Janaki Mandir (Janaki Sthan)

Sitamarhi, in Bihar’s Mithila region near the India-Nepal border, is venerated by tradition as the birthplace of Sita, consort of Rama. According to the Valmiki Ramayana, King Janaka of Mithila was ploughing a field during a yajna held to end a twelve-year famine when he found an infant girl in the furrow his plough had cut; he named her Sita, meaning “furrow,” and she is also called Janaki, “daughter of Janaka.” The Janaki Mandir, also known as Janaki Sthan, in Sitamarhi town is the principal temple built around this tradition and the town’s main pilgrimage draw.

The claim to being Sita’s exact birthplace is not, however, uncontested even within local tradition: a second site, Punaura Dham, roughly 5 km from Sitamarhi town, makes the same claim, with its founding traditionally credited to King Janaka and the sage Pundrik during the Treta Yuga — a mythological era rather than a historically datable period. In 2025 the Bihar state government approved a large redevelopment plan for Punaura Dham, explicitly modeled on the Ram Janmabhoomi project at Ayodhya, underscoring its continued prominence alongside the older Sitamarhi temple. This entry does not attempt to adjudicate between the two claims, and no independently documented founding date was found for either temple’s built structure.

At the Janaki Mandir itself, the temple’s managing trust conducts an annual ceremony reenacting the wedding of Rama and Sita, and organizes an Antar Griha Parikrama — a circumambulation of the city — during the festival of Janaki Navami. The wider Mithila region, in which Sitamarhi sits, traces its own antiquity to the Vedic period as one of the historical Mahajanapadas of ancient India, though that regional history is distinct from, and older than, any specific claim about the temple structure’s own age.