Tab 1

𝐀𝐛𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭:
There are mountains that rise from the earth like accidents of geology.
And then there are mountains that breathe, that possess memory, that recognize the
gaze of human beings and respond to [Link] Devi belongs to this latter category — a
presence rather than a place.
To speak her name is to touch a story older than kings, older than nation-states, older
even than the languages we now use to describe her.
She is the daughter, the beloved, the refuge, and the womb — and yet she is granite, ice,
gorge, and abyss. In myth, she is the goddess who withdrew into the mountains to
protect her purity. In geography, she is a sanctuary so inaccessible that even seasoned
climbers feel small in her [Link] story tells us that some landscapes do not
welcome human footsteps. They withhold themselves.

Figure [Link] bells framing the Nanda Devi landscape.

Note. The hanging temple bells in the foreground signify ritual presence and auditory invocation, while the
snow-clad Himalayan peaks in the background evoke sacred geography and divine dwelling. The composition
visually represents the convergence of ritual practice and landscape sacralization central to Himalayan religious
cosmology.
Source: Joshi, U. (2025). Prayer Bells with Himalayan Backdrop at Tungnath, Uttarakhand

𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧
The figure of Nanda Devi occupies a unique position in the religious, cultural, and
ecological imagination of Uttarakhand. Unlike deities whose sacredness is primarily
enacted through temple systems or textual traditions, Nanda Devi’s divinity is
inseparable from the mountain that bears her name, as well as from the larger sacred
landscape of Nanda–Sunanda that spans both Kumaon and Garhwal. The mountain
does not merely serve as a backdrop to the goddess’s cult; it constitutes her body,
territory, and agency. Local communities thus conceptualize Nanda Devi not only as a
patron goddess (kuldevi*) of the region, but also as a sovereign feminine presence
whose sacred geography governs access, regulates mobility, and protects ecological
space. This dissertation chapter examines the convergence of myth and geography in the
constitution of Nanda Devi’s sacred landscape, with particular attention to how
femininity, inaccessibility, and sacred sovereignty complicate dominant Western
conceptions of geography as empty, neutral, or conquerable space.

Figure 2.(a) Nanda-Sunanda peak represented as distant and inaccessible. (b) Human movement toward the sacred
mountain, illustrating the tension between approach and prohibition.

Note.(a) The mountain is visually framed as remote, elevated, and withdrawn, reinforcing sacred sovereignty
through inaccessibility.(b) The presence of trekkers approaching the mountain illustrates the epistemic tension
between human mobility and sacred restriction, central to debates on pilgrimage, mountaineering, and cosmological
prohibition discussed in this dissertation.
Source: Wikimedia Commons (n.d.).

While much scholarship on Himalayan sacred landscapes has emphasized pilgrimage,

textual cosmology, or the symbolic imagination, Nanda Devi offers a distinct case
wherein the sacred is territorialized in inaccessible, unmapped, and even prohibited
zones. The mythic narrative of Nanda Devi’s marriage to Shiva, her departure from her
natal terrain, and her subsequent withdrawal into the remote Himalaya forms a critical
narrative template that local communities use to interpret the landscape. In these
narratives, the geography of the high Himalaya is rendered as a marital landscape,
whereas the valleys of Kumaon and Garhwal constitute natal and affective landscapes.
This spatial organization reconfigures the mountain not merely as topography but as a
gendered emotional field, structured by separation, longing, and protection. As William
S. Sax (1991) argues in his ethnography of the Nanda Raj Jat pilgrimage, the journey of
the goddess is ultimately one of post-marital transition, dramatized through ritual
procession into snowbound highlands (pp. 84–112). In this cultural formulation,
landscape functions as both symbolic geography and lived geography, simultaneously
emotional and material.
The convergence of myth and geography also invites reconsideration of the broader
research question posed in this chapter: Do landscapes become sacred because of
pre-existing myths and deities, or do myths and deities emerge because of the qualities
of certain landscapes? This question is not merely theoretical; it has significant
implications for how sacred geography operates as a form of ecological enforcement,
cultural identity formation, and historical memory. It also reveals an important
conceptual tension that guides this chapter: the idea that sacredness may both protect
and restrict, producing ecological preservation on one hand and epistemic, scientific, or
exploratory limitations on the other. Local communities frequently interpret Nanda
Devi’s sanctuary as a protected and prohibited zone, accessible only under specific ritual
conditions and with divine sanction. Such prohibitions long preceded the designation of
the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve in 1982 and continued even after mountaineering
permits were revoked due to environmental damage and the 1982 Indo–American
expedition controversy. Sacredness thus acts as a custodial force, shaping ecological
ethics through religious frameworks.
However, sacredness also generates forms of prohibition, taboo, and fear, which may
discourage empirical inquiry, scientific research, or secular mobility in the region. These
restrictions are not merely social but cosmological, reflecting a worldview in which
divine sovereignty supersedes both human curiosity and state governance. This
interpretive tension—between sacred protection and sacred restriction—forms a key
analytical axis of this chapter. It enables an examination of how sacred landscapes
function not only as ecological refuges but as epistemological boundaries, shaping what
can be known, approached, or entered. Such tensions challenge the assumptions of
Western cartographic and mountaineering discourses that view mountains as unclaimed
territory awaiting conquest, measurement, or domestication. The feminine mountain in
local tradition resists this paradigm not through force but through inaccessibility,
withdrawal, and refusal.
The existing scholarship on Nanda Devi engages these themes unevenly. Ramakant
Benjwal’s Nanda Devi: The Goddess of Uttarakhand (2013) remains the most detailed
monograph on the goddess’s cultural status and ritual presence in Uttarakhand. Benjwal
emphasizes the ubiquity of Nanda Devi’s worship across Garhwal and Kumaon, noting
that she is uniquely revered as “mother, sister, and daughter” by Himalayan
communities (pp. 2–5). Benjwal situates Nanda Devi within a wider tradition of
Gaura–Parvati worship, highlighting her identification as a local manifestation of the
Himalayan daughter. Pushpa’s (2016) article on the narratives of Nauti Nanda Devi
further points to the diversity of oral traditions surrounding the goddess, including jagar
performances, temple songs, and regional myths that vary between Almora, Nauti, and
other localities. Meanwhile, Sax (1991, 1998) foregrounds the Raj Jat pilgrimage as a key
ritual through which Nanda Devi’s spatial sovereignty is enacted. In Sax’s analysis, the
pilgrimage is not merely commemorative but structurally mimetic: it re-enacts the
post-marital journey of the goddess toward her husband Shiva’s home in the snows,
thereby inscribing myth onto terrain through collective embodied movement.
Outside of Hindu ethnography, studies of sacred mountains by scholars such as
Bernbaum (1997) contextualize Nanda Devi within a global genealogy of geographically
sacred formations. Bernbaum’s comparative work demonstrates that mountains across
Asia and the Americas are frequently feminized, inaccessible, and associated with
sovereignty, fertility, and protection. Such theoretical cross-cultural frameworks are
useful for positioning Nanda Devi beyond the confines of regional folklore, situating her
within broader discourses on sacred geography and the feminine. At the same time, the
local specificity of the Nanda–Sunanda dyad and their association with inaccessible
terrain requires attention to indigenous Himalayan conceptions of space, marriage,
sovereignty, and ecology.
This chapter builds upon these scholarly foundations to offer a more integrated
bibliographic and interpretive analysis of Nanda Devi’s sacred geography. It proposes
that Nanda Devi’s landscape constitutes a feminine sacred geography that combines
three main dimensions:
​ Mythic territoriality — wherein myth and story grant landscape symbolic and historical
meaning.
​ Inaccessible sovereignty — wherein the geography functions as autonomous and
prohibited space.
​ Custodial ecology — wherein sacredness governs environmental protection and
resource control.

These dimensions together help explain how the Nanda Devi Sanctuary operates as a
sacred spatial regime that resists both human intrusion and patriarchal cosmologies of
land ownership. They further illuminate how communities utilize sacralization to assert
identity, belonging, and territorial legitimacy over Himalayan space, particularly in the
context of external pressures such as colonial mountaineering, state forestry
interventions, and modern conservation policies.
Figure 3. Location and spatial extent of the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve, Uttarakhand.

Note. This maps shows the Nanda Devi National Park and surrounding biosphere zones, contextualizing the sacred
landscape discussed in relation to myth, geography, and restricted access.
Source: Google Maps (n.d.). Map of Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve, Uttarakhand. Retrieved February 2026.

𝐌𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐝𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬
The study of Nanda Devi’s sacred geography necessitates a methodological approach
capable of integrating bibliographic, ethnographic, and oral-performance materials
within a coherent analytical frame. This chapter therefore employs a mixed-source
methodology, combining (a) published academic scholarship, (b) ritual and oral
literature, and (c) regional performance traditions. Such an approach reflects the actual
epistemological terrain of Nanda Devi studies, in which authoritative knowledge is not
confined to textual archives but circulates through song, pilgrimage, storytelling, temple
ritual, and embodied practice.

The primary bibliographic materials consulted include Ramakant Benjwal’s (2013)

monograph Nanda Devi: The Goddess of Uttarakhand, ethnographic works by William
S. Sax (1991, 1998), and comparative sacred geography studies by Edwin Bernbaum
(1997). Additional contextual sources include regional folklore compilations (e.g.,
Naithani, 2004; Oakley, 2010) and mountaineering accounts from the Himalayan
Journal. These works provide necessary frameworks for understanding Nanda Devi as a
cultural figure embedded within a network of Himalayan religious traditions and
landscape imaginaries.
A distinctive challenge in studying Nanda Devi arises from the fact that much of her
narrative corpus has historically circulated through oral performance genres, including
jagar*, mandan*, dhol–damau* ritual songs, and the Raj Jat pilgrimage repertoire.
These forms constitute primary data within Himalayan folk religion and demand
methodological legitimacy. Following Sax’s (1991) argument that ritual performances
“produce knowledge through enactment rather than inscription” (p. 86), this chapter
treats verses as valid ethnographic materials rather than supplemental folklore.
Verses cited in this chapter are thus drawn from both published transcriptions and oral
performance documentation. The former are cited through standard APA conventions
(author–year–page), whereas the latter are cited through descriptive provenance (e.g.,
“Oral performance, Nauti village, 2010”). This approach aligns with established
anthropological and ethnomusicological citation practices in South Asian fieldwork.

Given that many verses exist in Kumaoni and Garhwali dialects, as well as in Hindi
registers, this chapter presents verses in Devanagari script, followed by Roman
transliteration, and then either minimal thematic gloss or full translation depending on
length and analytic need.

As with any study that engages oral tradition, reflexive awareness of interpretive limits
is required. Sacred landscapes are not merely physical but cosmological spaces; their
epistemologies are not always compatible with secular frameworks of geography,
ecology, or mountaineering. Thus, while this chapter analyzes sacred prohibitions and
access restrictions, it avoids reducing these to superstition or irrationality. Instead,
prohibitions are examined as forms of spatial governance, sovereignty, and
environmental ethics articulated through sacred authority.

The triangulation of bibliographic, oral, and performance data enables cross-verification

of themes such as:
withdrawal and inaccessibility
sacred custodianship
feminine sovereignty
territorial identity
This methodology allows the chapter to question not only what is said about Nanda
Devi, but where, how, and through what mediums the goddess’s authority is articulated.

𝐌𝐲𝐭𝐡–𝐆𝐞𝐨𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐩𝐡𝐲 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞
The mythic narratives surrounding Nanda Devi constitute one of the most significant
foundations for how her sacred geography is imagined, enacted, and protected within
Uttarakhand. These narratives do not merely describe the goddess; they map the
landscape in terms of affective, relational, and cosmological categories. Three spatial
modalities recur across multiple oral and textual sources: the natal landscape, the
marital landscape, and the withdrawn sanctuary landscape. Each of these spatial modes
is feminized, relationally structured, and geographically real. They form what can be
described as a mythic–geographical triad.

The first mode in this triad is the natal landscape, commonly located in the valleys and
inhabited settlements of Kumaon and Garhwal. This terrain represents home, and is
associated with parental affection, social recognition, agricultural fertility, and human
relationality. Within local narratives documented by Pushpa (2016), Nanda Devi is first
introduced as “the divine daughter of the Himalaya,” loved and venerated as a sister,
daughter, or mother by the people of the region (p. 184). Benjwal (2013) similarly
emphasizes the goddess’s identity as a Himalayan daughter who enjoys affection across
regional and linguistic boundaries (pp. 2–5). Through such narratives, the natal
landscape becomes a matrix of belonging, memory, and identity.
Songs and jagar performances reinforce this association by situating the natal land as
fertile and accessible. In one Garhwali folk verse, the singer contrasts the prosperity of
the natal villages with the starkness of the marital highlands:

“सोमेश्वर की डांडी फलै-फूलै,

बागेश्वर की घाटी धनै भरपरू ”
Someshwar ki dandi phalai–phoolai,
Bageshwar ki ghati dhanai bharpur.
(Garhwali folk verse, published in Naithani, 2004)

Here, the valleys of Someshwar and Bageshwar are depicted as fertile, abundant, and
socially flourishing. They are livable geographies, marked by agricultural rhythm and
domestic sociality. Such verses do not merely praise local prosperity; they anchor myth
in topography, enabling listeners to understand the physical world through affective
categories. The natal landscape becomes the ground from which narrative movement
begins.

If the natal landscape symbolizes belonging, the marital landscape symbolizes distance
and separation. In most regional tellings, Nanda Devi marries Shiva, departing for
Kailash. This constitutes one of the most significant spatial displacements in the
narrative corpus: the movement of the daughter from her parental home to her
husband’s territory. Sax (1991) argues that the Raj Jat pilgrimage itself is a
dramatization of this transition, enacting the goddess’s post-marital journey toward the
“home of her husband in the snows” (pp. 84–85).
Within this frame, Kailash represents both the apex of sacred authority and the height of
emotional and geographical distance. In traditional performance genres, marital
displacement is not neutral; it is often experienced through longing and pain. Pushpa’s
(2016) transcription of a jagar lament from the Nauti tradition exemplifies this structure
(pp. 184–185), but similar motifs appear across Kumaon and Garhwal. For instance, a
Kumaoni verse recorded in Baijnath region laments:

“पर्वत को दे श परदे श भयो,

मायके को बात याद परयो।”
Parbat ko des pardesh bhayo,
Mayke ko baat yaad parayo.
(Oral performance, Baijnath, 2011)
The mountains became a foreign land; memories of my natal home returned.

Here the mountain is rendered as pardesh*—a foreign land—while the natal home
becomes mayka*, a term deeply gendered within North Indian kinship. The emotional
logic is clear: the mountain is sacred, but it is also isolating. Separation is spatial before
it is emotional.
Such verses demonstrate that the marital landscape is not simply a geographic zone, but
a geopolitical ontology of gender. It expresses a Himalayan variation of what
anthropologists have termed the “marital migration” model in North India, where
women move from natal homes to marital homes upon marriage. In the Himalayan
case, this migration is vertical as well as horizontal: the bride migrates upward, into
high-altitude spaces associated with deities, ascetics, and renunciation. Thus, even in
mythic form, the gendered body crosses ecological thresholds.

Beyond the marital landscape lies the most important spatial mode: Nanda Devi’s
withdrawal into the Sanctuary. Here, the goddess retreats into the high, glaciated inner
sanctum of the Nanda Devi massif—a region long considered inaccessible, both
physically and cosmologically. Unlike Kailash, which is sacred but conceptually
reachable, the Sanctuary is forbidden, unentered, and self-protective.
Benjwal (2013) hints at this theological geography when he notes that the goddess
“withdraws into the mountains and must not be disturbed” (p. 44). This withdrawal is
not passive; it is sovereign. It transforms inaccessible terrain into a taboo zone, guarded
not only by topography but by divine authority.
Folk performance traditions articulate this sovereign inaccessibility through verses that
emphasize the conditionality of access:

“जिन लाई दे वी बल
ु ाई, तिन कैं दर्शन होई”
Jin lai Devi bulai, tin kai darshan hoi
(Temple performance, Nauti, 2009)
Only those whom the goddess summons may attain her sight.
This verse expresses a theological geography in which permission precedes entry. Access
is not a right; it is a divine dispensation. The Sanctuary becomes a sacred bureaucracy,
where authority is feminine and unilateral.
Another verse from Garhwal further emphasizes the prohibition of ascent:

“दे वी को दर्ग
ु म डांडा, पैदल जन ना चढ़ै रे ”
Devi ko durgam danda, paidal jan na chadhai re
(Raj Jat repertoire, documented in Sax, 1991)
The goddess’s ridge is difficult; ordinary people may not climb.

Here durgam (difficult) operates both physically and cosmologically. The verse frames
the landscape as restricted territory, and the prohibition is categorical—not pragmatic.
In this way, sacredness functions as a form of spatial regulation long before the advent
of forestry laws, mountaineering permits, or conservation policy.

Figure 4. Nanda Devi Raj Jat pilgrimage routes connecting natal villages to high-altitude sacred zones.

Note. The pilgrimage reenacts the goddess’s post-marital journey, inscribing mythic narratives onto physical terrain.
Source: Sax, W. S. (1991). Mountain Goddess. Oxford University Press.

Together, these three spatial modes produce what may be termed mythic territoriality: a
system wherein the goddess’s body, story, and landscape co-constitute each other. The
territoriality is feminine not because of essentialist association with fertility or
maternity, but because the spatial logic is derived from gendered kinship structures:
natal belonging, marital exile, and widow-like withdrawal.
The Sanctuary, as the final spatial mode, becomes the locus of sacred sovereignty, from
which the goddess governs the terms of access, approach, and visibility. This governance
is not merely symbolic. Sax (1991, 1998) notes that during the Raj Jat pilgrimage, ritual
specialists use phrases such as “the land of Nanda” (Nanda ko raj) and “the goddess’s
command” (Devi ki aagya). These are not metaphorical utterances; they reflect a
cosmology in which sacred territory is politically real.
One dhol–damau verse performed during the Raj Jat asserts:

“राणा को रै बार, दे वी को राज;

बिना आज्ञा पग ना धरी।”
Rana ko raibar, Devi ko raj;
bina aagya pag na dhari.
(Field recording, Kulsari, 2013)
Gloss: News belongs to the Rana, but the land belongs to the Devi; without her permission one
must not set foot.

This formulation reveals a spatial hierarchy in which ritual authority supersedes secular
authority. The Rana (a political figure) may relay messages, but the Devi determines
territorial access. Land is sacred not in abstraction but in governance.

The relationship between myth and geography is not unidirectional. Myth provides a
semiotic grid through which the landscape acquires meaning. In oral narratives
documented by Pushpa (2016), the pain of marital separation is mapped onto the
physical difficulty of the high mountains (pp. 184–185). Conversely, geographical
withdrawal into the Sanctuary is interpreted as divine refusal and protection. Bernbaum
(1997) observes similar structures among sacred mountains in Tibet, Japan, and the
Andes, where inaccessibility is read as divine intention (pp. 112–115). In these cases, the
mountain is not simply difficult to reach; it is difficult to reach because it is divine.
Thus, myth informs geography by establishing interpretive frameworks that render the
Sanctuary legible as sacred space. It also instructs communities on how to behave
toward the land, shaping ritual, pilgrimage, agriculture, and stewardship.

At the same time, geography gives myth form by constraining narrative possibilities.
The Sanctuary’s physical difficulty—steep ridges, glaciers, and natural barriers—makes
withdrawal a credible divine strategy. Sacred sovereignty requires a sanctum, and the
Himalaya offers one.
If Nanda Devi emerged in a flat, fertile plain, her withdrawal narrative would lack
ecological plausibility. The mountain enables the myth. In this sense, myth and
geography are mutually constitutive rather than causally linear.

The result is a landscape in which feminine sovereignty is articulated spatially.

Sovereignty here is not domination through expansion or conquest, but through
withdrawal, refusal, and inaccessibility. Feminine power is territorial but not
territorializing. It is protective rather than extractive. It does not conquer space; it
controls access to space.
Such frameworks contrast sharply with colonial mountaineering discourses, wherein the
“undiscovered peak” is a challenge, a void, or an unfinished map. For Himalayan
villagers, the peak is neither void nor unfinished; it is already full, already governed,
already sacred.

When the villagers say the mountain knows, they do not mean it poetically.
They mean it literally.
They believe the goddess remembers every trespasser, every pilgrim, every intention.
When a climbing team goes missing, they say:
She called them back to herself.
When a pilgrimage returns safely after weeks of walking, they say:
She has allowed us to return.

𝐃𝐨 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐒𝐚𝐜𝐫𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐳𝐞 𝐋𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐬𝐜𝐚𝐩𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐄𝐜𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐲?

One of the central ways in which the sacred geography of Nanda–Sunanda operates is
through a logic of ritualized ecological custodianship. This takes the form of spatial
prohibitions, controlled access, and the consecration of particular zones as sites of
divine presence. Local narratives, ritual practices, and pilgrimage conventions produce a
form of sacred territorial governance long before the advent of modern environmental
policy. In this regime, the non-human environment—particularly alpine meadows,
glaciers, and river catchments—is not understood as a resource to be extracted, but as a
domain to be approached with restraint, deference, and circumscribed movement.
Benjwal notes that local communities interpret the sanctuary’s inaccessibility as the
Goddess protecting herself from desecration. This belief historically regulated human
activity long before modern conservation discourse.
Benjwal (2013) notes that the surrounding valleys of Kumaon and Garhwal designate
Nanda Devi not only as a goddess of fertility and prosperity but as a guardian of the
hills, whose presence renders certain spaces inviolable (pp. 42–46). These inviolable
spaces are not abstract; they are ecologically dense zones where human intrusion would
have materially impacted fragile soils, pastures, and snowfields. Thus, sacredness
functions as an environmental brake, limiting anthropogenic disturbance through the
idioms of taboo, reverence, and fear.
The Raj Jat pilgrimage corpus provides an instructive example of such a custodial
mechanism. During the multi-week procession, the movement of people, animals, and
material offerings follows precise routes, with ritually demarcated halts and
prohibitions. Certain alpine meadows are traversed only on foot, others only by pack
animals, and some are bypassed entirely due to their association with the goddess’s
privacy. A verse from the Raj Jat repertoire articulates this ethic of custodianship:

“बग्ु याल बिराजै दे वी,

चरन छाप न पड़ै भारी।”
Bugyal biraajai Devi,
charan chaap na parai bhaari.
(Raj Jat performance repertoire)
The goddess is in the meadows; heavy footprints must not fall upon them.

The verse encodes both a cosmological principle (the meadow as the goddess’s herself)
and an ecological one (limiting heavy treading that damages alpine grasses). This is a
recurring strategy in the Himalayan ritual economy: ecological fragility is managed
through sacralization.
Scholars of sacred mountains have observed similar patterns across Asia and Latin
America. Bernbaum (1997) documents how mountains in Tibet and the Andes are
rendered inaccessible through divine presence, resulting in de facto conservation zones
(pp. 112–117). The Nanda Devi Sanctuary, in this comparative frame, represents a
particularly strong case of sacralized environmental governance, because its inviolate
status predates state conservation efforts by centuries.
Sacred stewardship also aligns with identity formation. To revere and protect Nanda
Devi's landscape is to participate in a shared regional ontology. Pushpa (2016) identifies
how women in the Nauti and Kansuwa traditions describe the goddess as a daughter of
the local land whose safety reflects the safety of the region (pp. 181–183). This relational
cosmology transforms ecological custodianship into a form of collective kinship labor.
Protecting the mountain becomes equivalent to protecting a family member. The
landscape is therefore not simply sacred; it is socially embedded.

𝐒𝐩𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐓𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐨 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐄𝐩𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐜 𝐂𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐞

Yet the same idioms that render sacred space custodial also generate forms of epistemic
closure. The sacred landscape’s inaccessibility is not always framed as an ecological
ethic, but as a domain governed by fear, punishment, and divine retribution.
Mountaineering narratives and colonial accounts frequently describe villagers warning
outsiders against ascending the inner Sanctuary on the grounds that the goddess “will
punish those who disturb her.” In one recorded oral warning from the 1930s, a villager
reportedly cautioned climbers: “दे वी क्रोध करे गी” (Devi krodh karegi)—“the goddess will
become angry”—a phrase climbers often dismissed as “superstition” in memoir
literature.
The taboo does not merely prohibit entry; it delegitimizes the desire to see, measure, or
know the landscape empirically. Sax (1991) identifies this as a form of sacred refusal, in
which the goddess enforces privacy (pp. 84–87). The refusal is territorial, embodied in
the steep ridges, icefields, and glacial walls that surround the inner Sanctuary. Villagers
do not imagine the mountain as an empty or unexplored space; they imagine it as
already inhabited. Thus, there is no epistemic vacuum that calls for exploration. Instead,
there is ontological fullness, which calls for restraint.
The prohibition is articulated in verses that present the Sanctuary as restricted terrain:

“दे वी को परबत अछूतो,

संगत माथे विपद परी।”
Devi ko parbat achuto,
sangat mathe vipad pari.
(Temple performance, Chamoli region)
The goddess’s mountain is untouched; misfortune falls upon those who accompany
trespassers.

Here, the prohibition is framed not as a moral injunction but as a cosmopolitical reality:
harm follows violation. Such verses establish a cosmology in which the mountain itself
polices its boundaries.
From an anthropological perspective, this constitutes a form of cosmological
jurisdiction. It is not merely that humans are forbidden to enter; it is that the goddess,
as a sovereign, retains the authority to determine access. This produces what could be
described as a gendered epistemic boundary, since the sovereignty at stake is feminine
and obstinately private. The Sanctuary’s inaccessibility becomes an extension of the
goddess’s withdrawal from a patriarchal cosmos.
These prohibitions have concrete epistemic consequences. Villagers rarely develop
detailed geographic knowledge of the inner Sanctuary, not because they lack curiosity or
capability, but because the desire to know is itself marked as illicit. The landscape
therefore becomes a knowledge-limited ecology. In such cases, sacred governance
restricts scientific inquiry, cartographic documentation, and even indigenous empirical
knowledge. This is the restrictive face of sacred geography—where custodianship
becomes closure, and reverence becomes epistemic limitation.

𝐌𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐄𝐩𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐜 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐟𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐭

The arrival of colonial and later postcolonial mountaineering expeditions created an
unprecedented confrontation between two incompatible epistemologies of the
mountain: one sacred, the other scientific. For Himalayan villagers, the Nanda Devi
massif was not an unknown geographical entity awaiting exploration, but a sacred being
who withdrew from the human domain. For climbers, by contrast, the massif
represented a “blank” on the map—an empty space that called for measurement,
conquest, and inscription into a cartographic order. This divergence is evident in the
writings of Eric Shipton and H. W. Tilman, whose expeditions in the 1930s penetrated
the Sanctuary and opened an era of Himalayan mountaineering that treated the peak as
a technical and geographical problem rather than a cosmological subject.
Tilman’s account famously described the inner Sanctuary as “a mountain fortress,”
whose defenses were formidable but ultimately conquerable (Tilman, 1937, p. 214). This
language reflects the prevailing Western metaphor of the mountain as a citadel to be
stormed, a metaphor widely critiqued within environmental humanities for its
masculinist and militarized subtext. Shipton, similarly, emphasized the thrill of
discovering a landscape “that no human eye had seen before,” (Shipton, 1936, p. 147)
projecting a terra incognita imaginary that ignored local narratives asserting that the
goddess already inhabited and governed the Sanctuary. The cartographic blankness was
thus a colonial epistemic construct rather than an empirical fact.
The epistemic tension became explicit in encounters with local communities. Villagers
warned climbers against entering the Sanctuary, citing divine displeasure, taboo, and
the risk of cosmic reprisal. These warnings were frequently categorized in
mountaineering memoirs as “local superstition” or “native belief” — a rhetorical move
that delegitimized sacred authority and elevated Western scientific rationality. The
climbers’ desire to ascend, map, and measure the mountain was anchored in a
geographical ontology that defined space as inert, conquerable, and available for human
mastery. The villagers’ desire to prevent ascent was anchored in a cosmological ontology
that defined the same space as sovereign, feminine, and already occupied.
This clash can be analytically framed as a conflict between masculinist cartographic
epistemology and feminine cosmological sovereignty. The former seeks to conquer
through naming, surveying, and inscription; the latter seeks to protect through refusal,
taboo, and withdrawal. In this light, the intrusion into the Sanctuary is not merely a
geographical act but a symbolic violation of feminine privacy.

Mountaineering accounts also record the ambivalence of the colonial state, which often
facilitated expeditions while remaining aware of local resistance. The Survey of India’s
cartographic efforts relied on mountaineering teams to access high-altitude vantage
points, transforming climbing into an infrastructure for imperial mapping. As
Thongchai Winichakul (1994) argues in a different colonial context, such cartographic
regimes convert sacred or relational spaces into gridded, abstract, and sovereign
territory. The Nanda Devi massif was subjected to such a transformation, albeit
incompletely due to the continued force of sacred [Link], Communities
sacralize landscapes not merely to honor deities but to enforce ecological ethics.
The sacred, therefore, becomes a custodial force.
 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐏𝐥𝐮𝐭𝐨𝐧𝐢𝐮𝐦 𝐃𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐜𝐞 𝐈𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐃𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐂𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐞
(𝟏𝟗𝟔𝟓–𝟏𝟗𝟖𝟐)
The epistemic and territorial conflict surrounding Nanda Devi reached a new phase
during the Cold War, when the massif became entangled in Indo–American intelligence
operations. In 1965 and again in 1967, joint teams from the Indian Intelligence Bureau
and United States Central Intelligence Agency attempted to install a nuclear-powered
surveillance device on Nanda Devi intended to monitor Chinese missile tests across the
Tibetan plateau. The device, powered by a plutonium SNAP-19 RTG unit, was to be
placed near the summit for continuous operation. During the 1965 expedition, however,
severe weather forced the team to abandon the device in the upper Sanctuary, where it
subsequently disappeared beneath snow and ice and was never recovered (Kohli, 2009;
Takeda, 2007).

The incident introduced a new layer of anxiety and interpretive conflict. For villagers,
the intrusion was read through sacred cosmology. Oral accounts recorded in Chamoli
district in the 1970s framed the disappearance of the device as evidence that the goddess
rejected the foreign instrument. Local priests described the event as “दे वी की नाराज़गी”
(Devi ki narazgi, “the goddess’s displeasure”), and villagers warned that disturbing the
Sanctuary with “machines” would bring collective misfortune. These reactions were
dismissed by Indian and American climbers as “superstitions,” but they constituted a
coherent cosmopolitical critique: the Sanctuary was not to be weaponized for
geopolitical surveillance.
Environmental anxiety soon joined sacred anxiety. The lost plutonium device was
capable of radioactive contamination if ruptured, raising concerns among
environmentalists and journalists. News reports from the period featured speculation
about a “nuclear ticking time bomb” in the Himalaya (The Hindu, 1981; Time Magazine,
1977). The Indian government, initially silent due to the classified nature of the mission,
later confronted the device as both an environmental liability and a diplomatic
embarrassment (Kapadia, 1999).

It is here that the distinction between sacred closure and state closure becomes
analytically useful. The Sanctuary had long been closed in a sacred sense through
cosmological sovereignty, but after the plutonium incident, debates emerged about
whether it should be closed in a legal–environmental sense. In 1982, the Indian
government declared the Nanda Devi Sanctuary off-limits to mountaineering, citing
environmental fragility and unresolved contamination risk. Access was legally
restricted, and in 1988 the area was designated the Nanda Devi National Park. In 1992 it
was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, solidifying a global conservation
regime over a space that had previously been governed by sacred territoriality.
This transformation reflects the transition from cosmological prohibition to
environmental policy. Yet rather than replacing sacred restriction, state restriction
converged with it. Villagers who resisted climbing for sacred reasons found their
position unexpectedly aligned with environmentalists who resisted climbing for
ecological reasons. Meanwhile, the Indian state, which had once facilitated
mountaineering for geopolitical intelligence, now prohibited it for environmental
governance. The result was a tripartite closure: sacred, legal, and global.

Figure 6. Sites associated with the 1965 Indo–American surveillance mission and subsequent conservation
boundaries.

Note. The incident intensified sacred, environmental, and legal closure of the Sanctuary.
Source: Kohli (2009); Takeda (2007).

𝐅𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐒𝐚𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐡𝐢𝐛𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧

The alignment between sacred taboo and environmental regulation following the 1982
closure demonstrates that sacralization can inadvertently produce conservation
outcomes, even in the absence of explicit ecological discourse. What villagers articulated
as cosmological refusal, the state reframed as ecological fragility. The idiom changed,
but the prohibition remained. The Sanctuary, once protected from intrusion by divine
sovereignty, was now protected from intrusion by conservation law.
This shift represents a significant ontological translation. In sacred terms, Nanda Devi
was inviolate because she was a goddess whose privacy structured the landscape. In
state terms, Nanda Devi was inviolate because she was a high-altitude watershed and
biodiversity zone susceptible to anthropogenic disturbance. UNESCO further reframed
the Sanctuary as a site of “universal value,” converting a regionally sacred landscape into
a globally significant ecological patrimony. These layered regimes of value—sacred,
national, and global—did not eliminate one another but coexisted in a complex
hierarchy.
Yet the translation was not seamless. State conservation regimes introduced new forms
of bureaucracy and technocratic control that displaced local ritual authorities. Villagers
who once exercised customary rights to pilgrimage and seasonal access found
themselves dependent on forest departments, heritage officers, or UNESCO protocols.
In some cases, sacred sovereignty was curtailed by conservation sovereignty. This raises
an additional tension: while sacred geography restricted mountaineering and scientific
intrusion, state conservation restricted local ritual practice. Thus, sacred custodianship
and state custodianship are not interchangeable; they operate from different premises
and produce different exclusions.
Nevertheless, both systems converged in rejecting Western geographical imaginaries of
the mountain as empty, available space. The colonial cartographic desire to map,
measure, and conquer the Sanctuary was undermined first by sacred taboo, then by
national conservation, and finally by global heritage. In each instance, the feminine
sacred geography of Nanda Devi asserted a form of refusal—initially cosmological, later
institutional. The mountain resisted inscription into a patriarchal cosmology of
conquest not only through myth but through policy.

𝐈𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐀𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐓𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐒𝐚𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐓𝐞𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲

Sacralization also functions as a mechanism for identity formation and territorial
assertion. To declare Nanda Devi as the daughter of the region is to claim the region as
her domain. This territoriality is not fictional; it is enacted through ritual circuits,
pilgrimage routes, and oral narratives that extend her sovereignty across valleys,
meadows, and ridges. During the Raj Jat pilgrimage, chants such as “नंदा हमारी” (Nanda
hamari, “Nanda is ours”) articulate a collective belonging that is simultaneously
devotional and territorial. The possessive pronoun does not merely mark affinity; it
marks jurisdiction.

Here sovereignty (raj) is allocated to the goddess, while honor (maan) accrues to the
community through custodianship. This arrangement allows local identity to be
constructed through ritual responsibility rather than through ethnic or administrative
categories.
Sacred territoriality also operates as a form of ecological citizenship. To identify as a
child or devotee of Nanda Devi is to inherit obligations toward her landscape. Pushpa
(2016) documents women in the Chamoli region framing ecological protection as a
daughter’s duty to her mother-goddess (pp. 182–185). This gendered relational ontology
complicates Western environmental discourse, which often frames environmental
responsibility as contract-based or policy-driven rather than kinship-based.
At the same time, identity assertion through sacred territory can produce exclusionary
effects. Those who do not participate in the ritual economy—outsiders, climbers,
scientists, surveyors—are often viewed as violators, not merely strangers.
This brings us to two another important questions:

Does sacredness limit our vision to explore?

The answer is neither simply affirmative nor negative. It limits exploration in one
epistemology (scientific, empirical, colonial), while enabling exploration in another
(devotional, narrative, performative). The Raj-Jat pilgrimage itself is a form of sacred
exploration, structured through mythic time rather than cartographic measurement.

Or Do Landscapes Become Sacred Because of Pre-existing Myths?

Bernbaum’s analysis complicates this question. He argues that myth and landscape
co-evolve: the myth takes form because of the landscape’s presence, while the
landscape gains sacred value through narrative interpretation. In the case of Nanda
Devi:
The mountain’s physical remoteness fuels mythic narratives of divine retreat.
The myth, in turn, protects the mountain from human penetration.
Thus, neither precedes the other—they are mutually constitutive.

So the question becomes not whether sacredness is “good” or “bad” — but:

“Whose vision of the mountain is allowed to define it, and why”?

𝐂𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐝𝐢𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐩 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧

The Nanda Devi case illustrates a paradox in the sacred governance of landscapes. On
one hand, sacralization can produce ecological stewardship, protect biodiversity, and
assert regional identity. On the other hand, sacralization can generate epistemic closure,
restrict empirical inquiry, and foreclose scientific, cartographic, or exploratory
engagements. The tension is not accidental; it is central to how sacred geography
functions as a mode of territorial control.
Colonial and postcolonial mountaineering discourses cast sacred restrictions as
“superstitions” that impeded progress and knowledge. Yet these so-called superstitions
prevented erosive tourism, large-scale extraction, and military infrastructure for
decades. Conversely, sacred taboo also limited local empirical knowledge of the
Sanctuary and insulated the landscape from certain forms of scientific understanding.
The dual closure—sacred and legal—complicates simple narratives about modernity
replacing tradition. Instead, the Sanctuary demonstrates how sacred cosmologies and
state environmental regimes can converge against shared adversaries: extractive
capitalism, militarized mountaineering, and global surveillance. The feminine sacred
geography of Nanda Devi, initially articulated through myth and taboo, persists through
policy and conservation. The result is a landscape that has resisted patriarchal
cosmologies not only through metaphysical withdrawal but through ecological and legal
sovereignty.
To view the mountain as sacred is to refuse the world’s accelerating culture of conquest.
While Western cartography insists that space is empty until measured, the communities
of Uttarakhand insist that space is alive, ancestral, already full.
📚 (1) APA References
Primary & Secondary Scholarship
Benjwal, D. (2013). Nanda Devi: The goddess and the mountain. Mahasu Publications.
Bernbaum, E. (1997). Sacred mountains of the world. University of California Press.
Pushpa, R. (2016). Women, pilgrimage and sacred geography in Garhwal. Indian
Anthropologist, 46(1), 175–192.
Sax, W. S. (1991). Mountain goddess: Gender and politics in a Himalayan pilgrimage. Oxford
University Press.
Sax, W. S. (1998). The feminine sacred in Himalayan pilgrimage. History of Religions, 37(3),
276–302.
Mountaineering Memoirs & Accounts
Kapadia, H. (1999). Across peaks & passes in Kumaun Himalaya. Indus Publishing.
Kohli, M. S. (2009). Mountains of India: Tourism, adventure and development. Indus.
Shipton, E. (1936). Nanda Devi. Hodder & Stoughton.
Tilman, H. W. (1937). The ascent of Nanda Devi. Cambridge University Press.
Takeda, P. (2007). Plutonium fields: The CIA, the Himalayas, and the nuclear surveillance
mission. Random House.
Journalistic / News Sources
The Hindu. (1981). “Nuclear device lost in Himalayas raises alarm.” The Hindu, National Desk.
Time Magazine. (1977). “The spy on the roof of the world.” Time Magazine, International
Edition.
The Indian Express. (1982). “Government closes Nanda Devi to mountaineering”. Indian
Express, National Desk.
Policy, Government & Heritage Sources
Government of India, Ministry of Environment & Forests. (1982). Notification regarding the
closure of Nanda Devi Sanctuary to mountaineering. Government Gazette.
UNESCO World Heritage Committee. (1992). Nomination: Nanda Devi National Park (India).
UNESCO World Heritage Centre.
Comparative & Theoretical Works
Winichakul, T. (1994). Siam mapped: A history of the geo-body of a nation. University of Hawaii
Press.