Jothi Lingam List: All 12 Jyotirlingas With States and Towns

The complete list of the 12 Jothi Lingam (Jyotirlinga) shrines with their towns, districts, states and nearest rivers, the traditional stotram order, the four sites where the identification is contested, and how UPSC frames questions on them.

The 12 Jothi Lingam list, with place and state

Jothi Lingam is the Tamil way of saying Jyotirlinga, and there are twelve of them. They sit in eight states: Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand and Tamil Nadu. Maharashtra has three (five if you accept the contested claims), Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh have two each.

The table below follows the traditional order of the Dwadasa Jyotirlinga Stotram, not alphabetical or geographical order. Learn it in this sequence. It is the order every text, every temple board and every quiz uses, and it is far easier to recall as a chant than as a scattered set of names.

#	Jothi Lingam (Jyotirlinga)	Town / Place	District	State	River or landmark
1	Somnath	Prabhas Patan, near Veraval	Gir Somnath	Gujarat	Arabian Sea coast
2	Mallikarjuna	Srisailam	Nandyal	Andhra Pradesh	Krishna river, Nallamala hills
3	Mahakaleshwar	Ujjain	Ujjain	Madhya Pradesh	Shipra river
4	Omkareshwar	Mandhata island	Khandwa	Madhya Pradesh	Narmada river
5	Kedarnath	Kedarnath	Rudraprayag	Uttarakhand	Mandakini river, Garhwal Himalaya
6	Bhimashankar	Bhorgiri, Khed taluka	Pune	Maharashtra	Source of the Bhima, Sahyadri
7	Kashi Vishwanath	Varanasi	Varanasi	Uttar Pradesh	Ganga
8	Trimbakeshwar	Trimbak, near Nashik	Nashik	Maharashtra	Source of the Godavari, Brahmagiri hill
9	Vaidyanath	Deoghar	Deoghar	Jharkhand	Near the Ajay river
10	Nageshwar	Near Dwarka	Devbhumi Dwarka	Gujarat	Gulf of Kutch coast
11	Rameshwaram	Rameswaram island	Ramanathapuram	Tamil Nadu	Gulf of Mannar, Pamban
12	Grishneshwar	Verul, near Ellora	Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar	Maharashtra	Next to the Ellora caves

Why the order is worth keeping

The stotram runs Somnath, Mallikarjuna, Mahakaleshwar, Omkareshwar, Kedarnath, Bhimashankar, Vishwanath, Trimbakeshwar, Vaidyanath, Nageshwar, Rameshwaram, Grishneshwar. Notice the movement. It opens on the Saurashtra coast, jumps to the Deccan, climbs into Malwa, then to the Himalaya, then back down the Sahyadri, across to the Ganga plain, and finally ends in the far south before returning to Maharashtra.

That zig-zag is not a flaw in your memory. It is the design. The list deliberately stitches the subcontinent together, which is also why historians treat the Jyotirlinga network as an early pan-Indian pilgrimage circuit rather than a regional cult. If you try to memorise it state by state, you will lose the order. Chant it in sequence once a day for a week and it sticks for years.

Four of the twelve are disputed

Most lists you find online present all twelve as settled. They are not. Four have rival claimants, and the disagreement is old, textual and still live.

Vaidyanath is the sharpest case. Deoghar in Jharkhand is the popular answer, but Parli Vaijnath in Beed district, Maharashtra, has an equally strong traditional claim, and Baijnath in Himachal's Kangra valley is sometimes added. Nageshwar is claimed by three: the Dwarka temple in Gujarat, Aundha Nagnath in Hingoli district of Maharashtra, and Jageshwar near Almora in Uttarakhand.

Bhimashankar near Pune is widely accepted, though temples in Assam's Kamrup region and in Odisha have pressed claims based on the Dakini forest reference in the Shiva Purana. And at Omkareshwar, there is an internal debate over whether the linga on Mandhata island or Mamleshwar across the Narmada is the true one, which is why many pilgrims visit both and treat them as a single shrine.

If an exam or a quiz gives you the Deoghar, Dwarka and Pune answers, go with those. They are the mainstream identifications. But knowing that the list has soft edges is more useful than pretending it does not.

What UPSC actually asks about these temples

UPSC has almost never asked you to count the Jyotirlingas or name all twelve. That is quiz-show knowledge. What the exam does ask is the attribute attached to the place: which river, which hill range, which dynasty built it, which ruler rebuilt it, what architectural style, what is nearby.

So the useful version of this list is the second layer. Trimbakeshwar sits at the source of the Godavari and Bhimashankar at the source of the Bhima, which makes both of them peninsular drainage questions, not temple questions. Grishneshwar is a few hundred metres from the Ellora caves, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and was rebuilt by Ahilyabai Holkar in the eighteenth century. Ahilyabai also rebuilt the Kashi Vishwanath temple in 1780 and funded work at Somnath, which makes her a recurring name across the Maratha and art-and-culture portions of the syllabus.

Somnath carries the heaviest history. It was raided by Mahmud of Ghazni in 1026, rebuilt repeatedly, and reconstructed after 1947 under Sardar Patel and K. M. Munshi, with the present temple completed in 1951. Mahakaleshwar at Ujjain is the one usually described as south-facing, and Ujjain itself is the Kumbh site on the Shipra. Rameswaram's Ramanathaswamy temple has the longest temple corridor in India, roughly 1.2 km across its third prakara.

The habit worth building here is reading the question backwards: ask what attribute a paper-setter could hang off a place name, then learn that attribute. If you want to see how that instinct is trained on actual papers rather than guessed at, working through the PYQ Mastery Course is the practical next step, because art and culture questions reward pattern recognition far more than they reward lists.

A faster way to hold the list in memory

Chant the stotram order for sequence. Then layer a state map on top of it, because that is the form in which the information is actually tested.

Three clusters do most of the work. Gujarat holds the two coastal ones, Somnath and Nageshwar, both in Saurashtra. Madhya Pradesh holds the two river ones, Mahakaleshwar on the Shipra and Omkareshwar on the Narmada. Maharashtra holds the three Sahyadri and Deccan ones, Bhimashankar, Trimbakeshwar and Grishneshwar. That accounts for seven. The remaining five are singletons, one state each: Srisailam in Andhra Pradesh, Kedarnath in Uttarakhand, Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh, Deoghar in Jharkhand, Rameswaram in Tamil Nadu.

Seven in three clusters, five standing alone. Learn it that way and you will not need to look it up again.

FAQs

1. Which state has the most Jyotirlingas?

Maharashtra, with three: Bhimashankar in Pune district, Trimbakeshwar near Nashik, and Grishneshwar near Ellora. The count rises to five if you accept the Maharashtra claims for Vaidyanath (Parli Vaijnath) and Nageshwar (Aundha Nagnath).

2. How many Jyotirlingas are in South India?

Two: Mallikarjuna at Srisailam in Andhra Pradesh and Ramanathaswamy at Rameswaram in Tamil Nadu. Karnataka, Kerala and Telangana have none.

3. What is the difference between a Jyotirlinga and a Shakti Peetha?

Jyotirlingas are twelve shrines of Shiva, said to mark places where he appeared as a column of light. Shakti Peethas are shrines of the Goddess, associated with the places where parts of Sati's body fell, and their number varies by tradition from 18 to 51 to 108.

4. Which Jyotirlinga is the smallest and which is the largest temple?

Grishneshwar near Ellora is generally described as the smallest Jyotirlinga temple. Ramanathaswamy at Rameswaram is the largest in scale, with the longest temple corridor in India at roughly 1.2 km.

5. Is Kedarnath both a Jyotirlinga and a Char Dham site?

Yes. Kedarnath is the fifth Jyotirlinga and also one of the four shrines of the Chota Char Dham circuit in Uttarakhand, along with Yamunotri, Gangotri and Badrinath. It is distinct from the all-India Char Dham of Badrinath, Dwarka, Puri and Rameswaram.

6. Which Jyotirlinga temples were rebuilt by Ahilyabai Holkar?

The Maratha queen Ahilyabai Holkar of Indore rebuilt the Kashi Vishwanath temple at Varanasi in 1780 and the Grishneshwar temple near Ellora, and also funded restoration work at Somnath. She is a recurring figure in both Maratha history and temple-patronage questions.