Earlier Times

In this chapter, Whitmore examines how, between approximately the fourteenth and twenty-first centuries, Kedarnath transformed from a remote destination for renouncers, kings, and priests into a popular destination for pilgrimage tourism located in a state famous for its environmental activism and founded on a commitment to sustainable development. He notes that the regional identity of the new (post-2000) state of Uttarakhand was based on specifically regional understandings of nature shaped by colonial and post-colonial discourses about the picturesque Himalaya and hotly contested practices of natural resource extraction, and he argues that the enmeshing of Shiva with the natural Himalayan environment is shown to conceptually animate these historical transformations.