Place · Shakti pitha cave shrine · Pakistan

Hinglāj Mātā

Also known as Hinglaj, Hinglaj Mata, Nani Mandir, Hingula, Makran

Periods

Classical and Puranic Age, Republic and Living Practice

Function

Sacred site & pilgrimage

Tradition

Shakta pitha tradition; Hinglaj yatra

Confidence

Mixed / layered — The place is documented; its associated historical or cultural record and its named tradition are distinct layers.

Location

25.515, 65.515

Worth knowing

Local Muslims call it Nani Mandir and the pilgrimage Nani ki Haj, and Zikri and Baloch communities have long attended it; the Hinglaj Mata Tirath Yatra is the largest Hindu gathering in Pakistan. The shrine is also the origin claim of the Charan bardic community and of several Rajput and Sindhi lineages.

Connections (6)

• Pitha network withKāmākhyā

  Hinglaj Mata sits in a cavern on the Hingol river in Balochistan, reached across desert past a mud volcano, and is the westernmost node of the goddess-body network; Kamakhya in Assam is the easternmost. The lists were drawn up long before any modern border existed and they still ignore them: the pilgrimage to Hinglaj is now made largely by Pakistani Hindus, and the Indian devotee who wants to complete the pithas cannot.

• Shared site withRamdevra

  Ramdev Pir's tomb in the Thar and Hinglaj Mata's cave in the Makran are the two great shared shrines of the western desert, and both are attended by Hindus and Muslims under different names — Ramshah Pir at one, Nani Mandir at the other. The desert's religion has been consistently less exclusive than the plains', and partition cut the pilgrimage routes between them.

• Shared site withSehwan Sharīf

  Hinglaj in the Makran and Sehwan on the Indus are the two most plural major shrines in Pakistan, and both are attended across the line that is supposed to divide them: Muslims call the goddess's cave Nani Mandir, and Hindus dance the dhamal at the Qalandar's courtyard. Sindh and Balochistan kept an older arrangement that the frontier of 1947 did not abolish.

• Pitha network withKaroonjhar Mountains

  The two Devi shrines of Pakistan's arid west, and both are in rock. Hinglāj sits in a cave in a Makran gorge in Las Bela and is counted among the Shakta pithas, drawing the largest Hindu pilgrimage in Pakistan each April. Churrio Jabal Durga Mata stands on the Karoonjhar granite at the other end of the desert, and its festival is the Tharparkar equivalent. Both survive because they are remote, both are reached by yātrā from Karachi, and both are on the tentative heritage list.

• Pitha network withAstola Island (Haft Talār)

  Two Hindu shrines on the most improbable coast in the subcontinent. Hinglāj Mātā sits in a cave in a Makran gorge and draws the largest Hindu pilgrimage in Pakistan each April, counted among the Shakta pithas. Astola, forty kilometres out to sea, carries the ruin of a shrine to Kali that fishermen visited by boat. Both survive in a province that is overwhelmingly Muslim and thinly populated, and both survive for the same reason: they are too remote for anyone to have bothered about them.

• Site adjacencyHingol National Park

  The shrine is inside the park. Hingol covers some six thousand square kilometres of the Makran coastal range, Pakistan's largest protected area, and the cave of Hinglāj Mātā lies within it on the Hingol river — which means the country's largest Hindu pilgrimage runs through a national park and past a working mud volcano, Chandragup, where pilgrims stop to make offerings into the crater before going on to the cave. Ibex and chinkara and the yātrā share the same road in.

On these journeys

• Shakti Pitha system
• The north-west — Gandhara, the Indus and the Hindu Kush
• Balochistan — the plateau and the Makran coast

Sources

Wikipedia, “Hinglaj Mata Temple”. Sircar, The Śākta Pīṭhas (1948); Jurgen Schaflechner, Hinglaj Devi: Identity, Change and Solidification at a Hindu Temple in Pakistan (2018).

• Wikipedia — Hinglaj Mata