Grishneshwar

As the concluding Jyotirlinga, Grishneshwar completes the dwadasha, the circuit of twelve, and pilgrims who have journeyed to the others come here to close the round. Though the smallest and least grand of the twelve, it carries the weight of that completion.

Its nearness to Ellora sets it apart: a short walk from one of the supreme achievements of Indian rock-cut art — the Kailasa temple carved whole from the cliff — Grishneshwar joins a living shrine to a UNESCO World Heritage landscape, so that a single day can gather devotion and one of the wonders of world architecture.

A short walk brings the pilgrim to the Kailasa temple of Ellora, hewn whole from the basalt cliff, and to the sacred Shivalaya tank nearby, so that Grishneshwar is rarely visited alone. For those who have made the long round of the other eleven, arriving here is the quiet close of a journey the length of the subcontinent — the least grand of the Jyotirlingas, but the one that completes the twelve.

Grishneshwar — also Ghrishneshwar or Ghushmeshwar — stands at Verul, barely a kilometre from the great rock-cut caves of Ellora, some thirty kilometres from Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar (Aurangabad) in Maharashtra. It is honoured as the last, the twelfth, of the Jyotirlingas, the shrine that completes the circuit.

Its name recalls the devotee Ghushma, or Kusuma, who each day made a hundred and one clay lingas and set them in a tank in worship; when a jealous co-wife murdered her son, her unbroken devotion is said to have brought him back to life, and Shiva, moved, agreed to abide there forever as a Jyotirlinga bearing her name. It is a legend that exalts steadfast faith and forgiveness above all.

The temple has known destruction and rebuilding through the sultanate and Mughal-Maratha centuries. It was restored in the sixteenth century by Maloji Bhosale, grandfather of Chhatrapati Shivaji, and rebuilt to its present form in 1729 under Holkar patronage — the work bound to the great queen Ahilyabai Holkar of Indore, who renewed shrines across India.

The temple is built of a warm red volcanic stone, in a manner that blends the Maratha Hemadpanti tradition with South-Indian influence. A five-tiered shikhara rises over the sanctum, and the sabhamandapa, the assembly hall, is carried on carved pillars — some two dozen of them — while the walls bear reliefs of the Dashavatara, the ten avatars of Vishnu, and scenes from the Shaiva legends.

(Some sources describe the stone as black; the visible fabric is generally the local red basalt.) For all that it is counted the smallest of the twelve, it is finely and lovingly worked, and much visited for standing at the end of the great Jyotirlinga pilgrimage.