Parikrama: Walking Around the Sacred

Govardhan, Narmada, Vrindavan, Tirupati: how walking around a sacred object, river, hill, or town became one of the deepest forms of Hindu prayer, and how the world is now relearning circumambulation under different names

The course closes with the practice that gathers all the others into a single act. The body that has bowed at sandhya, sat for japa, kept the chaturmas, fed the unexpected guest, and walked to the four corners of the Himalaya now does the deepest pilgrimage of all: it walks around the sacred. Around a hill at Govardhan. Around a river for two thousand six hundred kilometres along the Narmada. Around a town at Vrindavan. Around a temple at Tirupati. The walking is not movement to a destination. The walking is the destination. This is parikrama, the oldest and slowest of all Hindu disciplines, the practice in which the foot itself becomes the prayer.

A Barefoot Walker on the Banks of the Narmada

It is just before sunrise on a December morning at Amarkantak, the small town in the Maikal hills of Madhya Pradesh where the Narmada river rises. A man of fifty two is standing at the source kund, the small stone tank where the river emerges from the earth. He has not put on shoes. He will not put on shoes for the next three years. He has a small cotton bag over one shoulder. Inside the bag are a brass tumbler, a thin cotton dhoti, a tulasi mala, and a hand-drawn map of the Narmada's course from the source to the mouth at the Arabian Sea and back along the other bank. The map is two thousand six hundred kilometres long. The walker will follow it on foot, on the right bank going down, on the left bank coming back, never crossing the river except at its source and at its mouth. He will sleep at ashrams and at the homes of strangers who will, by tradition, feed him without question. He will eat one meal a day. He will reach the same kund somewhere between three and four years from now.

He takes a sip of the kund water. He says one sentence. Narmade har. Hail the Narmada. He turns clockwise. He starts walking.

The practice has a name. It is called the Narmada Parikrama. The world's longest continuously performed river-circumambulation pilgrimage. Hindu civilisation has produced longer scriptures and larger temples than any other tradition on earth. But this practice, of walking around a river for two and a half thousand kilometres, sleeping where you arrive, returning to the exact stone where you began, in three or four years, on bare feet, may be the strangest and the most beautiful thing this civilisation has ever asked anyone to do.