NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 8 Becoming Aware of Sacred Geography — LET'S EXPLORE

First, the locations. On the map of Fig. 8.6 the four dhāms (light-blue triangles) sit almost exactly at the four corners of the country:

The chapter itself points out that they “appear to have been deliberately located in the southern, northern, eastern and western corners of India”. Joining them draws a giant cross over the whole Subcontinent.

What that implied for the people who travelled it:

• You cannot finish the yātrā without crossing the whole country. Badrinath to Rameswaram is about 2,800 km; Dwarka to Puri about 1,900 km. A pilgrim had to see the Himalayas, the Deccan, both coasts and the Ganga plain.
• India becomes one place in the mind. Someone who had walked from a snow peak to a southern seashore no longer thought of his own district as the world. He had felt with his feet that all of it was one land — the “feeling of one country and one culture” that Nehru described.
• Difference stops being strange. Along the way the traveller met other languages, foods, clothes and customs — and also met the same deities, the same festivals, the same reverence for rivers. Diversity and unity were experienced together.
• The roads themselves grew. Constant north–south and east–west traffic kept routes, ferries, rest houses and markets alive, so trade, news and ideas travelled on the same paths.
• Every region gained importance. No corner could be dismissed as remote, because each corner held one quarter of the whole. That is how a network of shrines quietly became a map of the nation.