Grishneshwar stands in the village of Verul in the district long called Aurangabad and renamed Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, in Maharashtra, a short walk from the rock-cut caves of Ellora and a short drive from the fort hill of Devagiri, later Daulatabad. It is twelfth and last in the order this set follows, and it is conventionally described as the smallest of the twelve — a modest structural temple with a great deal of history pressed up against it. Its story is unusual among the twelve in being domestic rather than cosmic: no demon, no war, no river brought down, but a household of four, a jealousy inside it, a child killed, and a woman whose worship did not break. The shrine carries her name. The Ellora caves next door are a separate and much older rock-cut complex, excavated over centuries and including the monolithic Kailasa temple; the two sit within sight of each other and are routinely merged in popular writing, but they are not the same monument and this corpus keeps them apart.

Claims, and where they come from

• Ghushmesha is one of the twelve jyotirlingas, twelfth and last in the order this set follows. — Shiva Purana — Koti Rudra Samhita, ch. 1 — the dvadasha-jyotirlinga list
• A brahmin and his wife, childless, brought her younger sister Ghushma into the household as a second wife. Ghushma worshipped Shiva daily in lingams she made of clay and set down in a tank, and she bore a son. The elder sister, watching her own position pass to the younger, killed the boy and put the body in that same tank. Ghushma, told of it, did not break off her worship; and when she went to the tank the child came back to her from it. Shiva appeared, and would have destroyed the elder sister; Ghushma asked instead that her sister be spared, and asked Shiva to remain there. He stayed, as Ghushmeshwara, and the shrine carries her name rather than his own epithet. — Shiva Purana — Koti Rudra Samhita — the Ghushmesha account. The outline above is the account as it is standardly told, but no edition could be checked from the session that drafted this file, and the incidental detail varies between retellings: the personal names of the husband and the elder sister, the number of lingams Ghushma made each day, whether the household stands on the hill of Devagiri, and how Shiva is turned from punishing the sister. Those particulars are therefore not asserted here
• The shrine is known by several names — Grishneshwar, Ghrneshwar, Ghushmeshwar and Kusumeshwara among them — and the tradition explains every one of them as the woman's name carried into the god's. — Temple tradition and common usage — That the shrine is named for her is the tradition's own account of itself. The philological question of how the modern spelling Grishneshwar relates to the Ghushma of the Purana, and whether Kusuma and Ghushma are one name or two, is NOT settled here — no source could be consulted from this session — and is put to the reader in `ask` instead of being answered
• The temple standing today is a Maratha-era structure of dressed stone, not an ancient fabric; its rebuilding is credited to Maloji Bhosale in the sixteenth century and to Ahilyabai Holkar, who rebuilt or endowed shrines across the subcontinent, in the eighteenth. — Regional historical tradition and modern record — Recorded because it changes what a visitor actually sees. Both attributions are widely repeated and neither was checked here against an inscription, a grant or an archaeological report; the Bhosale attribution also rides on Verul being the ancestral village of that family, which is regional tradition rather than a document read for this file. No construction dates, dimensions or patron titles are given because none could be verified
• The Ellora caves beside the village are a separate monument: a rock-cut complex of Buddhist, Hindu and Jain excavations, centuries older than the standing temple, including the monolithic Kailasa temple cut downward out of the hillside. Grishneshwar is a structural temple near them, not one of them. — Archaeological record — Stated as a separation rather than as a description. The dating, patronage and sequence of the caves belong to the archaeological literature and are not summarised here; what this corpus asserts is only that the two monuments are distinct, because popular accounts of the jyotirlinga routinely borrow the caves' antiquity for the temple
• Entry to the sanctum is governed by a dress practice: men are asked to remove the upper garment before going in for darshan. — Current temple practice at Grishneshwar — Living practice, not scripture, and the kind of rule that is tightened, relaxed or restated by the administration without notice. Recorded here because a pilgrim meets it at the door; it should be confirmed locally before travel rather than taken from this file

Counted among

• The Twelve Jyotirlingas — Twelve places where Shiva is worshipped not as an image but as a pillar of light with no beginning and no end.

Questions to explore

• The eleven other jyotirlingas are named for a god, a sage or a place. This one is named for a woman who lost a child and kept worshipping. Why did the tradition let her name stand?
• Grishneshwar, Ghrneshwar, Ghushmeshwar, Kusumeshwara — how did one shrine come by four names, and which of them is the oldest?
• Ghushma asks Shiva to spare the sister who killed her son. Is that forgiveness, or is it the price of getting him to stay?