Chausath Yogini Temple, Bhedaghat

Perched on a hilltop above the Narmada river at Bhedaghat, better known to most visitors for the marble-rock gorge and Dhuandhar Falls nearby, stands one of India’s most significant surviving Yogini temples — a form of Shakta shrine dedicated to the 64 Yoginis, a fierce, largely female pantheon associated with tantric worship and now rare across the subcontinent. Built by King Yuvaraja II of the Kalachuris of Tripuri in the early 11th century CE, on a site earlier known as Bhairavaghat, the temple would have been the Kalachuri dynasty’s largest single building project of its era. Its roofless, circular plan — a walkway of shrine cells running around the inside of a wall roughly 125 feet in diameter, with three niches serving as entrances — houses not the canonical 64 but 81 yogini images, making it, according to scholar Shaman Hatley, “the most imposing and perhaps best known” of all surviving circular yogini temples anywhere in India; the complex is also known by the alternate name Golaki Math. A later addition, in 1155 CE, placed a Gauri-Shankar (Shiva-Parvati) shrine at the center of the circle, layering a more conventional Shaiva dedication onto the older Yogini cult site.

Centuries of exposure and neglect have taken a heavy toll on the sculpture itself: most of the 81 yogini images are now heavily vandalized, their faces broken away, leaving the site closer to an archaeological monument than an actively worshipped temple today — one notable exception is a still-intact image of the horse-faced yogini Erudi, among the best-preserved yogini sculptures surviving anywhere. That physical condition, together with the absence of any confirmed record of ongoing daily worship, is the basis for classifying this entry as a heritage site rather than an active temple, even though the later Gauri-Shankar addition shows the site continued to draw ritual attention long after its original 11th-century consecration.