Pilgrimage, politics and sovereignty: India, China and the return to Kailash

Shiva and His Family on Mount Kailash. Ascribed to a Master of the Second Generation after Nainsukh (c. 1800-1810)

Religious exchanges between India and Tibet have been thorny subjects in Sino-Indian relations for the last seventy-five years, not least because they recall the close historical and cultural ties between India and Tibet. Reminders that Buddhism entered Tibet from India can disturb official narratives of Tibet’s essential place in the Chinese world - narratives that underpin Beijing’s sovereign claims there.

Nonetheless, on Monday, 28 April, the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed that Beijing and New Delhi have agreed that Indian nationals will be allowed once again to complete the pilgrimage (yātrā) up to Mount Kailash. The mountain, known in Tibetan as Gang Rinpoche, is situated in the Ngari Prefecture of China’s Tibet, adjacent to the Indian state Uttarakhand, and is a major destination for Tibetan Buddhists. But Kailash is also central to Hindu mythology and is where many texts describe the great god Shiva and his wife Parvati enjoying earth-shaking sexual union sustained over millennia. As a result, it is also an alluring destination for Hindu pilgrims.

Attitudes to such travel have long been a barometer of the state of Sino-Indian relations. Encouraged in the 1950s it was blocked following the 1962 war and allowed again as relations normalised in the 1980s. The route closed once more during Covid and when reopened in 2023 heavy restrictions meant pilgrimage was in practice impossible. This latest relaxation follows the agreements on border management made in December 2024 and is another sign that Sino-Indian relations are tentatively recovering from the torrid state they reached with the Galwan Valley border clashes of 2020.

Yet pilgrim travel - and religious relations more broadly - have always carried implications for sovereignty and legitimacy, especially regarding the sensitive question of Tibet. Prior to the establishment of independent India (1947) and the PRC (1949), sovereignty across the entire Himalayan region was ill-defined, fluid, and overlapping. Religion contributed to this fluidity with pilgrims often roaming freely and ecclesiastical authority operating in ways often independent of political power.

In 1949, many in Delhi would have preferred Tibet to formalise the separation it had effectively enjoyed from China for several decades. So when Mao’s army compelled Lhasa to accept Chinese sovereignty in 1951, there was considerable disquiet in India. Still, Delhi ultimately accepted the situation and fashioned a policy aimed at supporting the autonomy which Beijing had granted Tibet.

In the mid-1950s, Delhi and Beijing actively encouraged religious ties. Despite its secular rhetoric, India’s governing Congress Party celebrated Buddhism as both an authentic inspiration to Asians generally and a symbol of India’s own historical glory. New Delhi hoped religious and cultural relations with Tibet would sustain the autonomy promised by Beijing in 1951 and prevent a hardening of sovereign boundaries. Continued pilgrimage served that strategy. In 1954, an agreement on ‘Trade and Intercourse between Tibet Region of China and India’ granted that Indian pilgrims could visit Kailash ‘in accordance with custom’ - seemingly a recognition that the modern states of India and the PRC would allow sovereign boundaries across the Himalayas to remain blurred in the interest of good relations. The avowedly atheist Communist Party of China, for its part, encouraged religious and cultural relations between Tibet and India to demonstrate the sincerity of both China’s friendship for India and its commitment to a moderate, culturally relaxed policy in Tibet.

A key episode in the history of religious relations between India, Tibet and China was the Buddha Jayanti celebrations of 1956, marking the 2500th anniversary of Buddha’s birth. New Delhi embraced this to showcase India as the home of Buddhism, boosting its status in Asia and its special relations with Tibet. To add lustre, it was hoped that the Dalai Lama would travel down from Tibet to participate alongside countless other pilgrims. Although Beijing worried that the young Tibetan leader might be influenced by anti-China forces in India, it let him go in order to underline the commitment to Sino-Indian friendship and Tibetan autonomy. However, the manner in which the Buddha Jayanti highlighted India’s connections with Tibet and emboldened those seeking to undermine Beijing’s authority confirmed Chinese suspicions. The Dalai Lama very nearly decided to remain in India. Beijing then became far more cautious about India’s religious relations with Tibet. With the Dalai Lama’s escape from Tibet in 1959 and then the 1962 war, Beijing banned Indian pilgrims altogether and Tibet’s relations with India became heavily circumscribed.

So the simple announcement about the Kailash Yātrā belies much nuance. Religion is a transnational force which can hugely disrupt state sovereignty, and pilgrimage in particular can subtly challenge borders and political authority. Tibet is a region of great sovereign sensitivity to Beijing and foreign travel into that province has long been restricted. That Beijing has allowed this pilgrimage now indicates both its desire to improve relations with India and also its confidence that it can continue to contain narratives hostile to Tibet’s stable place within China. But dangers remain. The Kailash pilgrim trail not only highlights Buddhist Tibet’s religious and cultural ties to India, so implicitly contesting China’s legitimacy - it might even inspire those who see Hindu myth as justifying wider Indian influence.