Baijnath Temple (Vaidyanath Temple)

Inscriptions in Sharada and Takri script on stone slabs inside the temple’s mandapa date its construction to 1204 CE, funded by two local merchants, Ahuka and Manyuka, and naming the ruler and architects involved — making this one of the relatively few Himalayan Shiva temples whose founding can be pinned to a specific year rather than reconstructed from style alone. Built in the Nagara idiom characteristic of the western Himalayan foothills, the temple has endured for over eight centuries, surviving the destructive 1905 Kangra earthquake with only minor damage and undergoing a significant restoration in 1786 under the Kangra hill-state ruler Sansar Chand. The presiding deity is Shiva as Vaidyanath, “lord of physicians,” and the site carries a Puranic legend of its own: that Ravana, carrying a Shiva lingam toward Lanka, was tricked into setting it down here at a place then called Kiragrama, after which the lingam is said to have taken the composite Ardhanarishvara form and could not be moved again — a story still invoked locally to explain why Dussehra, which celebrates Rama’s victory over Ravana, is not observed at this temple.