On A Quest To Know Your Lineage? Uttarakhand To Soon Offer ‘Gotra Tourism’ Packages For The Inquisitive

Ancestry.com may soon get an Indian competitor with Uttarakhand Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat having announced ‘gotra tourism’ packages to boost domestic tourism in the hill state.

The new plan will allow tourists who avail the package to find out about their gotra (clan) lineage and thus update records of their family genealogy, reports Times of India.

Gotras are traditionally believed to have originated from the ‘saptarishi’ or the seven sages Kashyap, Atri, Vashishtha, Vishwamitra, Gautam, Jamadagni and Bharadwaj who meditated in the Dev Bhoomi of the Uttarakhand Himalayas. Rawat announced that the mediation sites of the seven sages will be developed as tourist destinations, adding that logos will be developed for each gotra so that people can associate with their gotras more easily.

The lineage records called ‘bahi’ have been maintained by priests known as ‘teerth purohits’ in the state for centuries. 2,500 such teerth purohits are based in Haridwar, but there are many others at the char dham shrines of Kedarnath, Badrinath, Gangotri and Yamunotri. Now the Uttarakhand Tourism Department wants to digitise these records.

“We intend to put the details of family genealogies online so that people can get to know about their family history and feel motivated to come to Uttarakhand to get it updated on frequent basis,” Secretary Tourism Dilip Jawalkar said.

Purshottam Sharma, head of the Ganga Sabha, an association of Haridwar teerth purhoits, stated that people from places as distant as Sindh have historically travelled to the temple town to record their family lineages. He also implored the state government to develop the infrastructure around the pilgrim spots to ease the travel of gotra tourists.