12 Jyotirlingas: Full List with States and Locations

A plain list of the twelve Jyotirlingas with their locations and states, the traditional order from the Dwadasa Jyotirlinga Stotram, and the architectural and historical facts that matter for UPSC Prelims and Mains culture questions.

The twelve, with state and location

There are twelve Jyotirlingas, spread across seven states. Maharashtra has five, more than any other state. Madhya Pradesh has two, and Gujarat, Uttarakhand, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu have one each.

That state distribution is the single most testable fact here. If you remember nothing else, remember five in Maharashtra.

#	Jyotirlinga	Place	State
1	Somnath	Prabhas Patan, Veraval	Gujarat
2	Mallikarjuna	Srisailam	Andhra Pradesh
3	Mahakaleshwar	Ujjain	Madhya Pradesh
4	Omkareshwar	Mandhata island, Khandwa	Madhya Pradesh
5	Kedarnath	Rudraprayag district	Uttarakhand
6	Bhimashankar	Pune district	Maharashtra
7	Kashi Vishwanath	Varanasi	Uttar Pradesh
8	Trimbakeshwar	Nashik	Maharashtra
9	Vaidyanath	Deoghar	Jharkhand
10	Nageshwar	Dwarka	Gujarat
11	Ramanathaswamy	Rameswaram	Tamil Nadu
12	Grishneshwar	Verul, near Ellora, Aurangabad	Maharashtra

Wait, that adds up to five in Maharashtra?

Good catch. The table above lists Bhimashankar, Trimbakeshwar and Grishneshwar. The other two are Aundha Nagnath in Hingoli district and Parli Vaijnath in Beed district.

And here is where the neat exam-ready list breaks down. Two of the twelve are genuinely disputed. Nageshwar is claimed by Dwarka in Gujarat, but also by Aundha Nagnath in Maharashtra and by a site in Almora. Vaidyanath is claimed by Deoghar in Jharkhand and by Parli Vaijnath in Maharashtra.

So which do you write in the exam? Deoghar and Dwarka are the mainstream answers and the ones UPSC has treated as standard. But if a question asks how many Jyotirlingas are in Maharashtra, the expected answer is five, counting the contested ones. Slightly inconsistent, yes. Exams are like that.

The traditional order and where it comes from

The order in the table is not arbitrary. It follows the Dwadasa Jyotirlinga Stotram, a Sanskrit verse attributed to Adi Shankaracharya, which names them in sequence beginning with Saurashtra's Somnath and ending with Grishneshwar. The Shiva Purana's Kotirudra Samhita gives the same twelve.

Notice the geography of that order. It jumps from Gujarat to Andhra, back up to Madhya Pradesh, north to the Himalayas, down to the Deccan, then to Varanasi, then Nashik, then east to Jharkhand. Nobody could have walked it in that sequence. The stotram was built for chanting, not for planning a trip.

The word jyotirlinga itself means a linga of light. The Shiva Purana story explains it: Brahma and Vishnu argue over who is greater, and Shiva appears as an infinite column of light whose ends neither can find. The twelve are the places where that column is said to have manifested.

The facts that have actually appeared in Prelims

UPSC rarely asks you to list twelve names. It asks something sideways.

Somnath is the most historically loaded. Mahmud of Ghazni sacked it in 1026. It was rebuilt and destroyed repeatedly, and the current temple, in the Chalukya or Solanki style, was completed after 1947 with Sardar Patel driving the project and K.M. Munshi overseeing it. Rajendra Prasad performed the installation in 1951, against Nehru's discomfort with a state role in a temple. That episode belongs to a Mains answer on secularism as much as to a culture question.

Grishneshwar sits beside the Ellora caves and is built in the Maratha style, restored by Ahilyabai Holkar in the eighteenth century. She also rebuilt Kashi Vishwanath in 1780, after Aurangzeb's demolition in 1669 and the construction of the Gyanvapi mosque on the site. Ahilyabai's name links three of these temples, including Somnath. Learn her, not just the temples.

Kedarnath is North Indian Nagara, stone, at roughly 3,580 metres, open only around six months a year, and it survived the 2013 Kedarnath floods when much around it did not. Ramanathaswamy is Dravidian, with the longest temple corridor in India. Mahakaleshwar is the only one where the linga faces south, which is why the ritual there is called Dakshinamukhi, and its Bhasma Aarti uses ash. Trimbakeshwar sits at the source of the Godavari.

One more pattern worth holding: Kashi Vishwanath, Somnath and Mahakaleshwar all sit inside live policy stories, corridor projects, heritage debates, tourism circuits. That is usually how the question arrives.

How much time this deserves

Twenty minutes, once, then revision. Do not build a chart with legends, festivals and architectural styles for all twelve. The return is not there.

What I would actually do: memorise the state distribution, fix the two disputed ones in your head, and attach one distinctive hook to each temple. Ujjain equals south-facing linga and ash aarti. Ellora equals Grishneshwar. Godavari equals Trimbakeshwar. Hooks survive; lists do not.

This kind of judgment, deciding what deserves twenty minutes and what deserves two hours, is most of what separates a 320 in GS from a 380. If your problem is not knowledge but a study plan that keeps expanding, Planb is built for exactly that.

And if a Jyotirlinga question does show up and you have not read this page, you will probably still get it from the options. That tells you where it sits on your priority list.

FAQs

1. Which state has the most Jyotirlingas?

Maharashtra, with five: Bhimashankar in Pune district, Trimbakeshwar near Nashik, Grishneshwar near Ellora, Aundha Nagnath in Hingoli and Parli Vaijnath in Beed. Two of those five, Nagnath and Vaijnath, are contested with sites in Gujarat and Jharkhand.

2. Is Kashi Vishwanath one of the 12 Jyotirlingas?

Yes. Kashi Vishwanath in Varanasi is the seventh in the traditional order and the only Jyotirlinga in Uttar Pradesh. The present temple was built by Ahilyabai Holkar in 1780.

3. What is the difference between a Jyotirlinga and a Shivling?

A Shivling is any aniconic representation of Shiva, found in temples and homes across India. A Jyotirlinga is one of twelve specific shrines where Shiva is believed to have appeared as a column of light, named in the Shiva Purana and the Dwadasa Jyotirlinga Stotram.

4. Are there 12 or 64 Jyotirlingas?

Tradition names 64 Jyotirlingas in all, of which twelve are considered the principal or Maha Jyotirlingas. When people say the Jyotirlingas without qualification, they mean the twelve.

5. Which Jyotirlinga is the hardest to reach?

Kedarnath in Uttarakhand, at about 3,580 metres, requires a trek of roughly 16 kilometres from Gaurikund and stays closed for about six months in winter. Amarnath, often mentioned alongside it, is not one of the twelve.

6. Have Jyotirlingas ever appeared in the UPSC exam?

Not usually as a direct list. They surface through temple architecture questions, through Somnath's reconstruction after 1947, and through Ahilyabai Holkar's temple restorations, so the history and style matter more than the names.