Tourism Resilience
The Power of Religious Pilgrimage in India
Thriving economies based on beliefs, rituals, deities, social norms, and the spirit of place.
by Kiran Shinde
Travel to Sacred Places
THERE are many ways in which people connect with the divine. Going to a known sacred place in the form of a pilgrimage is one of the most powerful ways to make this connection.
People seek connections with the divine in sacred places for many reasons. Among the more common are:
- Appealing for divine intervention to solve personal problems
- To seek forgiveness and salvation for having done something wrong
- To work on or obtain spiritual enlightenment or rebirth
Each religion and faith has its own ways of making these divine pilgrimage connections. In some cases, the pilgrimage is a required obligation. But in others it is the voluntary nature of such trips that inspires followers to travel to sacred places.
While the formality and depth of experience in religious tourism varies widely, it is still a significant part of the larger world of tourism. A World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) report in 2011, for example, estimated that “approximately six hundred million national and international religious and spiritual voyages” were taking place annually.
Much of what is seen today as religious tourism has evolved from more formal traditions of pilgrimage that were common in earlier times.
Visitors to sacred places seek to experience the presence of the divine in some way. Images of gods, goddesses, saints, angels, gurus, other deities, sacred mountains and other natural formations, religious events and stories are all common in sacred sites in order to foster that experience. For some, this experience may be so rich as to manifest the deity in the eyes of the pilgrim.
Religious Pilgrimage in India
ACROSS Asia, religion and religious practices produce many opportunities for tourism (Jafari & Scott, 2014; Kasim, 2011; Pinkney & Whalen-Bridge, 2018; Shinde, 2017; Wong et al., 2013).
India, however, is somewhat unique in that religious tourism, mostly in the form of pilgrimage, is the number one contributor to the country’s domestic tourism. India’s Hindu religious sites, in particular, consistently receive high number of visitors, but so do Muslim and Buddhist sites.
For example, at the national level, the two cities that receive the most inter-state domestic tourists (tourists crossing state boundaries) are pilgrimage destinations. The hill town of Tirumala at Tirupati (in Andhra Pradesh) often tops this list (27.3 million visitors in 2016), due to its famous Venkateswara Hindu Temple.
At the state level, pilgrimage cities also lead with visitor flows. For example, in Uttar Pradesh, 11 of the top 16 domestic tourist destinations are religious sites, including Allahbad (41.76 million); Ayodhya (17.54 million); Vrindavan (13.78 million); Mathura (7.22 million); and Varanasi (5.94 million) in 2017.
On this premise, one may ask if religious tourism can be a savior for tourism in times when other forms of tourism are in decline?
As long as people continue to be inspired to visit sacred places for deeply personal reasons, religious tourism will continue to thrive. Especially in a place like India, my research has shown that the answer to the question above is at least partly affirmative.
6 Pilgrimage Towns
IN MY research, I studied six pilgrim-towns in the state of Maharashtra, India. These six sites represent a wide spectrum of Hindu pilgrimage sites:
- Jejuri and Tuljapur have traditional pilgrimage economies based on obligatory religious rituals and rites of passage
- Shirdi and Shegaon are centres of devotional worship dedicated to modern saints
- Pandharpur and Alandi have traditional on-foot pilgrimage practices, called wari
These six pilgrimage towns have both formal and informal economies. Informal economies are based on patronage relationships and social networks between temples and pilgrims (hosts and guests). Formal systems of management are usually based on public charitable trusts.
Geographically, they range in scale from Tuljapur, which is a regional level site visited mainly by residents of the state of West Bengal, to Shirdi, which is a popular pan-Indian site in the state of Maharashtra.
Every pilgrimage town has some kind of “religious tourism resource”. This could be a deity, sacred symbols and representations, a natural feature, or some combination of these that represent the sacred power of the place and its divinity.
There are many ways in which the sacred power of these places is accessed by the guests and capitalized on by the host communities.
The six pilgrimage towns in this study receive a large number of visitors on a daily basis throughout the year. These numbers almost doubled during the weekends and days considered auspicious for worshipping their specific deities.
A large proportion are day-trippers and repeat visitors, though this is most common in the more contemporary places of devotional worship, including Shirdi and Shegaon (Maharashtra state). Peak visitor volumes occur during the annual festival for each place. None of these six towns recorded foreign tourists, although there might have been a few.
The religious pilgrims engage in activities based on their particular motivations. These range from simple darshan (“being in the the presence”) of the deity, to elaborate days-long rituals and performances.
The more contemporary pilgrimage centres (Shirdi and Shegaon) have very large numbers of visitors because of the wide following of their popular modern day saints. The institutional trusts created around them provide many services to pilgrims, including higher quality lodging and boarding facilities.
For example, SSST is the trust that administers the shrine of Sai Baba (1926–2011) in Shirdi. It provided meals to more than 15 million visitors in 2017–18 (at an average of about 41,300 devotees a day), as well as accommodation in more than 3000 rooms at its facilities. In 2017, the trust had an annual income of around INR 6066 million (approximately US$83 million), which is more than the municipal budget of a large city in India.
In addition to providing lodging and meals, host communities engage in trade and commerce centered on pilgrims and other tourists. Some of these are religious centered, selling religious offerings, trinkets and souvenirs. Others offer non-religious goods and services, such as restaurants, tour services, and local transport.
In two of the places studied, Jejuri and Tuljapur, more than 80% residents are directly engaged in these religious and non-religious visitor-based occupations.
Overall, religions rituals and rites of passage provide pilgrimage towns with strong patronage relationships and other social and economic networks between hosts and guests. Increasingly these networks are technology-based. They provide the communities with a stable and resilient economic base.
India’s Pilgrimage Landscape
My research on these six pilgrimage towns in India points to four themes that highlight the special nature of religious tourism:
(1) Religious Motives Drive Religious Tourism. The religious landscape is created and maintained by those who provide religious services. These include the temples, ashrams (a kind of hermitage or monastery), dharmshalas (pilgrim lodges), mutts/matha (religious schools or institutes), and other kinds of religious establishments. The territories that surround these sacred places, along with the performance of rituals, are also part of this well defined landscape.
(2) Religious Tourism Resources are Concentrated Around Built Structures. The main attraction is often in the form of a shrine or temple that represents “the spirit of the place”. The large numbers of worshippers centered around temples enhances the sacred image of these places.
According to a temple official in Pandharpur, “in one minute about 40 people can take darshan in the main temple and it is often over 22 hours continuous darshan happens.” Most temples have large waiting halls and dining halls to hold thousands of visitors like this.
(3) Commercialization Extends from, and Extends Along, the Routes Leading to the Religious Cores. Commercial activities serve visitor needs and their desires for religious paraphernalia to make offerings (prasad) to the deities, as well as for souvenirs to take away as blessings.
A priest in Tuljapur noted that “prasad is big business — flowers and garlands [sic] are big business.” Images and idols of the deities are transformed into merchandise and novelty products, reinforcing the religious connection to the larger place.
The playing of devotional music and visuals on television screens in front of shops are meant to entice visitors and provide an immersive visitor experience. In this way, an intense activity zone (or “contact zone”) is created where non-religious and religious activities support each other.
Non-religious products and services are those that are essential for tourists and provide part of the experience of the place, despite being a “non-religious” tourism component. These include accommodations and food sellers, as well as the selling of handicrafts, toys, plasticware, soaps, candles, bedding, and a variety of other household products.
(4) Explicit Expressions of Religiousness Create Religious Tourism. Religiously motivated visits are meaningless if visitors do not visit temples, places of worship, and other places where they can connect with their religious heritage. Doing the “religious thing” strengthens their identity and personal feeling that they belong to their religion.
Two core elements — conduct and ritual — underlie the activities and performances associated with religious tourism places. A priest with the temple-trust in Tuljapur noted that “There is no influence of any external factor on the annual flow of pilgrims who want to pay homage to Tulja Bhavani Devi — it is solely a matter of their devotion.”
It is this core desire to express religiousness that creates the religious tourism experience, including all of the ancillary products and services that arise to support it.
THESE four themes illustrate the centrality of beliefs, rituals, deities, social norms, and the spirit of place to religious tourism.
One can confidently say that it is possible that religious tourism is a savior. — It is a savior in a spiritual sense, as a form of appeal for divine intervention for life’s troubles. — And it is a savior by means of the physical cultural landscape it creates that inspires the millions of visitors and believers who throng to sacred sites and who literally save religious tourism as a human phenomenon.
This article is based on:
Kiran Shinde (2020): The spatial practice of religious tourism in India: a destinations perspective, Tourism Geographies, DOI: 10.1080/14616688.2020.1819400
Related
See also, this special issue of Tourism Geographies Vol. 21, №3, July 2019, titled Geographies of religion and spirituality: pilgrimage beyond the “officially” sacred:
See Additional Research Articles on “Pilgrimage” and “Religion” published in ‘Tourism Geographies’.
About the Author
Kiran Shinde teaches in the planning program at La Trobe University, Australia. He has been working in the field of religious tourism and published about 50 research articles across cultural heritage, religious tourism, policy analysis, destination planning and management besides presenting research at conferences in Canada, Turkey, Australia, Portugal, Singapore, UK, and USA. His qualifications include a Ph.D. (Monash University, Australia); M. Sc. (Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand); M.Tech. (CEPT University, India).
The text only portion of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons- Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License — CC-BY-ND. The article may be copied for most uses, providing no words are changes. Attribution must include a clear link to this original article webpage. — All of the photos used in this article are copyrighted with “all rights reserved” by the author. Please obtain written permission from the author before copying any of these photos. — For more information, see Tourism Geographic’s Copyright & Republishing Guidelines.
Follow ‘Tourism Geographic’ to receive notices of our latest articles!
Tourism Geographic is sponsored by Tourism Geographies: