12 rajasthan temples nobody writes about in english (2026): from the rat temple to a shrine for a motorcycle

tldr: rajasthan’s tourist temple list is four items long — dilwara, ranakpur, karni mata, brahma at pushkar. its actual temple economy is somewhere else entirely. sanwariya seth at mandphia counted rs 40.33 crore from a single vault opening on 19 november 2025 and typically takes rs 26 to 27 crore a month, and there is no real english page about it. om banna is a shrine to a motorcycle and one video about it has 19.4 million views. karni mata’s rats are not generic sacred rats, they are specifically charan ancestors, which every listicle omits. kaila devi’s devotees prostrate the last 15 to 20km to the temple, in english, nowhere. and rani sati in jhunjhunu cannot legally glorify the thing it was built to commemorate. twelve temples, ranked by how interesting they are against how little exists about them.

the list nobody has written

if you plan a rajasthan trip in english you will be sent to four temples. dilwara, for the marble. ranakpur, for the pillars. karni mata, for the rats. brahma at pushkar, for the claim that it is the only one — which is not true, and the correction is further down this page.

meanwhile a temple in chittorgarh district opens a cash vault eleven times a year and counts tens of crores out of it, with two hundred people doing the counting, because traders across india have formally made the deity a business partner. a highway shrine to a 1988 royal enfield draws millions of views and no practical page. a temple in karauli hosts a fortnight-long fair where people arrive having prostrated themselves for twenty kilometres, and the english internet does not know it happens.

this is that list, ranked by interest against coverage gap rather than by fame — which is why the most famous entry is near the bottom and the one you have never heard of is at the top.

the awards

best overall, and the only one on this list that is both famous and as good as claimed: ranakpur. 1,444 carved marble pillars, no two alike, and the number is countable rather than promotional. 9.5/10.

most misunderstood: karni mata. the rats are somebody’s grandparents. that is the whole belief and almost nobody explains it. 9/10.

strangest: om banna. it is a motorcycle, behind glass, garlanded, with liquor bottles at its feet. 7/10 as a stop, and it is not a trip.

best story: tanot mata. unexploded pakistani shells in a museum inside the temple compound, and a bsf garrison running the place. 8.5/10.

richest, by an enormous margin: sanwariya seth. rs 26 to 27 crore a month into a box. 8/10 as a visit, 10/10 as a story.

hardest to time: eklingji. three narrow windows, no phones allowed inside at all, and 22km out of udaipur. 8.5/10 if you get the hour right and 0/10 if you do not.

best if you want to be the only outsider there: osian, and kaila devi outside mela season. 8/10 and 7.5/10.

the hardest section on this page: rani sati, jhunjhunu. 7/10 as a building and a genuinely difficult thing to write about honestly.

most overrated on this list: none of them, and that is the point. the overrated rajasthan temples are the ones already on every list.

the comparison table

1. sanwariya seth, mandphia, chittorgarh

the pitch: india’s richest temple that nobody outside rajasthan has heard of.

it is at mandphia village on the chittorgarh to udaipur road, 41km from chittorgarh railway station and about 65km from dabok airport at udaipur. the deity is krishna, worshipped as sanwaliya ji or sanwariya seth — the seth of seths, the merchant of merchants. darshan runs roughly 5.30am to 12pm and 2.30 to 11pm, closed in between. entry is free and the trust takes online donations with a receipt.

the number. the bhet peti, the donation vault, is opened eleven times a year — monthly, except that it is two months after diwali and a month and a half after holi. the opening on 19 november 2025 was reported at rs 40.33 crore, counted after five of six counting stages, with counting still under way and gold, silver, coins and foreign currency all still uncounted at the time of the report. a typical month brings rs 26 to 27 crore. roughly 200 staff do the counting.

why it makes that money, which is the actual story. traders across india and abroad make sanwariya seth a formal partner in their business and deposit a fixed share of their profits into the vault. it is not devotion in the abstract — it is a contractual arrangement with a deity, honoured at scale, by people whose businesses depend on their word being good. that mechanism is fascinating and it is completely unwritten in english.

the origin, from 1840: a cowherd named bholaram dreamt of three krishna idols buried at chhapar in bagund village. they dug and found three statues — one went to mandphia, one to bhadsoda, one stayed at chhapar, three temples within a 5km radius.

honest note: the building is not architecturally remarkable and you are not going for it. you are going for the atmosphere of a place that functions as a national business shrine. it is described as the second most important vaishnav pilgrimage in the region after shrinathji. best months october to march. 8/10.

2. om banna, chotila, pali

the pitch: a shrine to a motorcycle, on a highway, where people leave whisky.

near chotila village on the pali to jodhpur highway, about 50km from jodhpur. free, roadside, always open.

om singh rathore crashed and died at the spot in 1988, riding a royal enfield bullet 350, registration RNJ 7773. police impounded the bike. the tradition is that it kept returning to the crash site — taken back to the station, found back at the tree — and after this had happened more than once the police stopped trying, and a shrine grew up around the bike where it stood.

say the honest thing about it: this is a modern legend, roughly 38 years old, with no documentary record of the returning-bike incidents. that does not make the shrine less real — it makes it a folk deity that formed inside living memory, with the object it formed around still sitting there.

what it is now is a small enclosure holding the bike, garlanded, behind glass. truckers, bikers and bus passengers stop for a safe-journey blessing. offerings include flowers, incense, red threads and small bottles of liquor, which makes it unlike every other entry here.

practical: it is a ten-minute stop on the jodhpur to udaipur or pali drive and there is no reason to make a special trip. one video about it has 19.4 million views and an english one has 5.53 million, which makes it the highest-curiosity, lowest-served item on this list — but curiosity is not a destination. 7/10 as a stop.

3. karni mata, deshnoke, bikaner

the pitch: the one on every weird-places listicle, and nobody has written the actual guide.

deshnoke, about 30km south of bikaner on the bikaner to jodhpur road. 4am to 10pm daily, mangla aarti at 4am and evening aarti at sunset. entry free, still camera rs 20, video camera rs 50, seva bookings at the counter roughly 5am to 7pm.

here is what every listicle leaves out. the rats are kabbas. the tradition is that members of the charan community do not go to yama’s kingdom when they die — they wait in the body of a kabba at deshnoke before being reborn into the charan lineage. the rats are ancestors. specific ones, of a specific community, waiting. that is the entire belief and calling them “sacred rats” without saying whose they are turns a coherent theology into a freak show.

the details that follow from it: a white kabba is the rare one, associated with karni mata and her four sons, and seeing one is held to be extremely auspicious. stepping on a rat is considered very bad and the traditional remedy involves donating a silver or gold rat. eating food a rat has nibbled is considered a blessing, including the milk — that is a real practice, you are under no obligation, and there is a genuine hygiene consideration. both halves of that are true and you should hear both.

you go barefoot. the floor is what the floor is. socks are a widely used compromise and the temple does not forbid them. the population is commonly cited at 20,000 to 25,000, which is unverifiable and should be treated as a claim. the silver entrance gates and marble facade were added by maharaja ganga singh of bikaner.

best time: 5 to 7am. the rats are most active after the morning feed, the temple is empty and it is cool. getting there: a train from bikaner junction to deshnok takes about 35 minutes with several services a day, or a taxi in 30 to 40 minutes.

9/10 for singularity, with a fair warning that a meaningful number of visitors find it genuinely hard and there is no shame in turning around at the courtyard.

4. tanot mata, jaisalmer

the pitch: a temple run by the border security force, with unexploded pakistani bombs in the museum.

tanot village, about 120km north-west of jaisalmer, roughly two hours by road. founded 828 AD by the bhati rajput king tanu rao. the deity is tanot mata, also called aavad mata, a charan warrior-sage in the same tradition that later produced karni mata — which links this entry to the last one in a way nobody points out. managed by the border security force since after 1965. entry free.

1965: during the indo-pakistan war, the standard account holds that around 3,000 bombs and shells were fired at or around the temple and none that landed in the complex detonated. that figure appears in wikipedia and in mainstream retellings, so treat it as the standard account rather than a verified count. what you can actually go and look at is several unexploded shells displayed in the museum inside the temple compound, which is a considerably more concrete thing than the number.

1971: attacked again. pakistani armour bogged down in the sand near longewala and the air force finished the job — 120 indian soldiers against a force of roughly 2,000 with tanks. the army built a vijay stambh in the temple compound, and it is commemorated annually on 16 december.

the practical bit nobody writes. tanot is close to the international border and the road runs through a militarily sensitive belt. permits for onward travel to longewala, closing times enforced by the bsf and id checks all change with conditions. do not treat any permit rule you read online as fixed. carry government photo id for every person in the car, check current access with your jaisalmer hotel or the bsf post on the day, and do not plan to still be out there after dark. pair it with longewala, 45km away. the drive through the thar is genuinely part of it. 8.5/10.

5. kaila devi, karauli

the pitch: a month-long fair with a ritual where people prostrate themselves for twenty kilometres, and not one english page about it.

kailadevi village, 23km south-west of karauli. roughly 4am to 8pm, aartis at 7am and 7pm, free. nearest station gangapur city at 35km; jaipur airport is about 160km. the deity is kaila devi, a form of the goddess and the kachhwaha clan deity.

the lakkha mela runs through the krishna paksha of chaitra, starting from the twelfth day of chaitra badi — march or april — for a full fortnight. lakkha because attendance is counted in lakhs.

kanak dandauti is the reason this entry is here. devotees cover the last 15 to 20km to the temple not on foot but by prostrating full length on the ground: lie down, mark a line at your fingertips, stand, walk to the line, lie down again. repeat. it takes days. people arrive at the temple having measured the last twenty kilometres of road with their own bodies.

it is one of the most extraordinary things happening anywhere in rajasthan and it has no english coverage at all. i am describing it plainly and without embellishment because it does not need any.

pair it with karauli town itself, which has a red sandstone city palace worth an hour, and madan mohan ji below. 7.5/10, and higher if you time the mela.

6. rani sati dadi, jhunjhunu

the pitch: one of india’s wealthiest temples, dedicated to a woman who committed sati, and legally constrained from saying so.

this is the hardest entry on this page and it is the reason the page is worth writing.

the temple is in jhunjhunu, in shekhawati. memorial mounds came first; the shrine was inaugurated in 1912 and the larger complex, begun in 1917, was completed in 1936. the figure commemorated is rani sati, also called narayani devi or dadiji, a rajasthani woman said to have lived somewhere between the 13th and 17th centuries who committed sati on her husband’s death. it is the principal kuldevi shrine of the marwari and agarwal community, which is where the money comes from. the festivals are bhadra amavasya and mangsir badi navami.

the legal position, which most write-ups dodge entirely:

• the commission of sati (prevention) act, 1987 criminalises not only sati itself but its glorification.
• the collector and district magistrate of jhunjhunu banned glorification of sati anywhere in the district under that act.
• a contempt petition was subsequently filed alleging that the order was being violated at the temple, citing a yagya held on the premises and pamphlets glorifying sati being sold and distributed.
• as a consequence, the temple today presents dadiji as a figure of shakti rather than of sati, and there is no image of the immolation in the shrine.

i am going to state that and leave it there. i am not going to celebrate sati, and i am not going to sneer at the hundreds of thousands of marwari families for whom this is their kuldevi and their family’s central shrine. the tension between those two things is real and it does not resolve, and pretending otherwise would be the dishonest move in either direction.

architecturally it is a very large, very colourful marble complex with extensive mirror and mural work, and it is the most impressive building in jhunjhunu. pair it with the shekhawati haveli circuit — mandawa, nawalgarh, fatehpur. 7/10.

7. eklingji, kailashpuri, udaipur

the pitch: the actual ruler of mewar. the maharana is only the regent.

kailashpuri, 22km north of udaipur on the nathdwara road. the deity is eklingji, a four-faced black marble shiva and the tutelary deity of the mewar dynasty. founded in the 8th century by bappa rawal, with the present structure largely 15th century under rana raimal. free.

the single best fact about the place: the maharana of mewar rules as diwan, regent, of eklingji. the god is the sovereign of mewar and the human ruler holds the office on his behalf. that is not a poetic flourish, it is the constitutional theory of the state. the maharana traditionally visits on monday evenings.

and the practical story is the timings. roughly 4.30 to 7am, 10.30am to 1.30pm and 5 to 7.30pm — three narrow windows, tightly enforced, 22km out of udaipur. get the hour wrong and you have driven 44km for a closed gate, which is exactly the sort of thing the aggregator pages bury three-quarters of the way down. photography is strictly prohibited and mobile phones are not permitted inside at all, so leave the phone in the car rather than discovering this at the door. 8.5/10 if you time it.

8. nathdwara shrinathji, rajsamand

the pitch: the temple where you cannot simply walk in and see the god.

nathdwara, 48km north of udaipur. the deity is shrinathji, krishna as a seven-year-old lifting govardhan, and this is the principal shrine of the pushtimarg. the image was moved from vrindavan in the 1670s to escape aurangzeb, and tradition says the cart’s wheels sank at this spot and it was taken as the deity’s own choice of address. entry free, with paid and vip slots existing through the trust.

the jhanki system is the whole practical payload. there are eight jhankis a day. mangala roughly 5.30 to 6.30am, shringar around 7.15am, gwal mid-morning, rajbhog around 11.15am, then uthapan, bhog and sandhya through the afternoon with sandhya aarti around 5.15pm, and shayan at night. the doors open, you get a window, the doors close. you cannot turn up between jhankis and you cannot pay your way in late.

print the caveat loudly: jhanki times shift with season, with festivals and with the deity’s schedule, and every aggregator lists them differently. check the trust’s own notice on the day. that sentence is worth more than the table above it.

also here: the 369-foot shiva statue, vishwas swaroopam, completed in 2022 and 8km from the temple, which is where a lot of the recent traffic comes from. stays are reported in the range rs 350 to 3,500. nathdwara is also the home of pichwai painting, an entire art form built around shrinathji imagery, and its thal and prasad culture is a real reason to eat there. 8/10, and it deserves a post of its own. do eklingji and nathdwara as one morning — same road, 25km apart, the standard udaipur day trip.

9. ranakpur jain temple, pali

short section, deliberately — this one is genuinely well covered and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

ranakpur, pali district, about 90km from udaipur and 160km from jodhpur. dedicated to adinath, the first tirthankara. 15th century, under rana kumbha. 1,444 carved marble pillars, no two alike.

darshan is free for devotees, with the tourist window roughly noon to 5pm because mornings and evenings belong to worship. morning darshan for devotees runs 6.30am to noon, with aarti around 5pm. lockers around rs 10, a charge for professional cameras, and photography permitted in fixed hours.

the rule that catches people out constantly: no leather inside. any leather. belts, wallets, camera straps, not just shoes. also barred: cigarettes and food. menstruating women are traditionally not permitted and the rule is posted at the entrance.

the honest angle: ranakpur is the one temple on this list that lives up to its billing. 1,444 is not a marketing number, it is a countable fact, and the light coming through that forest of pillars in the middle of the afternoon means the noon-to-5 tourist window is the best time rather than a restriction. 9.5/10, and there is nothing more to say about it that has not been said.

10. osian, jodhpur

the pitch: 8th-century temple ruins in the desert, and almost nobody stops.

osiyan village, 65km north of jodhpur, an hour and a half to two hours. it holds a cluster of hindu and jain temples from the 8th to 12th centuries — the largest early-medieval temple group in western rajasthan. the key ones are the sachiya mata temple, with an 8th-century core and a 12th-century structure, the mahavira jain temple from the 8th century, the surya temple, and the harihara temples, which are pratihara-period and are the real thing. several are asi-protected. entry at sachiya mata is free and the jain temple runs sunrise to sunset.

this is the oldest serious temple architecture in rajasthan and it sits directly on the jodhpur to jaisalmer road, which is to say every tour bus in the state drives past it on the way to a camel camp. most visitors to osian go for the desert camps and never see the temples. pair it with the camps, and with khichan further along, where the demoiselle cranes winter. 8/10.

11. madan mohan ji, karauli

the pitch: a deity that moved house twice, and the second move is the story.

karauli town, in the same district cluster as kaila devi and 23km from it, which makes the pair a natural day. the image of madan mohan ji travelled vrindavan to jaipur to karauli — and the question of why it left jaipur for a smaller town, in the tradition, involves a princess and a marriage, which is exactly the shape of question people search for and nobody in english has answered.

it is karauli’s principal temple and the town around it is red sandstone, with a city palace worth an hour. hindi coverage is substantial — three separate videos in the 60,000 to 125,000 range. english coverage is a line in a listicle, if that.

7.5/10, and it is the right second stop after kaila devi rather than a destination on its own.

12. kolayat, bikaner

the pitch: a mela at a desert lake that locals call bikaner’s kumbh.

kolayat, near bikaner, built around a lake and the shrine of the sage kapil muni. the kartik purnima mela here is framed locally as bikaner’s kumbh — a cattle fair, a lamp-lighting on the water and a mass bathing, in the middle of the thar.

there is essentially nothing about it in english and only modest hindi coverage, which is the definition of what this page is looking for. kartik purnima 2026 falls on tuesday 24 november, the same day as pushkar’s — which means the two biggest kartik purnima events in rajasthan happen on the same date, 300km apart, and you have to choose.

7/10, and higher if the mela is the reason you came.

if you are going deeper

• baba ramdev at ramdevra, 12km north of pokhran — a 14th-century rajput ruler worshipped as a folk deity by hindus and muslims together, muslims knowing him as ramshah pir. the bhadva mela, listed on the ministry of tourism’s festival calendar, falls in september, with tens of thousands walking there on foot in organised jathas along highways lined with volunteer camps. outside the mela it is a quiet village temple and a thirty-minute stop.
• harsh bhairavnath, sikar — the brother’s peak from the jeen mata story.
• chamunda mata, jodhpur, inside mehrangarh — and the 2008 stampede there, which is a sobering crowd-safety story and deserves one honest line rather than being quietly dropped from the guidebooks.
• brahma temples that are not pushkar: asotra in barmer and chhinch in banswara, plus several in south india. the “only brahma temple in the world” claim is wrong and it makes these invisible.
• dilwara, mount abu — the only jain temples that beat ranakpur, and the strictest photography ban in the state.

the verdict

if you have one day and you want the best building: ranakpur. 9.5/10. it is famous, it is on every list, and it is as good as they say.

if you want the most interesting hour: karni mata at 5am. 9/10. go early, understand what you are looking at before you walk in, and do not eat anything you do not want to eat.

if you want the best story: tanot mata. 8.5/10. a temple garrisoned by the bsf with a museum of shells that did not go off.

if you want to understand something about india that a fort will not tell you: sanwariya seth. 8/10. twenty-six crore a month, deposited by traders who wrote a god into their books as a partner.

and the thing worth saying at the end of a list like this: none of these are overrated. the overrated rajasthan temples are the four everybody already visits, and even those are mostly fine. what is wrong with the english record on rajasthan is not that it praises the wrong places. it is that it has only heard of four of them.

related

• the mandir index — every temple guide on this site
• pushkar guide — the brahma temple, the ghat pricing problem, and the “only one in the world” correction
• mehandipur balaji and jeen mata — the other two rajasthan temples with no english coverage
• khole ke hanuman ji, jaipur — 24 kitchens and a ropeway
• the khatu shyam circuit — the pilgrimage loop that actually works
• best dal baati churma in rajasthan
• tirupati darshan, honestly

timings and fees on this page come from a mix of official, news and community sources and several of them are the best available rather than the definitive version. the ones i would check on the day rather than trust from here are the eklingji windows, the nathdwara jhankis, and current access rules for tanot.