Mahavir Mandir, Patna

Two murtis of Hanuman stand together in the garbhagriha — yugal, a pair the trust calls the only one of its kind in the world. It names them from the Gita's promise: the first Paritranaya sadhunam, for the protection of the good, the second Vinashaya cha dushkritam, for the undoing of the evil that evil-doers do. This is Sankat Mochan's darbar, and Patna knows it as the Manokamna Mandir: none who comes here, it is held, goes back empty-handed. The Chalisa is read aloud through the day, and sindoor shringar is among the offerings kept.

The naivedyam is this temple's other worship. The laddoo is gram flour cooked in ghee with cashew, raisin, cardamom and Pampore saffron, made by karigars of the Tirupati tradition and carried home across the country. What it earns, with the donation boxes, keeps the Mahavir hospitals — Cancer Sansthan, Arogya Sansthan, Netralaya, Vatsalya, Hriday — where the poor are treated at a token fee or none, and feeds the Daridranarayan Bhoj twice each day. At Ayodhya, since the Vivah Panchami of 2019, the trust's Ram Rasoi has fed Ram Lalla's pilgrims free, on Govind Bhog rice grown at Mokri under Mundeshwari's own hill.

Ram Navami is the great day: the doors stay open through nearly the whole of it, the line leaves the station square and runs for kilometres into the city, and Hanuman Chalisas are given away by the lakh. Hanuman Jayanti falls here on Kartik Krishna Chaturdashi, as the Ramanandi tradition reckons it, with a nine-day Ramcharitmanas paath before it; and every Tuesday and Saturday the square fills again.

Mahavir Mandir stands in the open square outside Patna Junction, where the city's trains and its pilgrims arrive together. A judgment of the Patna High Court in 1948 recorded that the shrine had existed since time immemorial and declared it a public temple; the trust and Bihar Tourism both trace its founding to Swami Balanand, an ascetic of the Ramanandi sampradaya, about 1730. The temple's own history adds that it came under the Ramanandi order in 1900, having been in the keeping of Gosain sanyasis until the court's decree.

It grew into a great temple within living memory. After the partition of 1947 those who reached Patna came here in their thousands; the crowds outgrew the old fabric, and a concrete shrine replaced it. The marble temple standing today was raised, by the trust's own dating, between 1983 and 1985 — built, as it tells the story, with no subscription drive: donations came of themselves, and thousands joined the kar seva.

That rebuilding was the work of Acharya Kishore Kunal, a police officer who turned to the service of temples and remained founder-secretary of the trust, Shri Mahavir Sthan Nyas Samiti, until his death in December 2024. What he settled upon the shrine outlasts him: the samiti calls itself the largest religious trust of the north, and all it receives beyond the shrine's upkeep goes, under its bye-laws, to the sick and the poor.

The temple is a three-storeyed marble building on some ten thousand square feet, its stepped shikharas, banded white and red, rising straight out of the station square. Steps lead up to the garbhagriha, with a corridor around it in which Shiva is worshipped. Four sanctums stand on the first floor — Rama; Krishna giving Arjuna the Gita; Durga; and Shiva with Parvati and Nandi about a linga in its wooden enclosure — and, in a glass vessel of water, the Ram Setu shila the temple keeps as a relic of the bridge. The second floor is the Sanskar Mandap, where rites are performed under painted scenes of the Ramkatha; outside, Shani has his shrine beneath a peepal.