Mahalakshmi, Kolhapur

To her devotees Ambabai is Adi Shakti herself, the primordial power, and Kolhapur is joined in pilgrimage with Tuljapur, Mahur and Saptashrungi as the great goddess-seats of Maharashtra.

The image is a striking one: a black-stone figure about three feet tall, richly jewelled, crowned by the hood of a five-headed cobra, with a stone lion — her mount — behind her, and in her four hands a citron, a mace, a shield and a vessel. Most remarkable is the Kiranotsav, the 'festival of sun-rays', when for three days twice a year the light of the setting sun enters the western door and falls full upon the goddess — reaching her feet on the first day, her breast on the second and her face on the third, an alignment the temple's builders set into its very stones.

The temple keeps a full ceremonial calendar — the Navaratri festival above all, the Rathotsav when the goddess is drawn in procession, and the Kiranotsav twice a year — and on Fridays and full-moon days the crowds are thickest. Together with Tuljapur's Bhavani, Mahur's Renuka and the goddess of Saptashrungi, Kolhapur's Ambabai completes the 'Sade Teen' Shakti Peethas that anchor the Devi worship of Maharashtra, a circuit many families make at least once in a generation.

In the heart of old Kolhapur stands the temple of Mahalakshmi, worshipped across Maharashtra as Ambabai, the Mother. The town is known in tradition as Karvir and the goddess as Karvir Nivasini, 'she who dwells in Karvir'; local legend tells that she slew the demon Kolhasura here, and from him the city takes its name.

The shrine is old. Its founding is traditionally ascribed to the Chalukya king Karandeva in the 7th century, around 634 CE, and the centuries since have layered on additions by the Shilahara, Yadava and Maratha dynasties who ruled the Deccan. Through all of it Ambabai has remained one of the most beloved and continuously worshipped goddesses of western India.

Kolhapur's place among the Shakti Peethas is told differently by different traditions: some pan-Indian lists count it among the fifty-one, tied to the falling of Sati's eyes, while Maharashtra reveres it distinctively as one of the 'Sade Teen' — the three-and-a-half seats of the Goddess — where she is felt to reside in her fullness as Mahalakshmi rather than as a single relic. Either way, it is held among the most powerful Devi shrines in the land.

The temple is built in the Hemadpanti manner of the Deccan — black basalt laid, in the old way, without mortar, the blocks locked together by their own cut — carrying finely carved pillars, several halls and clustered shikharas raised over the centuries.

Its west-facing openings are placed with a precision that lets the low sun of early February and mid-November reach the sanctum for the Kiranotsav, a piece of temple-astronomy shared by only a handful of Indian shrines. The compound holds subsidiary shrines to many deities, along with a Garuda-mandapa and stone deepmalas, and the whole is cared for by the Paschim Maharashtra Devasthan Samiti.