India's 13 Chausath Yogini Temple Sites, Roofless Stone Shrines of Carved Goddesses Dated to the 9th to 12th Centuries, Are on UNESCO's Tentative List

India submitted 13 Chausath Yogini sites to UNESCO’s Tentative List on 11 February 2025. Chausath is Hindi for 64, and these are open-air stone shrines in which images of that many goddesses, the Yoginis, stood in cells around a courtyard. The submission’s component table lists seven sites in Madhya Pradesh, three in Uttar Pradesh, two in Odisha and one in Tamil Nadu.

The list mixes standing buildings with sites where only carvings survive. Hirapur and Ranipur-Jharial in Odisha and Mitaoli in Madhya Pradesh still have their walls. At Lokhari and Kaveripakkam it is the sculptures that remain, some of them now in museums on three continents. What follows goes through the sites in turn and says where the written records disagree.

What a Yogini temple is

Shaman Hatley, in his entry for the Encyclopedia of Indian Religions, defines a yogini either as a female tantric initiate or as a kind of medieval tantric goddess, and says temples to groups of yoginis went up across India mainly from the tenth to the twelfth century. India’s dossier gives the 9th to the 12th century as the period when the tradition was strongest.

Most of the temples follow one plan. The dossier describes a single-storey ring of cells of equal size under a flat roof of stone slabs, around an open courtyard with a shrine to Shiva that can be seen from every cell. Vidya Dehejia, in her 1986 study for the National Museum, called a roofless circular enclosure “an unusual phenomenon for an Indian temple”. The number 64 comes from the texts. Dehejia notes that a chapter of the Agni Purana derives 64 Yoginis from the eight Matrikas, the mother goddesses, and that the Matottara Tantra describes two circles of 64 and one of 81.

The count is not fixed. The dossier says Dudhai and Badoh had places for 42 images, and Bhedaghat has 81. It says most of the temples are circular and names Khajuraho, Badoh and Rikhiyan as the rectangular ones. Dehejia wrote that the texts mentioning Yoginis rarely say anything definite about the worship, and that its teachings were meant for initiates.

Hirapur and Ranipur-Jharial, the two circles of Odisha

Hirapur, in Khordha district, lies 13 km from the Lingaraja temple in Bhubaneswar, according to Odisha Tourism. Dehejia gives it as the smallest of the Yogini temples, 30 feet across with walls about 8 feet high. In her survey and in the dossier, its niches hold 60 standing Yoginis carved in grey chlorite, about two feet tall, and the central pavilion holds four more along with four Bhairavas, fierce forms of Shiva. Nine female figures stand in niches on the outer wall, which she says no other Yogini temple has.

The temple became public knowledge only in 1953, Dehejia writes. Odisha Tourism names the historian Kedarnath Panigrahi as the one who rediscovered it, while Dehejia names Kedarnath Mahapatra. There is no inscription, so the date rests on style. Dehejia compares the carving with the Mukteshvara temple in Bhubaneswar and concludes the shrine was complete by about AD 900. The dossier says the end of the 9th century or the start of the 10th. Odisha Tourism credits Queen Hiradevi with building it, and the dossier places her in the Bhauma-Kara dynasty. Dehejia observes that no inscription ties the temple to any ruler and that the Bhauma-Kara line had stopped reigning by 840. The dossier adds that an 11th-century Odia text, the Ekamrachandrika, lists Hirapur among the Shakti sites of Ekamra, the old name of Bhubaneswar. Bhubaneswar’s other early monuments include the Udayagiri and Khandagiri caves.

Ranipur-Jharial, in Balangir district, crowns a rocky hill. It is about 50 feet across with 64 niches, and Dehejia describes every Yogini as dancing in the same stance, the karana that begins a set of classical dance movements. A dancing Shiva with three faces and eight arms stands in the central pavilion, an arrangement she calls apparently new. She counted 14 animal-headed Yoginis, among them a cat, a buffalo and an antelope. Dehejia places the hill in territory held by the early Somavamsi kings but says no direct evidence links them to the temple. A Shiva temple at the foot of the hill, built by an ascetic named Gaganashiva, carries an inscription that she does not connect to the Yogini temple.

Mitaoli, the hilltop ring near Gwalior

The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) lists the Ekattarso Mahadeva temple at Mitaoli in Morena district as a hilltop circular cloister on a high plinth, with small cells that each have an open, pillared porch and a circular shrine facing east at the centre. Every cell and the central shrine now hold a Shivalinga. The ASI page says a recent study identified the building as a Chausath Yogini temple, and that each cell once had a tower that was made flat-roofed during conservation. Dehejia found that none of the lingas is original and that no Yogini image from the cells can be traced.

The count of cells differs. The dossier says 64 chambers. Dehejia counted 65, with a specially decorated door on the 37th, and suggested the extra one held an image of the goddess Devi herself, with the 64 Yoginis around Shiva.

The ASI page cites an inscription dated Vikrama samvat 1380 (AD 1323) that names Maharaja Devapala as the builder. Dehejia gives the Kachchhapaghata king Devapala’s reign as 1055 to 1075, and she reconciles the two dates by reading the damaged inscription as a record of construction by Devapala and his queen to which the 1323 date was added about 250 years later, probably to mark a donation. She also records a Hindi inscription of Vikrama samvat 1560 (AD 1503), which shows worship was still going on in the time of Raja Man Singh of Gwalior. The dossier gives the 11th century and the Gurjara-Pratihara dynasty, and adds in a note that the Kachchhapaghatas were originally vassals of the Gurjara-Pratiharas and the Chandelas.

The dossier also credits the temple with stone roof slabs pierced to drain rain into an underground tank, and with surviving earthquake shocks in Seismic Zone III. Both statements come from the dossier alone, since neither the ASI page nor Dehejia mentions them. Mitaoli sits in the same district as the temples described in the Bateshwar, Padavali and Kakanmath article, which notes it as a separate Yogini tradition.

Bhedaghat and Khajuraho

At Bhedaghat, on a hill above the Narmada near Jabalpur, the ASI page says 84 pillars form the circle, three gaps serve as entrances and 81 spaces hold a figure each. Dehejia gives the diameter as 125 feet, the largest of the Yogini temples, and the dossier gives 124. The Matottara Tantra says worship of the 81 Yoginis is meant for royalty, and Dehejia takes that to suggest the temple was a royal foundation, in territory ruled by the Kalachuri dynasty. The dossier dates it to the 10th century. The ASI page lists a protection notification dated 22 November 1911. The dossier says 64 sculptures stand within the 81 cells, so the ASI and the dossier give different counts of the figures. The original central shrine is gone, and Dehejia describes a Gauri-Shankar temple, standing off centre, that took its place centuries ago.

Khajuraho’s Yogini temple is the rectangular one, built of granite on a low mound apart from the main group, which the Khajuraho guide covers. The dossier says it was built in the late 9th century under the Chandelas, on a platform 5.4 m high, with 65 cells in a 103 by 60 foot rectangle, of which 35 survive. Dehejia also counts 65, with 32 equal cells on each side of a larger central one, and notes that every cell is empty. From the carving style of three Yogini slabs photographed in 1955, she suggests a date nearer the middle of the 10th century.

Goddesses that travelled, and one that came home

At Lokhari, in Banda district of Uttar Pradesh, the dossier records 20 Yogini images, nearly all with animal heads: horse, cow, rabbit, snake, buffalo, goat, bear and deer. It also lists a rabbit-faced Yogini, not found in other Yogini groups. It dates the set to the first half of the 10th century.

A goat-headed Yogini from Lokhari was taken from the temple in the 1980s. The Press Information Bureau says it surfaced briefly on the London art market in 1988, and that in October 2021 the Indian High Commission heard of a matching sculpture in the garden of a private home near London. The India Pride Project of Singapore and Art Recovery International of London helped identify and recover it, and the High Commission received it on Makar Sankranti in January 2022 and sent it to the ASI in New Delhi. The same release records that a buffalo-headed Vrishanana Yogini from the Lokhari temple was recovered by the Indian Embassy in Paris in 2013 and installed in the National Museum in September 2013. Deccan Herald reported on 10 August 2022 that the ASI had placed the goat-headed Yogini in its Purana Qila museum and planned to exhibit it.

Kaveripakkam, in Ranipet district of Tamil Nadu, is the one southern entry. No trace of its temple remains. The dossier infers brick walls on stone foundations, in the manner of surviving brick temples such as the ones at Uttiramerur, and says Yogini images of about 900 AD from the site are now in the British Museum, the Madras Museum and museums in Brooklyn, Minneapolis, Detroit and Toronto. The Smithsonian’s record says the sculptures were found in 1925 and shipped to Paris in 1926 and 1927 through the dealer C. T. Loo and Company, and dates its own piece to the Chola period, late 9th to mid-10th century. Museums disagree on the size of the set: the Nelson-Atkins gallery label says 11 sculptures are known, the Smithsonian says the temple held at least 14, and the Royal Ontario Museum says its Yogini was accompanied by at least fifteen others.

Where the sources differ

Dates run across a range. Hatley says mainly the tenth to twelfth century, the dossier says the 9th to the 12th, and Dehejia writes that the earliest Yogini temple is a sandstone circle of the second half of the 9th century.

Popular accounts say Mitaoli inspired India’s Parliament House. The Lok Sabha Secretariat’s own account says the building was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and Sir Herbert Baker, with its foundation stone laid on 12 February 1921 and the opening on 18 January 1927. Neither that document, the ASI page, the dossier nor Dehejia makes the link to Mitaoli, and no source opened for this article does.

The dossier’s figure for Mitaoli, a radius of 170 feet (52 m), is hard to square with Dehejia’s statement that 125-foot Bhedaghat is the largest Yogini temple, so this article leaves the size out.

Visiting and protection

The ASI circle pages for Mitaoli and Bheraghat both list no entry fee. They are archived copies of unknown date, so check locally. The Mitaoli page gives Gwalior as the nearest airport and Morena as the nearest station, and lists its notification under Act No. LXXI of 1951, dated 28 November 1951. Odisha Tourism lists Hirapur as open from 6 am to 6 pm with no entry fee, with October to March the best season, as checked on 5 November 2026.

The dossier says local people, especially women, still visit the temples at Khajuraho, Jabalpur, Morena, Hirapur and Ranipur every year at Navratri. It also calls for a more complete management plan for the group, with regular monitoring of structural stability and of the carvings. The UNESCO page still showed the group as a Tentative List entry on 5 November 2026, the stage before a full nomination.