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Bengali travel narratives have a rich repertoire of works that focus on travel as pilgrimage undertaken to the Himalayas, especially to the famous holy shrines of Kedarnath and Badrinath and to Kailasa and Manas Sarovar. This paper focuses on the changing nature of Himalayan pilgrimage down the centuries. The first part discusses two lesser known pilgrimages to the Himalayas where two monks of the Ramakrishna Mission order, namely Swami Akhandananda and Swami Apurvananda undertake their journey in 1887 and 1939 respectively. Their travelogues were published many years later by Udbodhan Karyalaya, the official mouthpiece of the Mission. In both the narratives we get details of the travails of travelling in those times with very little financial security and material comfort. The second part of the paper discusses issues raised by Umaprasad Mukhopadhyay in his travelogue Pancha Kedar where he tells us how, with changing times, the manner of travelling to the same holy places have undergone remarkable changes. The discussion then focuses upon another observation by the famous writer Narayan Sanyal who in his book Pather Mahaprasthan laments the demise of the original trekking routes of the pilgrims. In 1986, Saroj Kumar Bandyopadhyay visited Kailasa and Manas Sarovar and his narrative describing his month long package trip vouches for the changes that both the pilgrim and the pilgrimage had undergone to the same places almost half a century later. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses experiences of hardship during Hindu pilgrimages in the Nepalese and Tibetan Himalayas. Pilgrims have to reach their goal by undertaking a journey. The pilgrimage exposes pilgrims to a variety of experiences. The journey's religious experiences are of significance for the ritual arrangements of the pilgrimage. Cognitive theories and the selectionist approach of 'cultural epidemiology' are adopted to offer explanations for the formation of religious beliefs and values associated with travelling experience, hardship and danger during pilgrimage. Specifically, it is argued that the experience of salient emotional events such as hardship are likely to draw upon evolved social exchange intuitions that impose a selective pressure in the cultural formation and recurrence of beliefs regarding religious merits in pilgrimage. It is further argued that social exchange intuitions are a likely source of beliefs in boons and merits, since pilgrimage is already conceptualised as an interaction with 'supernatural agents.' These accounts modify and elaborate former suggestions regarding hardship and sacrificial notions in pilgrimage studies. Thus the presented arguments may be relevant to understanding some of the features of pilgrimage that also seem to recur cross-culturally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]