Jhandewalan Temple

Jhandewalan Temple, in central Delhi, is dedicated to Jhandewali Mata – a local form of Vaishno Devi – and owes both its founding and its name to a nineteenth-century merchant’s dream. According to the temple’s own account, Badri Das, a cloth trader from Chandni Chowk, was repeatedly visited in his dreams by visions of a buried shrine; digging near a waterfall at what is now the temple site, he uncovered an ancient idol of the goddess in a cave below ground. The idol’s hands broke during the excavation, so following customary ritual he had a new image installed above the original rather than repairing it, and raised a large flag (jhanda) at the site to mark the discovery – the origin of the name Jhandewalan, “place of the flag.” The temple’s management remained informal for decades until 1944, when Badri Das’s grandson, Shyam Sundar, formalized it as the Badri Bhagat Jhandewalan Temple Society, the body that still administers the temple today.

The temple’s main shrine, an octagonal structure built in white marble on a raised stone platform, sits within a larger compound that has grown to include a separate Hanuman temple, dharamshalas for pilgrims, and an old well associated with the original discovery. Its location beside Jhandewalan metro station has made it one of Delhi’s most easily reached pilgrimage sites, and it draws especially large crowds during both Chaitra and Sharad Navratri, when the temple society mobilizes thousands of volunteers to manage devotees. That organizational capacity was put to wider use during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown, when the temple ran a large free-meal program that served well over a million meals to those in need.