Braj as Cultural Landscape: Sacred Geography, Pilgrimage and Landscape Change

India, or Bharat, is often described as one of the world’s oldest continuing civilisations. Its languages, traditions and religious life have come through long periods of conquest and political upheaval, and yet outsiders have often found it hard to see how cultural life here holds together, or why things happen the way they do. Braj, the region around Mathura and Vrindavan that is tied to Krishna, is a good place to look at this more closely. Few of the forests, groves and ponds praised in its devotional literature survive as they were imagined, but pilgrims still come in very large numbers and the region still feels sacred to them. This paper asks how that can be. It draws on A. W. Entwistle’s geographical and historical study of Braj, Amita Sinha’s account of its imagined, enacted and reclaimed landscape, and Kiran A. Shinde’s historical geography of Vrindavan. Reading these together, it treats Braj as a cultural landscape made through stories, images, pilgrimage and everyday practice, rather than as a fixed territory or a set of shrines. It pays particular attention to parikrama, the act of walking around a sacred place, and to the changing forests, water bodies, settlements and ways of travelling. As a direction for later work, it also suggests that painting, photography, film and digital media now carry Braj well beyond its geography. The argument is that Braj’s sacred character has lasted alongside, and partly through, material change. Keywords: Braj; cultural landscape; sacred geography; pilgrimage; parikrama; Krishna; Vrindavan; visual culture; digital media; landscape memory; heritage