ABSTRACT
In May of 2010 I was sitting with my friend Dhruv Vajpayee in his tiny shop, looking out onto the crush of people in the temple courtyard in Kedarnath, a Shaivite shrine located in central northern Garhwal in the north Indian state of Uttarakhand. I have been visiting Kedarnath since 1999 and I lived there for most of the seven-month pilgrimage season in 2007. Dhruv and I were speaking about the visits of devtas (deities) to Kedarnath, the times when the physical images of Garhwali village deities would come to Kedarnath on devta-yatra (deity-pilgrim-age, deity-travel), carried in palanquins or baskets. At such times these deities, typically accompanied by families from their home village, act just as a human pilgrim would. They bathe, sponsor worship of the form of Shiva present in the Kedarnath temple, walk around the valley, and record their names in the record book of the pilgrimage priest for their village. Dhruv was showing me his favorite video recordings of devta visits on his cell phone that he had either made himself or collected from someone else. I felt like he was showing me something precious, a thing of deep value of the sort that is shown to friends. 1
