Nau Devi Yatra: The Himachal Goddess Temples Explained

The Nau Devi yatra is a road pilgrimage to nine goddess shrines spread across Himachal Pradesh, Haryana and Jammu. It is an itinerary, not a scripture. No text fixes which nine, published lists disagree, and the only thing every version shares is a Himachal core of five temples.

Key takeaways

• The nine-temple list is a travel-trade construction. Compare two operators and the shrines will not match.
• The scriptural network behind it is different: the 51 or 52 Shakti Peethas, the places where parts of Sati's body are held to have fallen.
• The Himachal five — Chintpurni, Jwalamukhi, Brajeshwari, Chamunda Devi, Naina Devi — are the fixed part of every version.
• One of those five is not on the Peetha lists at all, and nobody driving the circuit seems to mind.

Which nine temples are actually on the circuit?

Ask three families and you will get three answers. The names that recur are Mansa Devi above Panchkula, Sheetla Mata at Gurugram, Baglamukhi at Bankhandi, Vaishno Devi at Katra, and the five Himachal shrines below. Swap any two of the first four and the yatra is still sold, still driven, still called the nine.

This is worth saying plainly because it is usually hidden. The circuit is a route, assembled because these shrines happen to sit along a drivable arc from the plains up into the Shivaliks and back. It is a good route. It is not an ancient one, and no authority stands behind the number.

Chintpurni, Una district

The first stop for anyone coming up from Jalandhar or Ludhiana, and the lowest of the five at roughly 977 metres. The goddess here is Chhinnamasta, the severed-headed one — a fierce name, which you would never guess from the queue of families in holiday clothes.

The shrine is generally held to have been established by Pandit Mai Das, a Punjabi Brahmin of the Patiala riyasat, about twelve generations back. That is as precise as the record gets, and twelve generations is a family's way of counting, not a historian's. The town is now almost entirely built around the queue.

Jwalamukhi, Kangra district

The strangest of the five, and the one to see if you only see one. There is no principal image. Worship is directed at flames that burn continuously from fissures in the rock, the main one inside a square pit of hollowed stone.

The Mughal emperor Akbar is said to have tried to put them out, first with an iron disk and then by diverting water onto them, and to have failed. He is said to have offered a golden parasol afterwards, which turned to an unknown metal. Treat that as the story the place tells about itself. The flames themselves need no story.

Brajeshwari Devi, Kangra town

Kangra was once Nagarkot, and this was among the wealthiest temples in northern India — which is why it is attached to so many invasion stories. Mahmud of Ghazni's raid on Nagarkot in 1009 is the one everybody repeats. Whether this temple was what he emptied, and whether the hill fort above the town fell at all before Jahangir took it in 1622, is still argued; one widely cited account of the looting carries an explicit note that it is unverified.

What is not in doubt is 4 April 1905. The Kangra earthquake destroyed the temple along with the fort and the town, and killed 1,339 people in Kangra alone and roughly twenty thousand elsewhere. The building you walk into is younger than that morning. The goddess is Durga as Vajreshwari, of the thunderbolt, and the Peetha lists give this as the place where Sati's left breast fell.

Chamunda Devi, near Palampur

In Chandreshwar village, about ten kilometres from Kangra and fifteen from Dharamshala, under the wall of the Dhauladhar. Also called Chamunda Nandikeshwar Dham. The temple is reckoned to be around four hundred years old, and a sixteenth-century account describes the image being moved to the present site.

It is the easiest of the five to simply sit at for an hour, which is not nothing on a trip where most of your day is a car.

Naina Devi, Bilaspur district

A hilltop shrine reached by a long flight of stone steps from the town below, looking out over the Gobind Sagar. It is the most important religious site in its district and it draws crowds that the ridge was never shaped to hold.

That has cost lives. On 3 August 2008, during Shraavana, a rain shelter collapsed, pilgrims took the noise for a landslide, the railings gave way, and 146 people died with about 150 injured. There had been a stampede at the same site in 1978 in which 65 died. If you are going on a heavy day, go early, and do not let children walk the stair holding only a hand.

Why is Chamunda Devi on every itinerary and not in the scriptures?

Because the circuit was built by roads, not by texts. Chamunda Devi is not listed among the 51 or 52 traditional Shakti Peethas, yet it is counted without argument among the five great goddess temples of Himachal, alongside Chintpurni, Jwalamukhi, Brajeshwari and Naina Devi.

The reverse case is just as telling. The Peetha lists keep Jwalamukhi and Brajeshwari separate — the tongue at one, the left breast at the other. Yet devotees at Jwalamukhi also speak of the fissure as the goddess's mouth and say her body rests thirty-odd kilometres away at Kangra. Both accounts are live, and nobody at either temple seems troubled that they do not quite fit together. If you are trying to keep the two networks straight, our piece on Jyotirlingas and Shakti Peethas separates them properly.

What order should you drive them in?

Low to high, outside in. Chintpurni first, because it is nearest the plains and because arriving there in the morning spares you the worst of its queue. Then Jwalamukhi, then Brajeshwari at Kangra, then Chamunda under the Dhauladhar. Naina Devi sits apart from the Kangra cluster and is best kept for the way home, since it drops you back towards Chandigarh.

Is Navratri the right time to go, or the wrong one?

Both, and you have to choose. Sharad Navratri runs from 11 to 19 October this year, with Vijayadashami on Tuesday 20 October, and those nine days are when these hills are most themselves — the fairs running, the stairs full before dawn, every bus from Punjab pointed the same way.

They are also when darshan is shortest and the stair is most dangerous. Families who want the temples rather than the festival go in the weeks after Dussehra, when the hills are cold and clear and you can stand in front of the flames for as long as you like. Both choices are honest. Just make it on purpose instead of discovering it in a queue.

What I would tell a first-timer

Do not try for all nine. I am not a pandit and I have never done the full circuit in one run, but I have watched enough families come back grey-faced from four days in a Tempo Traveller to know how it goes wrong. Take the Himachal five, give them two unhurried days, and leave Vaishno Devi for a trip of its own — it deserves one.

And carry less than you think. A packet of incense, a chunri, whatever your mother tells you. The shrines do not want much.

Questions people ask