Rajasthan

Rajasthan is arid, and its religious geography is organised around a small number of places where people converge across long distances.

Pushkar holds a lake said to have formed where a lotus fell from the creator's hand, and one of the very few temples anywhere dedicated to Brahma. The annual fair there combines a bathing pilgrimage with one of the largest livestock markets in the region, which is a normal combination in South Asian pilgrimage rather than an oddity.

Ajmer holds the tomb of Moinuddin Chishti, who died in 1236 and whose shrine became the principal centre of the Chishti order and one of the most visited pilgrimage destinations in South Asia. Mughal emperors walked to it; its kitchens cook in cauldrons large enough to feed thousands; and its visitors have long included very large numbers of Hindus, which the shrine's own literature and independent scholarship both record as ordinary practice rather than as an exception.

The Jain temples at Dilwara on Mount Abu and at Ranakpur are built in white marble carved to a fineness that makes the ceilings translucent in places, funded by merchant families in the eleventh to fifteenth centuries.

Underneath all of this runs a dense local layer of deified heroes, snake deities and mother goddesses with their own shrines, festivals and bardic performers, which is where most everyday religious practice in the region actually happens.

Rajasthan has the largest Jain population of any Indian state by some measures, and it was there that a court was asked to decide whether a Jain religious practice is a form of suicide.

Sallekhana is the voluntary reduction and eventual cessation of food and water undertaken at the end of life, in old age, incurable illness or famine, with the aim of ending a life without violence and in full awareness. Jain texts treat it as the culmination of a lay or ascetic career rather than as despair, require permission from a teacher, and distinguish it sharply from suicide, which they condemn: the criterion is the absence of passion and the presence of deliberate, gradual, witnessed detachment. Several hundred people are recorded as undertaking it in India each year.

In August 2015 the High Court of Rajasthan held the practice to be an offence under the provisions on suicide and abetment of suicide in the Indian Penal Code. The Jain community protested nationwide, and the Supreme Court of India stayed the judgment within weeks, leaving the practice legally in suspense.

The case sets two things against each other that most legal systems handle badly: constitutional protection for essential religious practice, and a criminal law written on the assumption that a person who stops eating wants to die for reasons the state should prevent. Neither the stay nor any later ruling has resolved it.