Mahalakshmi Temple

The Mahalakshmi Temple, also called the Ambabai Mandir, is the great shrine of Kolhapur in southern Maharashtra, dedicated to Mahalakshmi, the consort of Vishnu. Local legend tells that the goddess slew the demon Kolhasur, whose dying wish gave the city its name. The shrine was counted among the principal Shakti Peethas.

The temple is said to have been built in 634 by the Chalukya king Karnadeva. The historian Paul Dundas, following the twelfth-century poet Brahmashiva, argues that it began as a Jain temple of the tirthankara Chandraprabha and was converted to Hindu worship amid medieval religious tensions.

Its black-stone image of the crowned goddess stands before a stone lion with a Shri Yantra carved on the wall behind. In 1707 the Maratha queen Tarabai made Kolhapur the capital of her own state, and the temple remained the spiritual centre of the kingdom.