12 Jyotirlinga Name List With Places and States (Complete)

The complete 12 Jyotirlinga name list with towns, districts and states, arranged in the traditional dwadasha order chanted in the Shiva Purana. Includes the Maharashtra cluster that trips people up, the Nageshwar and Vaidyanath location disputes, and how Jyotirlinga questions have appeared in Prelims.

The 12 Jyotirlinga Name List, in Traditional Order

The twelve Jyotirlingas are Somnath, Mallikarjuna, Mahakaleshwar, Omkareshwar, Kedarnath, Bhimashankar, Kashi Vishwanath, Trimbakeshwar, Vaidyanath, Nageshwar, Rameshwaram and Grishneshwar. That order is not random. It follows the dwadasha jyotirlinga stotram, the Sanskrit shloka beginning Saurashtre Somanatham cha, which is how the list has been memorised for centuries and why most authentic sources repeat it in exactly this sequence.

Six states carry more than one. Maharashtra has five, which is the single most useful fact in this entire list. Madhya Pradesh has two, both on the Narmada belt, and the remaining five are spread across Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand and Tamil Nadu.

#	Jyotirlinga	Town / Place	State
1	Somnath	Prabhas Patan, Veraval	Gujarat
2	Mallikarjuna	Srisailam, Nallamala Hills	Andhra Pradesh
3	Mahakaleshwar	Ujjain	Madhya Pradesh
4	Omkareshwar	Mandhata island, Khandwa	Madhya Pradesh
5	Kedarnath	Kedarnath, Rudraprayag	Uttarakhand
6	Bhimashankar	Bhorgiri, Pune district	Maharashtra
7	Kashi Vishwanath	Varanasi	Uttar Pradesh
8	Trimbakeshwar	Trimbak, Nashik district	Maharashtra
9	Vaidyanath	Deoghar	Jharkhand
10	Nageshwar	Dwarka (Daruka-vana)	Gujarat
11	Rameshwaram	Rameswaram, Pamban Island	Tamil Nadu
12	Grishneshwar	Verul, near Ellora, Aurangabad	Maharashtra

Maharashtra's Five, and Why People Miscount Them

Ask most people to name the Maharashtra Jyotirlingas and they will stop at three. The five are Bhimashankar, Trimbakeshwar, Grishneshwar, Parli Vaijnath and Aundha Nagnath.

Notice what just happened. Parli Vaijnath and Aundha Nagnath are not in the twelve-item table above, because the table used the most widely accepted identifications: Vaidyanath at Deoghar and Nageshwar at Dwarka. Maharashtra's claim to five rests on the alternative identifications for those same two slots. So the honest answer is that Maharashtra has three undisputed Jyotirlingas and two contested ones, and anyone telling you five with no asterisk is skipping the argument.

The three nobody disputes sit in a rough arc across the Deccan: Bhimashankar in the Sahyadris at the source of the Bhima, Trimbakeshwar at the source of the Godavari, and Grishneshwar a short walk from the Ellora caves.

The Two Genuine Disputes

Vaidyanath is the bigger one. Three sites claim it: Baidyanath Dham at Deoghar in Jharkhand, Parli Vaijnath in Beed district of Maharashtra, and a Baijnath in Himachal's Kangra valley. Deoghar is the mainstream identification, and it is the one that draws the Shravani Mela, when lakhs of kanwariyas walk roughly 105 km from Sultanganj carrying Ganga water.

Nageshwar splits three ways too. The Dwarka temple in Gujarat is the common answer. Aundha Nagnath in Hingoli district, Maharashtra, and Jageshwar in Almora, Uttarakhand, both have old claims.

If a question ever forces a single answer, go with Deoghar and Dwarka. If a question asks what is disputed, these two are the answer. The distinction between knowing a list and knowing where the list is soft is exactly the difference between a reader and a candidate.

What UPSC Actually Does With This

UPSC does not ask you to recite twelve names. It has never done that, and it is unlikely to start. What it does is use a Jyotirlinga as the hinge of a question about something else.

The 2021 Prelims question on the temple that is also the site of a hot water spring points at this habit. So does the recurring pattern of asking about Ellora, where Grishneshwar sits beside the Kailasa temple cut from a single rock by Krishna I of the Rashtrakutas in the eighth century. Kedarnath gets asked through the Char Dham and the 2013 Uttarakhand floods. Kashi Vishwanath gets asked through Ahilyabai Holkar, who rebuilt it in 1780 after Aurangzeb demolished the earlier structure in 1669. Somnath comes up through Mahmud of Ghazni's 1026 raid and the 1951 reconstruction pushed by K. M. Munshi against Nehru's reservations.

So the useful way to learn this list is sideways. Attach each name to one hard fact that is not its name: Omkareshwar to the Narmada and the island shaped like Om, Mallikarjuna to the Nallamala hills and the Krishna river, Rameshwaram to the longest temple corridor in India and the Pamban bridge, Trimbakeshwar to the Godavari's origin and the Kumbh at Nashik. Those are the hooks a question will hang on.

If you want to see the pattern for yourself rather than take my word for it, work through the art and culture questions from the last decade in the PYQ Mastery Course and watch how rarely the answer is the fact you memorised and how often it is the fact next to it.

A Faster Way to Hold the List in Memory

Twelve items, random order, no logic. That is the hardest possible format for recall, which is why people learn this list four times and forget it four times.

Two fixes work. The first is the shloka itself: the traditional verse encodes all twelve with their places in two lines, and reciting it once is faster than reading a table five times. The second is grouping by geography instead of by sequence.

West coast and Gujarat: Somnath, Nageshwar. Narmada belt: Mahakaleshwar, Omkareshwar. Deccan and Sahyadri: Bhimashankar, Trimbakeshwar, Grishneshwar. North: Kedarnath, Kashi Vishwanath. East: Vaidyanath. South: Mallikarjuna, Rameshwaram.

Six buckets, two or three items each. You will find you can rebuild the full list from the map in under a minute, which is the only test of memorisation that matters.

Somnath and Nageshwar: Gujarat coast
Mahakaleshwar and Omkareshwar: Madhya Pradesh, Kshipra and Narmada
Bhimashankar, Trimbakeshwar, Grishneshwar: Maharashtra
Kedarnath and Kashi Vishwanath: Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh
Vaidyanath: Jharkhand
Mallikarjuna and Rameshwaram: Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu

FAQs

1. Which state has the most Jyotirlingas?

Maharashtra, with three undisputed ones (Bhimashankar, Trimbakeshwar and Grishneshwar) and two more claimed sites, Parli Vaijnath and Aundha Nagnath. Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat have two each.

2. Which is the first Jyotirlinga?

Somnath in Prabhas Patan, Gujarat, is listed first in the traditional dwadasha jyotirlinga stotram and is generally treated as the first of the twelve. It has been destroyed and rebuilt several times, most famously after Mahmud of Ghazni's raid in 1026, with the present temple completed in 1951.

3. Are the 12 Jyotirlingas different from the Char Dham?

Yes, they are separate pilgrimage sets. The Char Dham in the national sense is Badrinath, Dwarka, Puri and Rameswaram, and only Rameswaram overlaps with the Jyotirlinga list, while Kedarnath appears in the smaller Uttarakhand Chota Char Dham.

4. Which Jyotirlinga is the hardest to reach?

Kedarnath in Rudraprayag district, Uttarakhand. It sits at about 3,580 metres near the Mandakini's source, stays closed for roughly six months of winter, and the usual approach is a trek of around 16 km from Gaurikund.

5. What does Jyotirlinga actually mean?

It means a linga of light, from jyoti (radiance) and linga. The Shiva Purana describes Shiva appearing as an endless pillar of fire to settle a dispute between Brahma and Vishnu over supremacy, and the twelve shrines mark where that column of light is said to have manifested.

6. Which Jyotirlinga is on an island?

Omkareshwar, which stands on Mandhata island in the Narmada in Khandwa district, Madhya Pradesh. The island is traditionally said to be shaped like the Om symbol.