The historian Alex McKay’s Kailas Histories:Renunciate Traditions and the Construction of Himalayan Sacred Geography shows that while Hindu traditions long regarded Kailash as the metaphysical home of Shiva, and Tibetan traditions suggest the mountain turned sacred less than a millennium ago, the physical mountain in Tibet gained prominence as the most sacred place of Hinduism only in the beginning of the 20th century. As McKay writes:

"Most significant [in the modern conception of Kailash] was a British colonial official [Charles Sherring, deputy commissioner of Almora and in-charge of the Gartok trading post] trying to increase revenue in his obscure Himalayan district, and his construction was advanced by a self-promoting Swedish explorer [Sven Hedin] glorifying his own achievements. Their initial construction was then enhanced by a modernist Indian renunciate [Swami Pranavananda], one of a small group who responded to colonial modernity by reformulating Hindu sacred geography through a creative combination of the scientific and the visionary study of its earliest texts. The construction then took full form through the elegant writings of an erudite German Buddhist mystic [ Anagarika Govinda, born as Ernst Lothar Hoffmann], long-resident in the Himalayas.

The argument that the physical Kailash only became prominent in the modern era is also supported by 18th- and 19th-century accounts such as that of Pran Puri, who wrote that on Kailash’s summit grew a “Bhojpatra tree” while the summit itself was “said to be sixteen miles in height from the level of the plain”. Pran Puri, however, does not mention any Shaivic associations with the peak, despite gosain monks being Shaivites themselves. This suggests a necessary correction to our modern conceptions of sacred geographies in the Himalaya, and how the constituent sites evolved over time to become important pilgrimage centres today. More importantly, Kailash’s sacred history also suggests colonial imaginations need to be revised on several fronts, not least in light of the colonialists’ self-serving interests".