0102621 Mamleshwar Temple, Amareshwar mandir, Omkareshwar Madhya Pradesh 023

The Mamleshwar temple, also known as Amareshwara or Amaleshwar mandir, is a complex of historic temples located in Godarpura across from Mandhata, on the southern bank of the Narmada river. This temple hosts the second Jyotirlinga of Omkareshwar, and one of the only twelve on the Indian subcontinent. Like the other Jyotirlinga on the Mandhata island, this complex too is from the 11th-century, one abandoned after the destruction during the Sultanate era, then rebuilt by Holkar-Maratha Hindus in the 18th-century. The contributions of Rani Ahilyabai are of particular note.

The site consists of one main temple which hosts the Jyotirlinga, along with subsidiary shrines that surround it. The temple mandapa has walls with panels of Shaiva, Vaishnava and Shakta artwork. Similarly the doorway to the sanctum is beautifully carved with Hindu art. The Mamleshwar temple has the Halayudhastotra inscriptions, which the Indologist and epigraphist Richard Salomon calls, "a little known masterpiece". The Halayudhastotra praises Shiva and includes a date in Vikram Samvat equivalent to 1063 CE, thus providing a date for this temple. This poetic inscription on a south wall of the ardhamandapa, is followed by Mahimnastava and Narmadastotra inscriptions from the 11th-century. There are other inscriptions on the north wall too. Further, it is likely that the much cherished Hindu text and famed Devi Mahatmya of Durga Puja fame was composed in the Mamleshwar temple complex and the Hindu temples on the Mandhata island. Given the more ancient date of this Sanskrit text, this site must have had an earlier temple-monastery before mid-1st millennium.

For further scholarly discussions, see (a) Jurgen Neuss (2013), Omkaresvar Mandhata, Tracing the Forgotten History of a Popular Place, Berlin Indological Studies, pp. 115–129; (b) J Forsyth, Mandhata, in The Gazetteer of the Central Provinces of India (editor: Charles Grant), pp. 257–264.