Nanda Raj Jat — the goddess carried two hundred and eighty kilometres on foot to the foot of her mountain every twelfth year — is the largest of them. Ramman at Saloor Dungra and the Raj Jat are the small and the great ends of one system, in which a deity belongs to named families and villages rather than to a priesthood.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Nanda Devi Raj Jat”. Archaeological Survey of India and State Archaeology monument records, and the standard regional literature.
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