thumb|Origin of the holy river Ganga '''''' (Sanskrit) comes from the two root words , meaning 'penance' and by extension 'religious mortification' and 'austerity', and more generally 'spiritual practice', and , meaning 'forest' or 'thicket'. then translates as 'forest of austerities or spiritual practice'. Though pronounced the same in Hindi, tapovana should not be confused with tapovan (from tapovat), which means a person engaged in austerity.
thumb|Origin of the holy river Ganga '''''' (Sanskrit) comes from the two root words , meaning 'penance' and by extension 'religious mortification' and 'austerity', and more generally 'spiritual practice', and , meaning 'forest' or 'thicket'. then translates as 'forest of austerities or spiritual practice'. Though pronounced the same in Hindi, tapovana should not be confused with tapovan (from tapovat), which means a person engaged in austerity.
Traditionally in India, any place where someone has engaged in serious spiritual retreat may become known as a , even if there is no forest. As well as particular caves and other hermitages where sages and sadhus have dwelt, there are some places, such as the western bank of the northern Ganges river around Rishikesh, that have been so used by hermits that the whole area has become known as a .
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).