Every now and then I build something that isn’t for a client, isn’t for a project brief, and certainly isn’t for money. Parikrama — a pilgrim’s atlas of Hindu temples — is exactly that, and this post is about why.
What it is
Parikrama is an interactive atlas. You can explore a map of over two thousand temples across India and the wider Hindu world, filter by deity, sampradaya, architectural style, or pilgrimage circuit, and build your own yatra — a plan of temples you’d like to visit, with distances and approximate travel days calculated. Every temple, where possible, carries a photograph, a short description, and a link back to its Wikipedia article for deeper reading.
It is a work in progress, and it will probably always be.
It’s not a business
There will never be advertisements on Parikrama. There is no revenue model, no newsletter lock-in, no “premium tier.” I say this up front because in a web that increasingly monetises every click, I want the terms to be clear from the start: you visit, you learn, you leave. That is all I want from this.
So why build it?
The honest answer is that I wanted to learn more — about where I come from.
There are temples near my ancestral village that I visited as a child and couldn’t tell you a single thing about today. There are circuits of pilgrimage — Jyotirlingas, Char Dham, Shakti Peethas — that millions walk every year and that I mostly know only by name. There is a vocabulary of architecture — Dravidian, Nagara, Vesara, Maru-Gurjara, Kalinga — that can tell you a great deal about when and where a temple was built, if only you know what to look for.
I wanted a place to put what I’ve learned, and to keep learning in public. If a page that helps me also helps a few others who share this curiosity — students of history, diaspora kids trying to stitch together a thread to their grandparents’ villages, pilgrims planning a trip, or anyone who finds sacred geography fascinating — all the better. I’m sharing it here because I suspect there are many of us.
It’s genuinely hard to get right
Here I have to be transparent with you.
Hindu tradition is old, regional, and vast. There are multiple calendar systems, multiple schools of architecture, deities that go by dozens of names, festivals whose dates shift every year by lunar phase. There is Amanta and Purnimanta. There is Drik and Vakya. There is Shaiva and Vaishnava and Shakta and a hundred smaller sampradayas, each with their own chronology, canon, and living tradition. A temple in Tamil Nadu might follow a different agama from an apparently similar shrine in Odisha. The same deity might be worshipped as the principal form in one place and as an attendant form in another.
I am one person building this in my spare time. I am not a Sanskrit scholar. I am not a historian. I am not an archaeologist. I am learning as I go.
That means some of what you see on Parikrama today is wrong. A coordinate slightly off. A deity mis-classified. A festival tagged to the wrong lunar month. An architectural style entered as “Dravidian” where a historian would have said “Dravidian (Vijayanagara).” There is a visible “Alpha” marker on the site to remind anyone visiting that this is a work in progress, and that the pace will be measured — because I would rather move slowly and get things right than move quickly and spread misinformation. Some of these corrections will take weeks. Some will take years.
If you spot an error — especially if you have local or scholarly knowledge of a particular temple or tradition — please tell me. The comment section at the bottom of this post, or the About page, is the best way to reach me. Every correction you send makes the next visitor’s experience more accurate.
Where I want to take it
Over time, I want Parikrama to become more accessible, not less:
- Photographs that do the temples justice, rather than placeholders
- Short, sourced histories for each site — written carefully, not generated
- Accurate darshan timings and seasonal notes
- A panchang-driven festival calendar that tells you which temples celebrate what, at the tithi level, for the date you’re actually reading
- Routes that account for the practical realities of pilgrimage in India today
- Multilingual support, so the atlas reads naturally for someone whose first script isn’t English
There is no deadline. This is a project I expect to work on, on and off, for years. Not because it has to be big — but because the subject deserves that care.
If you’ve made it this far
Thank you for reading. If you’d like to follow along with how Parikrama grows, bookmark the atlas itself and come back every now and then — you’ll usually find something new. If you have a temple to suggest, a correction to offer, or simply want to say hello, the comments below are open.
Parikrama is a small thing I am building because I wanted it to exist. I hope, in however small a way, it’s useful to you too.
— Chaitanya