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For to Hindus, as also to many Indian Buddhists, Muslims, Christians and Sikhs, India is a Holy Land. The actual soil of India is thought by many simple rural Hindus to be the residence of the divinity and, in villages across India, is worshipped and understood to be literally the body of the Goddess, while the features of the Indian landscape -the mountains and forests, the caves and outcrops of rock, the mighty rivers- are all understood to be her physical features. She is Bharat Mata, Mother India, and in her main temple in Varanasi the Goddess is worshipped not in the form of an idol but manifested in a brightly coloured map of India. Her landscapte is not dead but alive, dense with sacred significance.

There is a Hindu myth that seeks to explain this innate holiness. According to the legend, Rajah Daksha, the father-in-law of Shiva, failed to invite his son-in-law to an important sacrifice. Overcome by shame, the rajah's daughter, Sati, jumped into a fire and killed herself. Shiva, inconsolable, traversed India in a furious, grief-stricken dance, carrying her body. The gods became anxious that Shiva's anguish would destroy the universe, so they dispersed her body bit by bit, across the plains and mountains and forests of India. Wherever fragments of her body landed, there was establisched a tirtha, often a shrine to the Goddess, and in time many of these tirthas became major pilgrimage sites.

The legend encapsulates a picture of India as a mythologically charged landscape whose holy pilgrimage sites are as widely distributed as the body of Sati itself. The idea of India's sacredness is therefore not some Western concept grafted onto the subcontintent in a fit of mystical Orientalism: it is an idea central to India's conception of itself. Indeed this idea of India as a sacred landscape predates classical Hinduism, and, most importantly, is an idea that was in turn passed onto most of the other religions that came to flourish in the Indian soil.

The origins of the idea o Sacred India seem to lie in Indias's ancient pre-Vedic religions where veneration was given to sprites known as nagas or yhakshas. These godlings were associated with natural features of the landscape such as pools and sacred springs and the roots of banyan trees, and were believed to have jurisdiction over their own areas. Over the centuries, the myths associated with such features changed, so that a particular sacred pool might in time come to be associated with Ram and Sita, or a mountain linked with Krishna or the wanderings of the Pandava brothers of the Mahabharata. Just as the sacredness of the landscapte percolated form pre-Vedic and tribal folk cults into classical 'Great Tradition' Hinduism, so in the course of time the idea slowly trickled form Hinduism into Buddhism, Sikhism, Indian Christianity and even Indean Islam.