What is Muktidham?

One of the twelve is close to Nashik, at Trimbakeshwar, up the road where the Godavari starts. The other eleven are spread out across the country. J.D. Chauhan Bytco was an industrialist in Nashik, and in 1971 he built this temple, the whole of it in white Makrana marble.

What he wanted inside it was the twelve. So he had a copy made of each jyotirling, and each copy was made to the size of the original, the same measure as the ling in the shrine it stood for. And then each copy was sent away — to its own shrine, the one it was a copy of, wherever in the country that was — and made holy there. Then it was brought back to Nashik Road and set in its place.

There is a temple of Krishna inside the complex, and its walls are painted. The pictures are Krishna’s life, and scenes from the Mahabharata, and the painter was Raghubir Mulgaonkar. On the same walls the whole of the Bhagavad Gita is written out, all eighteen chapters, so that you can stand in front of a wall and read it.

There are shrines to Lakshmi, to Hanuman, to Durga and to Ganesh. And there is a dharamshala. A धर्मशाला dharamshala is a place for pilgrims to stay, and this one has room for two hundred people or more.

If you come to Nashik by train, Nashik Road is the station you get down at, and the temple is close to it, on the station side of the city, not the river side.

You see the marble before anything else. The whole building is white, outside and in, carved on the outside. Go in and find the twelve. Each ling is in its own shrine, and you can walk from one to the next. Then the Krishna temple, where the walls are the thing — his life and the war painted round you, and the Gita written up chapter by chapter. The four shrines are there too, and the dharamshala is in the same complex.

The old temples are on the other side of the city, along the river. The temples of Nashik has them, and the Kapaleshwar temple, above Ramkund, is the one with no bull sitting outside it.