Kalkaji Mandir

Delhi calls her Kalka Maharani. The temple's committee names this seat the siddha peetha of Jayanti Kali — a standing locally held, not a place in the canonical reckoning of the Shakti Peethas — and what the city means by it is simpler than any list: here the manokamna is accomplished. Thousands come daily with flowers, coconut and chunni, and the committee sets down that there is no caste at this door.

Navratri is the great season, and it comes twice: Chaitra in spring, Ashwin in autumn, nine days each, when a very great mela takes the ridge and the approach becomes one lane of stalls. Jagran belongs to the shrine's own account of itself: the all-night singing is named with smaran, dhyan, upasana and kirtan among the ways the Mother has been kept through the yugas.

Kalkaji stands on Suryakuta, a rise of the Aravalli in south Delhi; the locality takes its name from the temple, not the other way about. The katha the shrine tells begins with the devas here harried by two asuras. Brahma sent them to Parvati; from Parvati came Kaushiki, who struck the two down — but every drop of blood that touched the earth raised another host. Then from Kaushiki's brow rose Kalika, who drank the blood as it fell and made an end of them. After the victory the Devi stayed where she had fought. The Government of Delhi's own account sets the shrine in Satya-yuga, when Kalika came down and killed the asura Raktabija and his host.

The image is not carved. Delhi's district administration puts it plainly: the form of the Goddess Kalka here is a self-manifested one. The temple's committee remembers that the Mother appeared at this place, and that the svayambhu pindi has been seated in her house ever since; her own verse calls her Suryakot-nivasini, she who dwells on Suryakuta. By the temple's tradition, at the founding of Indraprastha Shri Krishna worshipped her on that hill with the Pandavas beside him — tradition, the shrine's own, not dated history.

Of the building, less is certain. The account most often repeated gives the oldest parts of the present structure to the eighteenth century — not earlier than 1764, raised by the Marathas — with additions in 1816 by Mirza Raja Kidar Nath, Peshkar of Akbar II. The published study of the site is more cautious: the central shrine was rebuilt in the mid-nineteenth century and ringed with dharamshalas that wealthy devotees gave the pujaris to house pilgrims at the two annual fairs; the earliest legible plaque among them is a Farsi inscription of 1845. The shrine has been reclad twice in living memory as jirnoddhar, sacred renewal — in the 1980s, and again lately in white Kishangarh marble.

The masonry is brick, finished in plaster and marble under a pyramidal tower. The central chamber is twelve-sided and about twenty-four feet across, a doorway in each side — twelve for the twelve rashis, as the committee reckons them — with thirty-six more in the outer circuit and the main door facing east; the pindi sits on a silver-clad altar beneath a silver chhatra.

Around it the complex is a palimpsest. A small Shivalaya clings to the right of the main entrance on the outer parikrama: they meant to move it while the Mother's house was building, dug for the base of the lingam and found no end to it, and were told in a dream to raise Shiva's shrine where it stood. Ganesha stands to the north, Bhairav and Hanuman a little beyond, and two stone lions carrying eighty-four bells before the gate; the dharamshalas keep their lakhori brick and donor plaques in Hindi, Farsi, Sanskrit and Urdu.