Badrinath Temple

Three pilgrimages in one place

This is what makes Badrinath unusual, and it is rarely explained clearly.

It is one of the four original Char Dham established by Adi Shankaracharya — Badrinath, Puri, Dwarka, Rameswaram — a pilgrimage spanning the whole subcontinent.

It is also one of the Chota Char Dham, the Himalayan circuit of Yamunotri, Gangotri, Kedarnath and Badrinath, which most people now mean when they say Char Dham. Our Char Dham guide untangles the two, because conflating them is the most common planning error in Himalayan pilgrimage.

And it is one of the 108 Divya Desams, the Vishnu temples praised by the Tamil Alvar poet-saints between the sixth and ninth centuries — which means a shrine at 3,133 metres in Uttarakhand is part of a canon composed two thousand kilometres south. See the Divya Desam guide.

The head priest, by long tradition, is a Namboodiri brahmin from Kerala — a continuation of Shankaracharya's own southern origin, and another thread running the length of India through this one building.

The hot spring at the door

Directly below the temple steps is Tapt Kund, a natural sulphurous hot spring running at around 45°C in a valley where the air is close to freezing.

Pilgrims bathe here before darshan. The contrast — snow peaks above, steam rising, people immersed — is the sensory memory most visitors take away from Badrinath, more than the temple itself.

It is genuinely hot. Enter gradually. There are separate enclosures, and the water is held to have medicinal properties, which given the mineral content is not an unreasonable claim.

The building, and the colour

Badrinath does not look like a Himalayan temple. The facade is painted in bright bands of colour — reds, yellows, greens, blues — in an arched form that reads closer to Tibetan and Buddhist idiom than to anything in the plains.

That is not an accident. This valley was a Buddhist site before it was a Vaishnava one, and the temple was re-established as a Vishnu shrine by Adi Shankaracharya in the eighth or ninth century, who is said to have recovered the black stone image of Badrinarayan from the Alaknanda river below.

The image is shaligram — a black fossil-bearing stone from the Gandaki river in Nepal, treated in the Vaishnava tradition as a natural manifestation of Vishnu rather than a carving. As at Kamakhya and Kedarnath, what is worshipped is unworked stone.

The structure is repeatedly damaged by avalanche and earthquake and repeatedly rebuilt, most substantially under the Garhwal kings and again in the twentieth century.

Mana — the last village

Three kilometres beyond the temple, on the road toward the Tibet border, is Mana, signposted for years as the last village in India. Beyond it the road becomes military.

It is worth the walk. There is Vyas Gufa, the cave where the Mahabharata is said to have been dictated; Bhim Pul, a single enormous rock slab bridging the Saraswati river, held to have been thrown there by Bhima; and the point where the Saraswati — the river Indian tradition treats as having vanished — emerges violently from the rock and joins the Alaknanda.

Mana also runs what it advertises as the last tea shop in India, which is a tourist proposition and also a genuinely good cup of tea at 3,200 metres.

Vasudhara Falls, a 122-metre drop, is a further five kilometres of rough walking and is the best half-day available from Badrinath if you have acclimatised.

Practical realities of the season

Badrinath is easier than Kedarnath in one crucial respect: the road goes all the way. There is no trek. You can be driven to within a few hundred metres of the temple.

That makes it the accessible one of the four for elderly pilgrims and anyone who cannot walk sixteen kilometres uphill — which is a large part of why it receives the highest numbers of the Chota Char Dham.

But 3,133 metres is still altitude. The drive up from Joshimath gains height fast, and people who assume that not trekking means not needing to acclimatise are the ones who get ill. Spend a night at Joshimath.

The Himalayan road network here is fragile. Landslides close the route most seasons, sometimes for days. Build slack into any itinerary that includes Badrinath, and treat a fixed onward flight two days later as a bad idea.