Place · jyotirlinga temple · India
Grishneshvara / Ghushmesha
The smallest of the twelve and the last listed, at Verul beside the Ellora caves. Red basalt carved in the Maratha idiom, rebuilt by Ahilyabai Holkar in the eighteenth century after earlier destruction. Named for Ghushma, a devotee whose faith is said to have restored her drowned son to her.
- Periods
- Classical and Puranic Age
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Tradition
- Shiva Purāna
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 20.027, 75.170
Worth knowing
Verul is the older name of Grishneshwar's village, and the Verul area was significant enough to give the Bhosale dynasty its ancestral home. Shivaji's grandfather Maloji Bhosale was granted the Verul jagir, making Grishneshwar's village the ancestral seat of the Maratha royal house that later founded the Maratha empire under Shivaji.
Connections (4)
- Site adjacencyKhuldābād
Khuldabad, 5 kilometres from Grishneshwar, houses Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb's simple tomb and the dargah of the Chishti Sufi Zainuddin Shirazi. The proximity of Aurangzeb's grave to the Jyotirlinga he is said to have damaged creates one of Indian sacred geography's most striking spatial juxtapositions of iconoclast and shrine within a single kilometre-scale landscape.
- Site adjacencyEllorā
Grishneshwar sits within a kilometre of the Ellora rock-cut cave complex, a UNESCO World Heritage site with 34 Hindu, Buddhist and Jain monuments carved between the 6th and 10th centuries. The Jyotirlinga's proximity to Cave 16, the Kailasa temple, embeds it directly in the Rashtrakuta-era Shaiva monumental landscape of the western Deccan.
- PatronageAhilyabai Holkar
The Grishneshwar temple as it now stands is Ahilyabai's rebuilding of the late eighteenth century, in red basalt worked in the Maratha idiom, and it is the smallest and last-listed of the twelve. It sits a few hundred metres from the Ellora caves, so a working jyotirlinga of the 1700s stands beside rock-cut excavations of the 600s to 900s — the same hillside used continuously, in completely different ways, for twelve hundred years.
- Site withinAurangabad / Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar
Grishneshwar — the smallest and last of the twelve Shiva Jyotirlingas, at Verul beside the Ellora caves — sits 29 kilometres northwest of Aurangabad in Aurangabad district. Verul is also the ancestral village of the Bhonsle Maratha dynasty, whose jagir at Verul predated Shivaji by three generations. The jyotirlinga is one of the Aurangabad district sacred sites in continuous worship for over a thousand years.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Ghrishneshwar Temple”. The Śiva Purāṇa, Koṭirudra Saṃhitā; and the temple establishments’ own published records.
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