Grishneshwar Temple

Grishneshwar (also spelled Ghrishneshwar, and sometimes called Ghushmeshwar), the westernmost and traditionally last-listed of the twelve Jyotirlingas, stands in Verul village barely 1.5 km from the Ellora Caves in Maharashtra — a separate, still-active Shiva shrine, distinct from the famous 8th-century rock-cut Kailasa Temple monument at Ellora covered elsewhere in this directory. Shaiva legend traces its origin to a devoted woman named Ghushma, who is said to have fashioned and immersed a hundred and one Shiva lingas each day; when her stepson was killed out of jealousy and then miraculously restored to life from a sacred pond, Shiva appeared and, at her request, agreed to remain at the site forever as the Ghushmeshwar/Grishneshwar Jyotirlinga.

The temple’s documented history is one of repeated destruction and rebuilding: an earlier structure was destroyed under the Delhi Sultanate in the 13th-14th centuries and suffered further damage during the long Mughal-Maratha conflict. Restoration began in the 16th century under Maloji Bhosale, grandfather of the Maratha king Shivaji, and the black-stone, Hemadpanthi-style temple seen today was rebuilt to its present form in 1729 with Holkar-family patronage, after Mughal power in the Deccan had waned. Exactly which Holkar queen funded this 1729 rebuilding is not fully settled in the sources checked for this entry — Wikipedia’s own article text and its category tagging point to two different names — so that detail is flagged here rather than stated with false certainty.