Jhandewalan Temple

Jhandewalan Mandir in Delhi is a Hindu temple to Vaishno Devi, founded in the 19th century by Badri Das, known as Badri Bhagat, a cloth merchant of Chandni Chowk. He used to meditate on what was then a quiet hill on the Delhi Ridge, with fruit trees and a spring. It is said that after repeated dreams of a buried shrine he dug beside a little waterfall and came upon an ancient idol of the goddess far inside a cave. Its hands broke during the digging, so he left it in place and set a new idol directly above it, raising a large jhanda, or flag, on the hill so the shrine could be seen from afar.

The flag gave the temple its name, and the upper temple's goddess is Jhandewali Mata, also called Sheranwali locally. In 1944 his grandson Shyam Sundar set up a society to manage it. Once in Ram Bagh and now hemmed in by urban growth, it remains a major religious centre, busiest during the Navratras.