Hinglaj Mata Temple (Nani Mandir)

Hinglaj Mata Temple, popularly known to many local Muslim devotees as Nani Mandir (“grandmother’s shrine”), is a natural cave shrine set in a narrow gorge on the west bank of the Hingol River, within Hingol National Park in Balochistan’s Lasbela District. It is revered as one of the Shakti Peethas — sites where, in Shakta tradition, a fragment of the goddess Sati’s body is held to have fallen after Shiva carried her corpse in grief; here it is said to be a portion of her head, making Hinglaj one of the most significant of the traditionally enumerated fifty-one Shakti Peethas. Unlike most major Hindu pilgrimage sites, Hinglaj has no built temple structure in the conventional sense — the goddess is worshipped as a natural rock formation within the cave — and its remoteness on the Makran coast has long made it one of the more physically demanding Hindu pilgrimages in South Asia.

The annual four-day Hinglaj Yatra, held each April and organized since 1986 by the Hinglaj Seva Mandali committee, draws roughly 300,000 pilgrims who travel the Makran Coastal Highway to the shrine, visit nearby mud volcanoes regarded as sacred along the way, and bathe ritually in the Hingol River. The site is also venerated by local Zikri Muslims and Sufi practitioners, who share in its pilgrimage as the “Nani Mandir” — making it, like several other sites in this directory, a living example of devotion shared across religious communities in the subcontinent.