Harvey & Takhar/Religion and Senses of Place, 1. Clouds Drifting Through a Landscape

The human geographer Yi-Fu Tan (1977: 9) has argued that a place ‘cannot be known in itself. What can be known is a reality that is a construct of experience’. While experience constructs place, place also shapes experience through what Ron Scollon and Suzie Wong Scollon (2003: 2) have called geosemiotics –‘the material placement of signs and discourses’. The material placements in Rishikesh include a plethora of signs advertising various courses in yoga and meditation, the now semi-permanent wayside shrines that are dotted around the town, and the increasingly large statues of Hindu deities that adorn the banks of Gangā. Discourses about Rishikesh include: references in some of the Hindu literature, the long associations with saints and sadhus, the narrative that indicates that it is the gateway to “the Land of the God”, and the claim that it is the yoga capital of the world and the place where the Beatles stayed with Mahesh Yogi. This chapter will explore how Rishikesh is represented as one place through the geosemitotics and discourses that construct this small Northern Indian town as unique. However, it will identify how Rishikesh may also be considered as many places through the multiplicity of experiences that different interpretive communities encounter.