Kedarnath

Kedarnath is the chief of the Panch Kedar, the five Himalayan shrines of Shiva, and one of the four seats of the Uttarakhand Chota Char Dham, so that a single journey through the Garhwal hills gathers it with Badrinath, Gangotri and Yamunotri. To stand before the rough dark rock in the cold thin air, after the long climb, is counted among the most powerful darshans in all of Shaivism.

Because snow closes the high valley for half the year, the temple keeps a seasonal rhythm found at few great shrines: opened around Akshaya Tritiya in spring and closed near Kartik Purnima in autumn, when the deity is carried down to Ukhimath to be worshipped through the winter. The opening and closing days, with their processions, are themselves great occasions.

Kedarnath stands near the head of the Mandakini valley in the Garhwal Himalaya, at about 3,583 metres the highest of the twelve Jyotirlingas and, for many, the most arduous and moving to reach. The grey-stone temple sits alone on a broad meadow beneath snow peaks, fed by the glaciers that give birth to the Mandakini, a tributary of the Ganga.

Tradition holds that the Pandavas raised the first shrine here, seeking Shiva to absolve the bloodshed of the Kurukshetra war; Shiva, unwilling to face them, took the form of a bull and dived into the earth, his hump surfacing at Kedarnath — worshipped ever since as a rough, conical rock rather than a carved lingam. Its revival into the great pan-Indian network of Shaiva shrines is credited to Adi Shankaracharya in the 8th century, whose samadhi is remembered just behind the temple.

Built of massive interlocking stone slabs set without mortar, the temple has stood through a thousand winters — and, most famously, through the flood of June 2013, when a torrent of water and debris destroyed the town around it but split around a great boulder that lodged behind the sanctum, leaving the shrine itself standing. That rock is now venerated as the Bhim Shila.

The temple is a robust, high-plinthed structure of grey ashlar stone, built low and immensely strong to survive snow, avalanche and flood, and unusually oriented north to south. A small mandapa fronts the sanctum, which shelters the conical swayambhu rock; outside stands a large image of Nandi, the bull.

There is little ornament — the power of the place is in its bare stone, its endurance and its setting among the peaks, not in carving. Behind it rises the Adi Shankaracharya samadhi, rebuilt after the 2013 disaster, and the flood only deepened the shrine's aura of divine protection.