Jhandewalan Devi

There are two darbars here, one above the other, and the older is below. Steps go down from the courtyard to the gufa, the cave opened in the digging, and it is there that the found vigraha is worshipped, her silver hands upon her and a lamp kept burning before her. Delhi knows her by that too: Gufa Wali Mata, the Mother of the cave. Above, in the bhavan darbar, stands the murti Badri Das installed over the place of the finding, and it is there that the crowd takes darshan. The temple's own live broadcast carries both — mukhya darshan and gufa darshan.

The day is long and fixed. The doors open at four in the morning; mangala aarti is at six, the shringar aarti at nine, bhog aarti at noon, the evening shringar aarti at half past seven and the shayan aarti at ten, with a short closing before evening while the shrine is cleaned.

Navratri is the season, and Jhandewalan keeps both — Chaitra in the spring and Ashwin in the autumn. The hours stretch. The shringar aarti is brought forward to four in the morning, so that the first darshan is taken while the road outside is dark; singers keep the Devi's praise from morning until evening; the shayan aarti waits until the small hours. On Durga Ashtami the jagran is held through the night. Deshbandhu Gupta Marg fills, the queues run back past the barricades, and heavy vehicles are turned off the stretch. In Shravan the Rudrabhishek is offered at the Shivalaya above.

Jhandewalan stands on Deshbandhu Gupta Marg between Karol Bagh and Paharganj, on the low rocky spur of the Aravallis that runs through Delhi. Before the streets closed over it this was open ground of outcrop and scrub, where the walled city came to walk.

The temple tells its own beginning through one devotee. Badri Das, a cloth merchant of Chandni Chowk, came often to this rise to sit in meditation, and the tradition says the Mother reached him there — a dream, and in it a voice asking to be brought out from beneath the rock. He had the ground opened. Out of a chamber in the stone came a vigraha of the Devi, and with her, the accounts say, a flag. Her hands were broken in the lifting, so hands of silver were made for her, and she was worshipped as she was found. Accounts place Badri Das in the nineteenth century; the temple's own page claims no date at all, saying only that the shrine has stood for centuries.

The flag gave the place its name. Badri Das raised a jhanda over the shrine so that it could be seen across the open ground, and those who came began to bring flags of their own, as they still do. The Devi became Jhandewali, she of the flags, and the locality around her became Jhandewalan. Since 1944 the temple's affairs have rested with the Badri Bhagat Jhandewala Temple Society, which carries the founder's name.

The temple is white marble and modern in everything the eye meets: a ribbed shikhara rising in slender ridges over the sanctum, tiered eaves stepping down from it, small spires along the roofline and silver-worked gates below. The place does not pretend otherwise — its sanctity is the finding and the cave, not the stone raised above them.

An arched gateway on Deshbandhu Gupta Marg carries the temple's name in Devanagari with a saffron flag at its crown, and a canopied lane leads from it to the courtyard. The Shivalaya stands above, the gufa below.