Omkareshwar

The island's Om-shape makes Omkareshwar one of the most evocative of the Jyotirlingas, and it is a great station on the Narmada Parikrama, the circumambulation of the whole sacred river that pilgrims undertake on foot. To walk around Mandhata, the Narmada on either side, is itself an act of devotion.

That the Jyotirlinga is worshipped as a pair — Omkareshwar and Mamleshwar — gives the pilgrimage its particular shape: neither shrine alone is the whole, and devotees cross the river to complete it. The nightly Narmada aarti on the ghats, lamps set adrift on the dark water, is among the loveliest sights on the river.

The two-shrine darshan gives Omkareshwar a rhythm of its own: pilgrims cross to Mamleshwar on the south bank, whose older Paramara carving some consider the finer, and only with both is the Jyotirlinga complete. The island itself, ringed by the parikrama path and studded with lesser shrines, ghats and the ruins of medieval temples, rewards a slow, unhurried visit as much as a quick darshan.

Omkareshwar sits on Mandhata island in the Narmada river, in Khandwa district of Madhya Pradesh — an island revered because its shape is said to trace the sacred syllable Om. Sacred since ancient times, it is linked in legend to King Mandhata of the Ikshvaku line, an ancestor of Rama, who is said to have won Shiva's grace here through long austerity; the island bears his name.

Uniquely among the Jyotirlingas, the worship is shared between two shrines: Omkareshwar, 'the lord of the Om sound', on the island, and Mamleshwar (Amareshwar), 'the immortal lord', on the southern bank of the river — the two together counted as the single Jyotirlinga, so that a full darshan crosses the Narmada.

The temple is ascribed to the Paramara kings of Malwa around the eleventh century; damaged in later medieval upheavals, it was restored in the eighteenth century by the Holkars, the work begun by Gautama Bai Holkar and completed by the great queen Ahilyabai.

The temple is built in the North Indian Nagara style, its shikhara rising in stacked layers of carved stone above the island. The multi-storeyed complex includes a spacious pillared hall — some sixty columns are counted in it — and stonework worn smooth by centuries of pilgrims.

The setting is half the architecture: the sanctum stands among the ghats and lanes of the little island, linked to the mainland and to Mamleshwar by bridges across the Narmada, the river running green and wide below. Older shrines and the ruins of medieval temples dot the rock around it, and a tall Shiva statue and newer shrines have risen nearby in recent years.