Yogmaya, Mehrauli

Delhi has been founded and refounded many times, and this small shrine has outlived them all. It is spoken of as the oldest living place of worship in the capital — a claim resting not on its stone but on the worship inside, kept unbroken by one hereditary priestly family of the Vatsa gotra now in its sixteenth generation.

Its great days belong to all Mehrauli. After the rains the flower-sellers of Delhi keep the Sair-e-Gul Faroshan — Phool Walon ki Sair, the outing of the flower-sellers — begun in the reign of Akbar II, revived after Independence, and organised now by the Anjuman Sair-e-Gul Faroshan. Shehnai leads a procession of great flowered fans through the Mehrauli bazaar, and the pankha is offered here and at the dargah of Khwaja Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki a few lanes away — Hindus and Muslims walking together, each offering at both. Delhi's Lieutenant Governor calls it symbolic of the age-old communal harmony and tehzib of the national capital.

The Devi is served with flowers and sweets, and the offering stays sattvic: wine and meat are never brought to her, and the bells at the door are not tolled while the worship goes on. Both Navratris fill the lanes, and Janmashtami is kept here for the brother whose life she saved.

The temple of Yogmaya stands in Mehrauli village in south Delhi, a few hundred metres north-west of the Qutb complex and inside the line of Lal Kot — the Tomar Rajput citadel of 1060 CE, the oldest surviving fort in Delhi. No quarter of the city has been lived in longer; Mehrauli is held to have seen a thousand years of continuous occupation. Twelfth-century Jain texts call the settlement Yoginipura, a name said to come from this shrine.

The Devi here is Yogamaya, and her katha is told in the tenth book of the Bhagavata. When Vasudeva carried the newborn Krishna across the Yamuna to Gokul, he brought back in his place the daughter born to Yashoda that same night and laid her in the prison at Mathura. Kamsa seized the child by her feet and dashed her against the stone. She slipped from his hands and rose into the sky — the younger sister of Krishna, manifest as a goddess of eight mighty arms bearing bow and spear, shield and sword, conch, discus and mace — and told him that killing her had gained him nothing: his destroyer was already born elsewhere, and he should spare the helpless children. Mehrauli holds that she took her seat here.

Tradition carries the shrine back to the Mahabharata and gives the first temple to the Pandavas of Indraprastha. That is how Delhi tells it, not how history records it; what the record shows is the survival. Through the sultanate centuries, with the Qutb rising a few hundred paces away, the worship never stopped, and local accounts name this the one pre-sultanate temple of the city still in use. The building the pilgrim sees is of the early nineteenth century — rebuilt in 1827, in the reign of Akbar II, at the charge of Lala Sethmal by the account commonly given — and its fabric has been renewed many times since.

The temple is small and plain. An entrance hall opens on a square sanctum of about seventeen feet, flat-roofed under a short tower and spire; the walled enclosure carries towers at its corners, and the floor that was once red stone is now marble.

Within, the Devi is a black stone image set in a marble well some two feet across and a foot deep, dressed in red and heaped with flowers, the Sair's pankhas hanging above her. West of the temple, screened by trees, lies Anang Tal, the tank of Anangpal Tomar.