Lord of the Himalayan Hump — Jyotirlinga of the Char Dham
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Kedarnath (Sanskrit: केदारनाथ, "Lord of the Field/Hump") is the Shiva Jyotirlinga enshrined at 3,583 m in the Garhwal Himalaya — the highest-altitude major Hindu temple and one of the four Char Dham (with Badrinath, Gangotri, Yamunotri). He is the Uttarakhand T0 anchor and, alongside Mahakaleshwar and Kashi Vishwanath, part of the Shaiva triangle that defines pan-Indian Jyotirlinga pilgrimage.
The Kedarnath mula-lingam is unusual: rather than a smooth cylindrical stone, it is a conical rock mound about 4 feet high, irregularly shaped, understood in local tradition as the rear-end (kedara = "hump") of Shiva in his form as a bull — a reference to the Mahabharata-framed sthala-purana in which Shiva, fleeing the Pandavas who sought his blessings after Kurukshetra, transformed into a bull and plunged into the earth at this site, leaving his hump at Kedarnath. The rest of the bull-body emerged at the other Pancha Kedar sites:
This five-site geography is a distinctive Himalayan organisational form; Eck (2012) argues it constitutes a single theologically-unified temple complex distributed across 150 km of high-altitude terrain.
Adi Shankaracharya is traditionally credited with reviving or rebuilding the temple in the 8th century CE; his samadhi was originally behind the temple (relocated after the 2013 flood). The present stone-slab temple is architecturally distinctive — massive interlocked granite blocks without mortar, attributed variously to Pandava-era or early-medieval construction, and notably surviving the 2013 North India floods with minimal structural damage despite being at the centre of the disaster (Whitmore 2018 provides the scholarly reconstruction).
In June 2013, unprecedented cloudburst-driven flooding on the Mandakini and Saraswati rivers destroyed the Kedarnath village, killed an estimated 6,000+ pilgrims (official figure 4,094, scholarly consensus higher), and radically reshaped the shrine's infrastructure. A massive boulder — now the Bhim Shila — came to rest behind the temple, deflecting floodwaters and preserving the sanctum. The post-2013 reconstruction has formalised helicopter access, imposed pilgrim-capacity limits, and drawn the temple into contemporary debates about Himalayan ecology, tourism volume, and climate vulnerability.
Kedarnath is closed approximately November–April due to snow. During this period, the deity's chal-utsava (processional image) resides at Ukhimath (Omkareshwar temple), where all Kedarnath worship continues. The temple's reopening on Akshaya Tritiya (April–May) and closing on Bhai Dooj (November) are calendrically significant Himalayan events, announced via Panchang by the Jyotirmath shankaracharya lineage.
The temple is served by the Rawal head priest, traditionally from the Veerashaiva Jangama lineage of Karnataka — a remarkable cross-regional priestly arrangement in which the highest Himalayan Shaiva shrine is served by a South Indian lineage, understood as an Adi-Shankaracharya-era arrangement. The Rawal's successor is selected from the Jangama mathas of Karnataka. Administration is by the Shri Badrinath-Kedarnath Temple Committee, a Uttarakhand statutory body.
Kedarnath is the Uttarakhand T0 anchor, one of the four Char Dham, a Jyotirlinga, and the centre of the Pancha Kedar five-site system — a single entry that links to at least four future T1 entries. Whitmore (2018) and Eck (2012) give Tier 1 footing; the 2013 floods make this an unusually politically-live entry with strong contemporary scholarship.
