Annapurna Temple, Varanasi

01Shiva with a begging bowl

Kashi’s tradition says that no one in the city goes to bed hungry, because Annapurna feeds it. In the katha, Mahadev once told Parvati that the world, food included, was maya. The Devi withdrew, food vanished, and the worlds starved; then she appeared in Kashi with a ladle and a pot of grain, and Shiva himself came to her with his bowl. Adi Shankaracharya’s Annapurna Stotram ends with the line ‘bhiksham dehi kripavalambanakari, matannapurneshvari’, give alms, Mother Annapurna. The temple stands in the Vishwanath gali, a few steps from the Jyotirlinga.

02The golden Annapurna

The temple is held to have been built in its present form under Peshwa Baji Rao I in the 1720s. Daily darshan is of a brass murti, but a golden Annapurna, seated, with Shiva standing before her with his bowl, is shown only for a few days around Dhanteras and Annakut, when laddus and grain are given out to the crowd. A separate 18th-century stone Annapurna, stolen from a Varanasi ghat around 1913 and kept for decades at the University of Regina’s art gallery in Canada, was returned to India and installed in the Kashi Vishwanath Dham on 15 November 2021.

The life of this place