The sacred geography of the Indic world — every site mapped, dated, storied, and cited.
An interactive atlas of the sacred Indic world — Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh sites across India and the wider civilisational sphere it shaped: Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. Scrub the timeline to watch two and a half millennia of temple building unfold; every site carries its history, its legend (marked as katha, distinct from documented history), pilgrim practicalities, and full citations.
Colour is the construction era of the standing structure; shape is the tradition — circle Hindu, square Buddhist, diamond Jain, triangle Sikh. While scrubbing time, a hollow mark means the site was already sacred (first attestation or tradition) but today's structure was not yet built; the mark fills in the year construction of the standing structure began.
All maps on this site depict the external boundaries of India as per the position of the Government of India, using the Natural Earth “India worldview” boundary edition: the entire Union Territories of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh — including the areas under Pakistani and Chinese occupation — and the full state of Arunachal Pradesh are shown as Indian territory. Sacred sites located in occupied territory (e.g. Sharada Peeth) are listed under India accordingly.
The atlas documents 1126 sites. 68 are flagship entries, carrying documented history, legend, access and patron; the remaining 1058 are compact entries holding the essentials. Those figures are recomputed on every build rather than written by hand — an earlier version of this page claimed 150 flagship records when only a fraction met the standard, and 82 were relabelled downward to match reality rather than let the label flatter them.
Every record cites its sources and nothing is published without one. We would rather state a weakness than imply it away: 883 records (78%) currently rest on English Wikipedia alone. That satisfies our rule that no fact ships unsourced, but a single encyclopedia citation is thin support for the dating and dynasty attributions this project exists to get right, and reducing that number is the main editorial work ahead. 107 records carry an official website and 747 carry their name in a native script. Sites whose coordinates could not be sourced anywhere were excluded rather than guessed, and phone numbers appear only where published on an official temple site.
Where sources disagree about whether a site belongs to a canonical list, we show the claim and the disagreement rather than quietly picking a side — 27 records carry a contested attribution with its own citation. Two of the 108 Divya Desams (Tirupparkatal and Vaikuntham) are not of the earthly realm and can never appear on a map, so 106 is this gazetteer's ceiling for that circuit.
Historical facts are compiled from the references cited on each entry — primarily English Wikipedia (facts restated; adapted text CC BY-SA), UNESCO World Heritage Centre listings, the Archaeological Survey of India, state temple boards (TN HR&CE, Devaswom boards, AP/TS Endowments, shrine boards), and official temple trusts. Map geometry comes from Natural Earth (public domain) in its India-worldview edition; site coordinates from Wikipedia/Wikidata (CC0). “Open in Google Maps” links use coordinates only; no Google data is stored.
The full build adds community contributions with a verification queue: photographs, timings, festival calendars, and corrections — with phone numbers accepted only when they match an official source or are call-verified, and every edit carrying a source and a “last verified” date.
Raising records off single-source citation; Wikidata and OpenStreetMap ingestion to grow from 1126 toward tens of thousands; dynasty map-layers under the timeline; completing the canonical circuits; routes, timings and accommodation from official sources only; and Indic-language editions.