Sixteen kilometres east of Palampur, on the road towards Bir, the town of Baijnath is arranged around a stone temple that has been in continuous worship for more than eight hundred years.

It is dedicated to Shiva as Vaidyanath — the lord of physicians — and its inscriptions date its construction to 1204 AD, under two local merchants named Manyuka and Ahuka. That makes it one of the oldest working temples in the western Himalaya.

Why the building matters

It is a Nagara-style temple in dressed stone: a square sanctum under a curvilinear tower, with a pillared porch in front, carved over almost every surface with figures, foliage and geometric bands.

The remarkable part is that it is still here. On 4 April 1905 an earthquake estimated at magnitude 7.8 struck Kangra, killing around twenty thousand people and levelling most of the district’s built fabric. Baijnath temple survived largely intact — a fact that locals will tell you about, and that gives the place a weight beyond its architecture.

An earthquake in 1905 destroyed most of Kangra district. This temple, then seven hundred years old, stayed up.

Visiting

  • Open daily, morning to evening. There is no ticket.
  • Shoes come off before you enter the compound. Photography of the exterior is normally fine; inside the sanctum, ask.
  • Cover shoulders and knees. This is a working place of worship, not a monument.
  • Shivratri, in February or March, brings a substantial fair and large crowds. Every bed in town fills.
  • The Binwa stream runs behind the town, and the Dhauladhar sits directly north — the setting does a lot of the work.

Making a day of it

Baijnath pairs naturally with Bir, twenty minutes further east, and the two together make the obvious day out from Palampur. Paprola, adjoining Baijnath, is the terminus of the Kangra Valley narrow-gauge railway — arriving by train and walking to the temple is the best version of this trip.

Tashi Jong, the Tibetan settlement around Khampagar Monastery, is a short detour and makes a striking contrast: a thirteenth-century Hindu stone temple and a twentieth-century Tibetan Buddhist community within a few kilometres of each other.

Staying nearby

Baijnath and Paprola are cheaper and quieter than Bir, and considerably quieter than Palampur town. They suit anyone arriving by rail, anyone visiting for Shivratri, and anyone who finds Bir in flying season too busy.

The trade-off is that these are working market towns rather than tourist ones. There is little to do after dark, and the highway runs through — ask which side of the building your room is on.

Written by the Palampur Properties team in the Kangra valley. If something here is wrong or out of date, tell us — we would rather fix it than defend it.