Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL
Capital: New Delhi
Population: 1.4 billion+
Language: Hindi and English. The Constitution recognises 22 languages in all.
1 – Golden Temple – Amritsar (also above)
The Golden Temple, or Harmandir Sahib, Sikhism’s holiest shrine, stands in the sacred pool that Guru Ram Das began digging at Amritsar in 1577, and Guru Arjan completed the temple and installed the Adi Granth in it in 1604, while Maharaja Ranjit Singh had its upper storeys sheathed in gilded copper in the early 19th century.
The Golden Temple has entrances on all four sides, symbolising openness to every caste and direction, its langar serves free meals to an estimated 50,000–100,000 people a day, and it was rebuilt after Afghan forces blew it up in 1762, then damaged again in June 1984 in the Indian Army’s Operation Blue Star.
A short walk from the Golden Temple is Jallianwala Bagh, where on 13 April 1919 troops under Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer, educated at Midleton College, County Cork, fired on a crowd, killing at least 379 by the official count, a figure long disputed, under the Punjab rule of Sir Michael O’Dwyer of County Tipperary.
2 – Aru Valley
Aru Valley is a meadow village at about 2,400 m on the Aru stream, a tributary of the Lidder, some 12 km from Pahalgam in Kashmir’s Anantnag district.
Aru Valley is the starting point for treks to the Kolahoi Glacier and to the Tarsar and Marsar lakes, best walked from late spring to early autumn, as winter brings heavy snow.
In summer Gujjar and Bakarwal herders bring their flocks up to the meadows around Aru Valley, a seasonal journey between the lower valleys and the high pastures.
3 – Humayun’s Tomb
Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi was built in about 1565–72 under Emperor Akbar for his father Humayun, the second Mughal emperor, and is traditionally credited to Humayun’s senior widow, Bega Begum, designed by the Persian architect Mirak Mirza Ghiyas and completed by his son.
Humayun’s Tomb was the first garden-tomb on the Indian subcontinent and a model for the Taj Mahal, in red sandstone with white marble under a double dome, set in a charbagh of about 12 hectares, with more than 150 Mughal graves earning it the name “dormitory of the Mughals”.
In September 1857, the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, sheltered at Humayun’s Tomb and surrendered to Captain William Hodson, dying in exile in Rangoon in 1862, while the Aga Khan Trust for Culture restored the gardens and then the tomb itself by 2013.
4 – Taj Mahal
The Taj Mahal at Agra was built by Shah Jahan, for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died in 1631 giving birth to their 14th child, begun in 1632 and completed around 1653, with some 20,000 workers by the account of the French traveller Tavernier and a design usually attributed to Ustad Ahmad Lahauri.
The Taj Mahal is a study in symmetry, with a charbagh garden, a mosque balanced by an identical guest hall, pietra dura inlay of semi-precious stones, and minarets that lean slightly outward, reportedly so they would fall away from the tomb if they ever collapsed.
Shah Jahan was deposed by his son Aurangzeb in 1658 and held in Agra Fort until his death in 1666, then buried beside his wife in the Taj Mahal, where his cenotaph, set to one side of hers, breaks the otherwise near-perfect symmetry.
5 – The Red Fort
The Red Fort was Shah Jahan’s red sandstone citadel at Shahjahanabad, the new Delhi he made his capital in place of Agra, begun in 1638–39 and completed in 1648 within almost 2.4 km of walls.
Inside the Red Fort are the Diwan-i-Am, the Rang Mahal and the Diwan-i-Khas, inscribed “If there is a paradise on earth, it is this”, whose Peacock Throne Nadir Shah carried off in 1739, while on every Independence Day since 1947 the prime minister has addressed the nation from its ramparts.
After the 1857 uprising, in which Dublin-born John Nicholson was fatally wounded leading the British assault on Delhi, the British demolished most of the Red Fort’s palace buildings to make way for barracks, and in 1945–46 they tried officers of the Indian National Army there.
6 – Akshardham Temple
Akshardham Temple in Delhi was built by the BAPS Swaminarayan organisation in under five years by some 11,000 artisans and volunteers and consecrated on 6 November 2005, and Guinness World Records recognised it in 2007 as the world’s largest comprehensive Hindu temple.
The central monument of Akshardham is built without structural steel, in pink sandstone and white marble, with 234 carved pillars, more than 20,000 statues and the Gajendra Pith, a plinth carved with 148 elephants, beside the Yagnapurush Kund stepwell.
Akshardham was carved in the traditional manner, so it is not a replica of an old temple but an old kind of temple that happens to be new.
7 – Mehrangarh Fort
Mehrangarh Fort stands on a rocky hill about 120 m above Jodhpur, founded in 1459 by Rao Jodha of the Rathores when he moved his capital from Mandore, no longer thought secure, behind walls up to 36 m high.
Seven gates climb to Mehrangarh Fort, one of them, Dedh Kangra Pol, scarred by cannon fire, and inside are the Moti Mahal and Phool Mahal, with a museum of palanquins, howdahs and arms.
Jodhpur below Mehrangarh is the Blue City, and nobody knows for sure why so many houses are blue, with local accounts pointing to Brahmin households, to a copper-sulphate wash that repels termites, or to keeping homes cool.
8 – Kosi River Valley – Almora
Almora stands on a horseshoe-shaped ridge about 1,640 m up in the Kumaon hills of Uttarakhand, above the Kosi River Valley, founded in 1568 under the Chand ruler Kalyan Chand, with long views of the Himalaya on clear days.
From Almora, Kasar Devi temple sits further along the ridge, the Jageshwar group of more than 100 stone temples lies about 35 km away, and the forests of Binsar open onto wide mountain views.
The ridge at Kasar Devi, long nicknamed Crank’s Ridge after its colony of Western seekers, drew Vivekananda in the 1890s, Lama Anagarika Govinda, Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary, and in 1898 Sister Nivedita, born Margaret Noble in Dungannon, County Tyrone, stayed at Almora with Vivekananda.
9 – Dal Lake
Dal Lake covers some 18 km² on the edge of Srinagar, with Mughal gardens terraced down its shore, Shalimar Bagh, laid out by Emperor Jahangir for Nur Jahan in 1619, and Nishat Bagh, built in 1633 by Asaf Khan, Nur Jahan’s elder brother.
Shikaras, the long cushioned boats of Dal Lake, slip between floating gardens to an early-morning floating vegetable market and a floating post office.
When Kashmir’s maharajas barred outsiders from buying land, British visitors to Dal Lake took to the water instead, and the first modern houseboats appeared in the 1880s, giving rise to a whole industry on the lake.
10 – Goa
Goa was seized by Afonso de Albuquerque in 1510 and stayed Portuguese for 451 years, until Operation Vijay in December 1961, and it keeps a civil code derived from the Portuguese Civil Code of 1867, applying the same family law to all religions.
Old Goa’s Basilica of Bom Jesus and Sé Cathedral belong to the UNESCO-listed Churches and Convents of Goa, and on the night of 9 March 1943 volunteers of the Calcutta Light Horse raided the German ship Ehrenfels in Mormugao harbour in neutral Goa, a story filmed as The Sea Wolves (1980).
The Basilica of Bom Jesus in Goa holds the body of St Francis Xavier, who died off China in 1552 and was brought here in 1554, displayed roughly once a decade, with his right forearm sent to Rome in 1614 and a toe said to have been bitten off by an over-zealous devotee in 1554.
11 – Udaipur
Udaipur was founded in 1559 by Maharana Udai Singh II and became Mewar’s capital after Akbar took Chittorgarh in 1568, built around artificial lakes in the Aravalli hills, the seat of one of India’s longest-ruling royal houses.
Udaipur’s City Palace runs along the shore of Lake Pichola, while the island palace of Jag Niwas, built in 1743–46 for Jagat Singh II, became a luxury hotel in the 1960s.
Octopussy (1983) was filmed in Udaipur at the Lake Palace, the Monsoon Palace and Shiv Niwas Palace, with Jag Mandir, another palace on Lake Pichola, used for many exterior shots.
12 – Gurudongmar Lake, Sikkim
Gurudongmar Lake lies at more than 5,000 m in North Sikkim, close to the Tibetan border, one of the highest lakes in the world, named after Guru Padmasambhava and sacred to Buddhists, Sikhs and Hindus.
Gurudongmar Lake lies in a restricted border area reached through Lachen and Thangu, and on a clear morning the high Himalaya stand along its skyline.
Gurudongmar Lake freezes for much of the year, but part of it is said never to freeze, which tradition explains through the blessing of Guru Padmasambhava or of Guru Nanak.
13 – Varanasi
Varanasi, on the west bank of the Ganges, is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world and the holiest of Hinduism’s seven sacred cities, where dying is believed to bring liberation, or moksha.
More than 80 ghats line about 6.5 km of the Varanasi riverfront, stone steps where people bathe at dawn and where the cremation fires of Manikarnika Ghat burn, while the Ganga Aarti is performed each evening at Dashashwamedh.
Near Varanasi at Sarnath the Buddha preached his first sermon, and the Lion Capital of Ashoka’s pillar there, carved in the 3rd century BC, was adopted as India’s state emblem on 26 January 1950.
14 – Ajanta and Ellora
Ajanta and Ellora are two sets of rock-cut caves in Maharashtra about 100 km apart, both UNESCO World Heritage Sites since 1983, with Ajanta’s Buddhist caves cut in two phases from about the 2nd century BC and Ellora’s 34 caves carved roughly between AD 600 and 1000.
Ajanta’s 30 or so caves curve around a horseshoe gorge of the Waghora river, their murals of the Jataka tales among the finest surviving masterpieces of ancient Indian painting, while Ellora holds 12 Buddhist, 17 Hindu and 5 Jain caves.
Ellora’s Kailasa Temple, Cave 16, built under the Rashtrakuta king Krishna I in the 8th century, was carved from the top down out of a single mass of rock, with an estimated 200,000 tonnes removed to leave a multi-storey temple.
15 – Mumbai
Mumbai grew from seven islands that came to Charles II in 1661 as part of Catherine of Braganza’s dowry and were leased to the East India Company in 1668 for £10 a year, later joined by land reclamation, and Bombay became Mumbai in 1995.
The Gateway of India in Mumbai, its foundation stone laid in 1911 to mark the arrival of George V and Queen Mary, the first visit to India by a reigning British monarch, was completed in 1924, and on 28 February 1948 the last British troops in India left through it.
On 14 April 1944, the SS Fort Stikine, carrying cotton, gold and explosives, blew up in Mumbai’s Victoria Dock, with estimates of the dead ranging from the official figure of about 740 to well over 1,000.
16 – Kerala
Kerala, the strip of coast and hill country between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea, drew traders for its pepper from Roman times onwards, followed by Arab, Chinese and Portuguese merchants.
Kerala’s backwaters run for more than 900 km of linked lagoons, canals and rivers around Vembanad, where kettuvallams that once carried rice and cargo serve as houseboats, with the Chinese fishing nets of Fort Kochi on the coast.
Kerala’s St Thomas Christians trace their church by tradition to AD 52, the Paradesi Synagogue at Kochi was built in 1568, and Vasco da Gama died at Kochi in 1524, his remains later returned to Portugal and laid in Lisbon’s Jerónimos Monastery.
17 – Meenakshi Amman Temple, Madurai
Meenakshi Amman Temple stands at the heart of Madurai in Tamil Nadu, the old city laid out in nested squares around it, and the present temple is mostly 16th–17th-century Nayak work, rebuilt after the earlier temple was badly damaged in Delhi Sultanate raids in the early 14th century.
Meenakshi Amman Temple has 14 gateway towers, the tallest the southern gopuram at about 52 m, an estimated 33,000 sculptures, a Hall of a Thousand Pillars that has 985, and the Golden Lotus tank.
The temple is named for the goddess Meenakshi, a form of Parvati, rather than her consort Sundareswarar, a form of Shiva, and every night his image is carried in procession to the bedchamber in her shrine.