Why the creator has only one great temple
Ask any priest on the steps why Brahma lives here and nowhere else, and he will tell you a story about a wedding, a late wife and an hour that could not wait.
The lotus: Brahma, the creator, struck down a demon called Vajranabha with a lotus flower, and where its petals fell, three lakes appeared.
The name: the largest became the sacred lake of Pushkar, and the town took its name from the flower, pushpa, falling from the god's hand, kar.
The sacrifice: Brahma chose the place to perform a great yagna, a fire sacrifice, and invited every god to attend.
At a glance
- Built
- Largely 14th century, often repaired
- Built by
- Tradition: Vishwamitra, then Adi Shankaracharya; repairs credited to Ratlam
- Open
- Before dawn to late night, with an early-afternoon rest
- Allow
- About forty minutes
- Best time
- Just after dawn, October to March
- Photography
- Not inside; the spire from the lane or ghats
- Getting there
- On foot through the bazaar lanes
- A wife was needed: a yagna of that kind has to be performed by a man with his wife beside him, and Brahma's wife, Savitri, was delayed.
- Why she was late: in some tellings she was dressing, in others she was waiting for her companions, the other goddesses, while the priests watched the auspicious hour slipping away.
- A bride from the lake: Brahma asked Indra, king of the gods, to find him a bride, and Indra brought a young woman from the land around the lake.
- A Gurjar girl: many local tellings say she came from the herding community that still lives in these hills. Brahma married her on the spot, named her Gayatri and seated her beside him at the fire.
- Savitri arrives: she found another woman in her place, wearing the bride's red, and her anger shook the sky. She cursed her husband to be worshipped nowhere on earth except at Pushkar.
- More curses: Savitri also cursed Indra, who had found the bride, and the other gods who had stood by and said nothing.
- To the hill: then she walked away from the lake and climbed the highest hill to the west, Ratnagiri, where her temple still stands.
- Gayatri's softening: the new wife could not undo the curse, but she softened it. Brahma would be worshipped, she said, and Pushkar would be his home above all others.
- Two wives, two hills: Gayatri's own temple sits on a lower hill to the east, so the town lives between two wives on two hills, with the husband in the middle, beside the water.
- Visit both: pilgrims who know the story will tell you, with a smile, that you must visit both wives or risk offending one of them.
- Not quite the only one: a handful of Brahma temples exist elsewhere in India, including one at Asotra in western Rajasthan, but none carries this one's weight or draws pilgrims from every corner of the country.
- Tirth raj: for Hindus, Pushkar is tirth raj, the king of pilgrim places, and its temple is the reason.
- The full telling: our journal tells the story of Pushkar's Brahma temple at greater length.
Builders, breakers and restorers
The temple you climb into today is not the first on this spot. Like Pushkar itself, it has been built, damaged and loved back to life more than once.
Vishwamitra: one story says the sage raised the first shrine after Brahma's sacrifice.
Adi Shankaracharya: another credits the eighth-century philosopher, who travelled India reviving its great shrines, with restoring the temple and installing the image of Brahma.
Legend, not proof: historians cannot prove either story, but they tell you how old the people of Pushkar feel their temple to be.
Facts to know
- Present building
- Largely 14th century
- Damage remembered
- Under Aurangzeb, 1658 to 1707
- Lake rebuilt
- 18th and 19th centuries
- Cared for by
- A sanyasi, ascetic order
- What we know: the present building dates largely from the fourteenth century, and it has been repaired many times since.
- Aurangzeb: the Mughal emperor, who ruled from 1658 to 1707, is remembered in Pushkar for damaging many of the town's temples.
- Rebuilt by rivals: much of what you see around the lake was rebuilt in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Rajput and Maratha patrons competed to earn merit here.
- Ratlam's repairs: local accounts credit the temple's own repairs to a Maharaja of Ratlam, Jawat Raj, who is said to have kept the original plan while rebuilding.
- New layers: the marble floors have been relaid more than once, and the silver coins in them are a newer devotion still, which families keep adding.
- A long conversation: seen this way, the building stops being a single moment in history and becomes a conversation between a god and the families who come to see him, as a living temple should be.
- Always ascetics: the temple has always been in the care of priests of a sanyasi order, men who have renounced household life.
- Why it matters: that is the root of one of its best-known customs. By tradition, married men do not enter the inner sanctum. More on that below.
Walking in, from the street to the sanctum
The temple is small enough to see in twenty minutes and rich enough to fill an hour. This is the order in which our guides walk you through it.
The lane and the shoe stand
The lane: you approach through a narrow lane of shops selling marigold garlands, coconuts, sugar sweets for offering, red threads and small framed pictures of the four-faced god.
- The car stops early: your car will stop some way off, because the lanes are too narrow and too crowded to drive.
- Shoes off: leave your shoes at one of the stands near the steps, or with your guide, and keep a small cloth bag for your phone. From here on you are barefoot.
The steps and the gate of the hamsa
A high plinth: the temple stands raised up, so you climb a broad flight of marble steps to reach it.
- The gateway: at the top is a gate with small pillared canopies on either side.
- Look up: above the arch is the hamsa, the swan or goose that carries Brahma through the heavens.
- Why the bird matters: in Hindu thought the hamsa can separate milk from water, so it stands for the power to tell truth from falsehood, a fitting doorkeeper for the god of creation and knowledge.
The courtyard and its pavilions
The court: through the gate is an open courtyard ringed by low pavilions and side shrines.
- The families: on busy mornings it is full of families from Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, grandmothers in bright saris and boys with freshly shaved heads after a first haircut at the lake.
- Pause here: this is where you feel the scale of devotion more than in the sanctum itself, and where bells and bhajans, devotional songs, gather and echo.
A floor paved with silver coins
Look down: the black and white marble of the main hall's floor and lower walls is set with hundreds of silver coins.
- Each a vow: every coin was given by a family to mark a vow, a wedding, a birth or a recovered parent, and many carry the donor's name.
- Our grandmother's game: she used to bend down and read them aloud, guessing where each family came from by its surname.
- Small thank-yous: no great inscription by a king, just thousands of small thank-yous underfoot. It is one of the gentlest records of faith we know.
The silver turtle
Where: in the hall, set into the floor and facing the sanctum.
- What it means: the turtle is linked with Vishnu's incarnation as Kurma, who carried the world on his back, and with steadiness and patience.
- What pilgrims do: they touch it and then their foreheads.
- Please: do not stand on it, and step around the people kneeling near it.
The sanctum and the four-faced god
The garbhagriha: at the heart of the temple is the womb chamber, where the image of Brahma sits.
Four faces: one looks in each direction, because the creator sees everything he has made.
- Four hands: they hold a rosary, a book of the Vedas, kusha grass and a water pot, the tools of the priest and the scholar.
- Gayatri: she sits to his left.
- What you see: the image from the threshold, framed by silver, lit by oil lamps and heaped with flowers.
The cave of Shiva below
Easily missed: close beside the main temple, steps lead down to a small cave shrine of Shiva, known as Atpateshwar.
- Inside: a linga encircled by a coiled copper snake, in a dim, cool, quiet space.
- Its great night: it fills on Mahashivratri, Shiva's great night, which falls in February or March.
- Ask to go down: it completes the picture, because in Pushkar the three great gods are never far from each other.
The view back to the hill
- Look west: as you leave, stand at the top of the steps. Ratnagiri hill rises behind the town with Savitri's white temple at its summit.
- The whole legend: pilgrims point to it and retell the story. The husband here by the water, the wife who cursed him watching from above, all in a single view.
How the building works, in plain words
Most visitors expect a creator's temple to be vast. It is not. It is a modest, tall-spired north Indian temple, and its modesty is part of its charm.
Nagara style: think of it as a sequence of spaces that grow darker, smaller and holier as you move towards the god.
The sequence: first the gateway, then an open court, then the mandapa, the pillared hall where worshippers gather, and finally the sanctum, a small dark chamber that holds the image.
The shikhara: above the sanctum rises the spire, pointing upwards like a mountain. It stands for Mount Meru, the centre of the universe, so the god sits under a symbolic mountain.
Facts to know
- Style
- Nagara, north Indian
- Spire
- Red, about twenty metres
- Materials
- Local stone, lime and marble
- Joints
- Said to be molten lead
- The red spire: about twenty metres high, it is the one feature you can pick out from the ghats and from the top of Savitri hill.
- Kept simple: it is not carved all over like the great temples of Khajuraho or Ranakpur. Pushkar's builders worked with local stone, lime and marble.
- Lead, not mortar: the blocks are said to be joined with molten lead, an old technique for stability in a land of hot days and cold nights.
- Why the plinth: raising a temple on a platform separates sacred space from the street, protects it from water and makes the approach a climb, so every pilgrim rises towards the god.
- The details that matter: the hamsa over the gate, the turtle facing the sanctum and the coins in the floor give the building its character. Look for them.
- For grandeur instead: plan a separate journey through the temples of Rajasthan, including the marble halls of Ranakpur.
- Why come here: for something different, a small building carrying an enormous weight of meaning.
The rituals of the day and the year
The temple keeps a clock older than any visitor's itinerary. It wakes before the town and goes to sleep long after the shops close.
Mangala aarti: the first worship with lamps comes well before sunrise, when the god is woken with bells and conch shells.
Few see it: those who do find a handful of pilgrims, the priests and the smell of camphor in the cold air.
Sandhya aarti: held a little after sunset, when the hall fills and the bells ring for several minutes without pause.
Facts to know
- First aarti
- Mangala, before sunrise
- Evening aarti
- Sandhya, a little after sunset
- Monthly rites
- Full moon and new moon
- Greatest day
- Kartik Purnima, October or November
- Holiest bathing
- Five days, Ekadashi to the full moon
- Night aarti: late at night a final aarti puts the god to rest.
- Offerings through priests: by long tradition married men, as householders, do not enter the sanctum, so pilgrims of every kind make offerings through the ascetic priests.
- Prasad: the priests take the coconut, flowers or sweets from the outer hall and return part of them as prasad, food blessed by the god.
- Not a slight: it is simply the custom of this temple, and everyone, from a village farmer to a cabinet minister, follows it.
- Purnima and amavasya: every full moon and every new moon brings special rites.
- Kartik Purnima: the greatest day of all, usually in late October or November, when Brahma is honoured with a great festival.
- The holy bath: pilgrims come in their hundreds of thousands to bathe in the lake in the five holiest days before the full moon, from Ekadashi onwards.
- The fair alongside: the same days bring the famous livestock fair to the dunes. Our page on the Pushkar Camel Fair explains how the two gatherings fit together.
Local tip
Many pilgrims, after seeing Brahma, go on to the Gayatri temple and then climb to Savitri. Follow the same order and you will find yourself walking the legend around the town.
The best hour and the best season
At ten on a festival morning the temple steps are a slow river of people. At first light on an ordinary Tuesday you may share the hall with a dozen.
Just after dawn: walk down to the ghats first, watch the lake turn from grey to gold, then climb the steps as the morning rituals end.
Why dawn works: the marble is cool underfoot, the light comes in low through the gate and the priests have time to talk.
After the evening aarti: the crowd that came for the lamps drifts back to the lake, and the temple settles into a lamplit calm.
Facts to know
- Best hour
- Just after dawn
- Second best
- After the evening aarti
- Avoid
- Late morning and early afternoon
- Best season
- October to March
- Calmest months
- December, February, early March
- The hard hours: late morning and early afternoon, when coach groups arrive, the queue backs down the steps and in summer the marble burns.
- The afternoon rest: like most Hindu temples, it closes in the early afternoon while the god takes his meal and sleeps.
- Hours shift: they change with the season and on festival days, so we check them for you on the day rather than publish them here.
- October to March: warm days and cool nights. In December and January you will want a shawl for the dawn walk.
- Kartik: the month around the fair is the most spiritually charged time of year, and by far the most crowded. Come for the full moon with a guide and patience.
- For calm: come in December, February or early March.
- Month by month: our guide to the best time to visit Pushkar.
How to visit, with care and comfort
The temple welcomes visitors of every faith. In return it asks a few simple courtesies, and a little planning makes the visit far more comfortable.
Come with a guide: ours will explain the rituals, read the coins with you, introduce you to a priest if the moment is right and keep the touts at a polite distance.
Shoes: remove them before the steps. In the hot months the marble can scorch, so wear thin cotton socks if you like. They are acceptable here.
Dress: shoulders and knees covered, for men and women alike. A light scarf is useful. Our note on what to wear in temples has more.
Facts to know
- Footwear
- Off before the steps
- Dress code
- Shoulders and knees covered
- Photography
- Generally not inside
- Access
- Steep steps, no lift
- Town rules
- Vegetarian, no alcohol
- Leather: leave belts and bags in the car if you can. Many devout Hindus avoid carrying leather into a temple, and you will feel more at ease without it.
- Photography: generally not allowed inside, and phones may be checked at busy times. Photograph the spire from the lane or the ghats, and ask before photographing any person.
- Offerings: carry a little cash in small notes. A modest offering is perfectly proper.
- Pushy blessings: if someone presses flowers into your hand and leads you somewhere for a blessing, decline politely and stay with your guide.
- Mobility: the steps are steep and there is no lift. A slow climb and a steady arm usually work, but festival crowds make it hard. Our guide to accessible travel explains how we plan around it.
- Food and drink: Pushkar is a vegetarian, alcohol-free town. Bring no meat, eggs or alcohol near the temple, and keep any snacks out of sight.
- After darshan: once you have had your darshan, the sacred seeing of the god, stand to one side of the sanctum door so the next family can step forward.
- The rest of it: our page on temple etiquette covers everything else.
What most visitors miss
Most travellers climb the steps, glimpse the image, and leave within ten minutes. These are the small things that turn a glance into an understanding.
The names in the floor
Kneel and read: take a minute by the coins and read a few.
- Who they were: family names from Gujarat, Rajasthan and Maharashtra, sometimes a village, sometimes a date.
- Why bother: it is a slow, private way into the temple's meaning, and it costs nothing but a minute.
Brahma Ghat, where the god bathed
The story: the ghat below the temple is said to be where Brahma himself bathed before the sacrifice.
- Pilgrims' order: many bathe there before coming up to the temple.
- How to visit: on the same walk, quietly, and without photographing anyone in the water. Our guide to Pushkar Lake and its ghats goes ghat by ghat.
The pilgrims' red thread
The thread: priests on the ghats tie a red and yellow thread around pilgrims' wrists after a prayer at the lake.
- The Pushkar passport: travellers call it that, because once you have one, others stop offering.
- A genuine ritual: our guide will arrange one with a priest our family trusts, and the thread will mean something.
The priests' registers
Family records: Pushkar's priestly families keep handwritten registers of the pilgrim families they serve, some going back many generations.
- Part of the same world: they are not part of the temple itself, but they belong beside it.
- Seeing one: our guide can arrange for a priest to show you how a family's visits have been recorded over the decades.
The Gayatri hill
- The other wife: almost everyone climbs to Savitri. Very few walk up the lower hill on the eastern side of the lake to Gayatri's temple, which completes the story.
- Why go: the climb is short, the view back across the water to Ratnagiri is lovely, and you will probably have it to yourself.
What to pair with the temple
The temple sits a few minutes' walk from the lake and at the foot of Savitri's hill, so a single morning can hold most of sacred Pushkar.
The ghats at dawn
- Start at the water: fifty-two ghats ring the lake, and at first light they fill with pilgrims ringing bells and floating marigolds.
- The pilgrim route: walk from Varaha Ghat towards Brahma Ghat, then climb up to the temple. It is the natural route and the most beautiful.
Savitri temple on Ratnagiri
The climb: thirty minutes to an hour on foot, or a few minutes by ropeway, to the angry wife's temple.
- When: before dawn for sunrise, or late afternoon for the view of the whole valley.
- Then Brahma: come down and see the creator with the story fresh in your mind.
The Varaha and Rangji temples
Varaha: Vishnu as the boar who lifted the earth from the ocean has one of Pushkar's oldest shrines.
- Rangji: its south Indian gateway tower shows how far Pushkar's pull reaches.
- When: both sit close to the main bazaar and suit a late-morning walk.
Ajmer and the dargah
- Over the ridge: beyond Nag Pahar, about fifteen kilometres away, lies Ajmer and the great Sufi shrine of Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti.
- One great day: Brahma's temple in the morning and the dargah in the evening is one of the most moving days you can spend in Rajasthan.
A longer sacred journey
- The pilgrim route: Pushkar sits naturally beside Ajmer, the Krishna shrine at Nathdwara and the Jain temples of Ranakpur.
- Our journey: the sacred Rajasthan journey links them at an unhurried pace, with palace hotels between the temples.
Where to stay close to the temple
Staying inside the old town puts you within a few minutes' walk of the temple, but the calmest luxury lies just outside, among fields and low hills.
On the lake: the old town has a few heritage hotels, simple but full of character, where you can hear the temple bells from your room.
Who they suit: travellers who want to walk to the dawn rituals and do not mind modest rooms and a busy lane outside the gate.
Facts to know
- Closest
- Heritage hotels on the lake
- Calmest
- Resorts on the edge of town
- During the fair
- Luxury tented camps
- Palace nearby
- Kishangarh, about an hour
- Nights
- Two, within a longer journey
- Our usual choice: a resort on the edge of town, such as the Westin Pushkar Resort and Spa or Ananta Spa and Resort, both with gardens, pools and spas, a short drive from the lanes behind the temple.
- The short drive: no hardship. We drop you as close as the lanes allow before dawn, walk with you to the ghats and the temple, and bring you back for breakfast in the quiet.
- Fair camps: during the fair, luxury tented camps open near the fairground, and the dawn walk to the temple from a camp is one of the great mornings of a Rajasthan journey.
- Choosing: our guides to luxury stays in Pushkar and luxury hotels in Pushkar explain the options.
- A palace instead: Kishangarh is about an hour away, and Jaipur's great palace hotels are about three hours by road.
- Fitting it in: Pushkar works well as a two-night stop within a longer journey. Our Pushkar itinerary shows how we fit it in.