Pandit Booking & Temples in Uttar Pradesh

Ritual geography of Uttar Pradesh

For this site Uttar Pradesh means its eastern end: Varanasi and Prayagraj, the two cities on the Ganga that the rest of north India travels to. Kashi is the older and the denser — a Jyotirlinga, ghats used for the rites of the dead every day of the year, and a Sanskrit teaching tradition that has supplied priests to half the region for centuries. Prayagraj is the confluence, and its sacred geography is a meeting of rivers rather than a building.

Both are places families come to rather than live in for ritual purposes, which shapes what is asked for: asthi visarjan, tarpan, shraddh and pind daan far more than the domestic round. The two are two hours apart and are commonly done on one journey, in either order.

The calendar is the practical constraint. Prayagraj's Magh mela, and the Kumbh and Ardh Kumbh at their own intervals, put the whole city on the sands for a month at a time; Kashi's Mahashivratri does the same for a night.