Naina Devi is the goddess of a hilltop shrine in Bilaspur district, Himachal Pradesh, standing high above the waters of the Gobind Sagar reservoir on the Sutlej. In the tradition of the Śakti Pīṭhas she marks the place where the eyes, naina, of Sati fell to earth, and the goddess is worshipped here in the aniconic form of a pindi, attended by images of her eyes. The temple is one of the principal goddess shrines of the Punjab hills, and its ridge looks across to Anandpur Sahib on the plain below.
The tradition
Alongside the Pīṭha tradition, local memory tells of a herdsman named Naina who saw a cow letting down her milk of its own accord over a stone on the hill; the goddess, revealed in a dream, asked that a shrine be raised at the spot, and the temple and the goddess alike took the herdsman's name. The hill rajas of Bilaspur maintained the shrine, and it has long drawn devotees from Himachal and Punjab together.
Worship
The great fair falls in the monsoon month of Shravana, when pilgrims climb the hill in their thousands, many carrying the red flags of the goddess; the Navratras bring the other peak seasons. Petitions concern sight in every sense, health of the eyes among them, but the goddess is asked, as hill goddesses are, for protection entire.
Further reading
- Bhattacharyya, N. N. History of the Sakta Religion. Munshiram Manoharlal, 1996
- Erndl, Kathleen M. Victory to the Mother: The Hindu Goddess of Northwest India. Oxford University Press, 1993
- Kinsley, David. Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine. University of California Press, 1986
- Kinsley, David. Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine: The Ten Mahavidyas. University of California Press, 1997
- Sax, William S. Mountain Goddess: Gender and Politics in a Himalayan Pilgrimage. Oxford University Press, 1991
See also
This entry was last revised on 31 July 2026.