Mansa Devi Temple (Mata Mansa Devi Mandir)

The Mansa Devi Temple at Bilaspur in the Panchkula district’s Shivalik foothills is a comparatively well-documented 19th-century foundation rather than an ancient site: it was built between 1811 and 1815 by Maharaja Gopal Das Singh, ruler of the princely state of Mani Majra, as a shrine to the goddess Mansa Devi, a form of Shakti. A second temple in the same complex, the Patiala Shivalaya, was added roughly 200 metres away in 1840 by Maharaja Karam Singh of Patiala, giving the site its present character as a multi-shrine complex rather than a single temple.

After independence, when Mani Majra’s princely status ended and the region merged into PEPSU, the complex fell into neglect for some decades. Its modern institutional footing dates to 1991, when the Haryana government passed the Shri Mata Mansa Devi Shrine Act, placing the temple under a dedicated Shrine Board chaired by the state’s Chief Minister – the same board that also administers the nearby Chandi Mandir temple. The complex, now spread across roughly 100 acres, has since seen state-funded expansion, including a corridor and entrance renovation carried out under the central government’s PRASAD pilgrimage-development scheme around 2021. The temple’s twice-yearly Navratra Melas, held in the Hindu months of Chaitra and Ashvin, are its largest events, drawing large numbers of devotees over nine days each.