Ahilyabai Holkar Built the Present Kashi Vishwanath Temple in 1780, Added a New Shrine at Somnath in 1783 and Raised Indore From a Village to a City, and India Marked Her 300th Birth Anniversary on 31 May 2025

Ahilyabai Holkar ruled the Holkar state of Malwa from 1767 to 1795, and the record credits her with the Kashi Vishwanath temple that stands in Varanasi today, a new temple beside the ruins at Somnath, the Vishnupad temple at Gaya, the city of Indore and the riverfront at Maheshwar. On 31 May 2025, her 300th birth anniversary, the Government of India issued a postage stamp and a Rs 300 coin in her name at Bhopal.

Each claim below is tied to the page that makes it, because the pages do not all say the same thing.

A widow who warned the Peshwa’s uncle not to make war on a woman

The Press Information Bureau (PIB), the government’s press office, gives her birth as 31 May 1725 at Chondi in Jamkhed, in what is now Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra. Her father, Mankoji Shinde, was the village head and taught her to read and write. In 1733, PIB says, Malhar Rao Holkar married her to his son Khanderao. Sir John Malcolm, the British officer who questioned Holkar servants in Central India after 1818 and published his memoir in 1823, records that Khanderao was killed at the siege of Kumher in 1754.

Malhar Rao, who had fought at Panipat in 1761, died in the mid-1760s. Her son Male Rao came to the throne and died nine months later. Malcolm describes what followed. The Holkar minister Gangadhar Yeshwant proposed adopting a distant relative as heir, with a pension for her, and Raghunath Rao, the uncle of the Peshwa (the Maratha head of state), agreed for a gift. Ahilyabai told the minister that the plan disgraced the house of Holkar and that, as wife and mother of the last two heirs, she alone had the right to choose a successor.

When she heard that Raghunath Rao was preparing to force the matter, she sent him a message advising him not to make war on a woman, since it could bring him disgrace and never honour. She had four bows with full quivers fitted to the corners of the howdah, the seat on her favourite elephant, to show that she meant to lead her troops herself. Madhaji Shinde and Janoji Bhonsle refused to join Raghunath Rao, and a letter from the Peshwa Madhav Rao told his uncle to stop.

She then named Tukoji Holkar, a soldier of the same clan but no relation to Malhar Rao, as commander of the army. PIB gives 11 December 1767 as the day she took the throne. Between the two of them, Malcolm says, the arrangement lasted more than thirty years without a serious quarrel, that Tukoji called her his mother, and that she was the actual head of the government. Her land policy, her courts and the insurance rates that Malcolm used to judge her reign are covered in an earlier tuput article on her administration.

Kashi: the temple that stands there now

H. R. Nevill’s 1909 Benares gazetteer, a government publication, says “The present temple was built by Ahilya Bai of Indore.” He adds that its large spire is plated with gold leaf over copper, paid for by Maharaja Ranjit Singh of Lahore, and that the earlier shrines on the site were destroyed, the second one by Aurangzeb, who built a mosque from the material. What the Mughal court’s own chronicle records about the 1669 demolition is set out in the Aurangzeb article.

The Shri Kashi Vishwanath Temple Trust’s home page gives the date: constructed in 1780 by Maharani Ahilyabai Holkar of Indore. In its 2025 feature, PIB calls her work at Kashi “renovation and repair” in 1780 and notes that a statue of her has been installed in the temple. At Bhopal in 2025 the Prime Minister credited her with restoring numerous temples across the country, including Kashi Vishwanath, and said he was privileged to serve in Varanasi, where she had undertaken extensive development work.

Nevill also records her mark on the riverfront: a ghat built by her, which he says did much to beautify the city, and a double well near the Assi confluence that she, a Raja of Bihar and Amrit Rao built together. Munshi Ghat was built by her architect, Munshi Sri Dhar. For today’s corridor, the ghats and visiting hours, see the Varanasi ghats guide.

Somnath: a new temple beside the ruins, in 1783

K. M. Munshi writes in his history of the shrine that in 1783 Queen Ahalya Bai of Indore found the old ruins unfit for installing the deity and built a new temple at a little distance from them. To protect it, the linga was placed in a secret underground shrine directly below the upper one.

So she did not rebuild the temple that was consecrated in 1951. She built a separate one next to it. According to PIB’s 2021 release, the Old (Juna) Somnath temple is also called the Ahilyabai Temple because the queen of Indore built it when she found the old temple in ruins. PIB’s 2026 backgrounder says she chose to consecrate a new temple in the eighteenth century, and that President Rajendra Prasad consecrated the present temple on 11 May 1951.

Her temple has a place in that later story. Munshi records that Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel announced the decision to rebuild Somnath on 13 November 1947 at a public meeting held at the Ahalyabai Temple. Its precinct was reconstructed by the Shree Somnath Trust at a cost of Rs 3.5 crore and opened on 20 August 2021, when the Prime Minister remembered her as the queen who renovated several temples from Vishwanath to Somnath.

Gaya and the pilgrim road

L. S. S. O’Malley’s 1906 Gaya gazetteer says the Vishnupad, the great temple at the centre of the Gaya pilgrimage, is a solid structure of grey granite built in the eighteenth century by the Maratha princess Ahalya Bai. It is named for the footprints of Vishnu enshrined inside.

Malcolm supplies the wider map. At the principal places of Hindu pilgrimage, from Jagannath in Cuttack and Dwarka in Gujarat to Kedarnath in the north and Rameswaram in the south, she built holy edifices, maintained establishments and sent yearly sums for charity. Her main structures, he says, were at Gaya, where a figure of her adoring the image of Mahadeva is kept in one of the temples. One of his assistants, Captain T. D. Steuart, travelled to Kedarnath in 1818 and found a stone rest house and a water reservoir built at her expense at a high stage of the climb. She also sent Ganges water, he notes, to wash the images in southern temples. The road to Kedarnath today is covered in the Char Dham article.

Indore and Maheshwar

Malcolm writes that old Indore was a small village whose site pleased Ahilyabai, who camped there after Malhar Rao died. She ordered the district’s head officer to move there from Kampail, built a new city on the other bank of the stream and gave it the same name. He describes Indore as a place she had raised from a village to a wealthy city. Hunter’s Imperial Gazetteer dates the town to about 1770, and says the Holkar court moved to Indore in 1818.

She herself lived at Maheshwar on the Narmada, which Malcolm spells Mhysir. Madhya Pradesh Tourism says she made it her capital in 1767 and that during her 28 years it became an important centre of politics, commerce and art. The same page says Malhar Rao took control of the fort in 1733 and that she rebuilt it to the form it has today, while noting that historians disagree about who first fortified the hill. When Malcolm wrote, a wide flight of stone steps from the town to the river, with temples beside it, was almost finished in her memory.

The looms of Maheshwar

The Ministry of Tourism’s Incredible India page says the Maheshwari sari tradition dates to the eighteenth century, when she patronised and promoted the craft, and lists the fabric as a Geographical Indication product of Madhya Pradesh. Its reversible border, called bugdi, and its borders carry checks and floral designs inspired by the Maheshwar fort and the Narmada. Before the 2025 anniversary, the Ministry of Culture said in a release that she supported women weavers in making Maheshwari saris. At Bhopal the Prime Minister said she invited weaving families from Junagarh in Gujarat to start the craft there 250 to 300 years ago.

The Rehwa Society, a non-profit set up to revive the weave, tells the craft’s recent history. After independence mill cloth took the market and Maheshwar’s weavers fell into neglect. In 1978, Richard and Sally Holkar, both of the Holkar family, were stopped on the ghats by a weaver who asked them to help his people earn again. In 1979 they founded the society with a grant from the Central Welfare Board and Rs 79,000, starting with 12 looms and 12 women trained under the master weaver Ganesh Bichwe. Its building had once housed a temple where Ahilya Devi, the society says, asked Brahmins to pray for her people.

Where the sources part company

The dates differ by a year or two. Malcolm gives 1765 for the start of her administration, and Hunter gives 1765 for Malhar Rao’s death. PIB gives 1766 for Malhar Rao’s death and 11 December 1767 for the day she took the throne. Malcolm says she died in 1795 at sixty, while PIB gives 13 August 1795 at seventy, which fits a 1725 birth. On Kashi, the trust and the gazetteer say she built the present temple, and PIB’s feature says renovation and repair.

The reforms the Prime Minister listed at Bhopal, raising the minimum age of marriage for girls, women’s right to property and widow remarriage, rest on that speech. The pages of Malcolm’s chapter on her reign do not mention these measures, or weaving. Malcolm himself wrote that a reader might fault her for giving Brahmins the largest share of her charity and spending a state’s money on buildings in distant lands. He set against that the reply of a Brahmin who had served at Poona, who asked whether double the spending on an army could have kept the country at peace for over thirty years.

Two personal episodes are in Malcolm too. He heard a rumour that she hastened her son’s death, investigated it closely and concluded it was false. He also records that her daughter Muktabai chose to die as a sati on her husband’s pyre, that Ahilyabai pleaded with her to stay, and that she walked in the procession and stood near the pyre, held up by two Brahmins. Afterwards, Malcolm says, she built a monument to the dead.

The 300th anniversary

On 31 May 2025 the Ministry of Culture and the Madhya Pradesh government held the commemoration at Jamburi Maidan in Bhopal. The Prime Minister released the stamp and the Rs 300 coin with her portrait, presented the National Devi Ahilyabai Award to a woman artist for work in tribal, folk and traditional arts, and credited her with water conservation, small canals and ponds, the encouragement of cotton and spice farming, and a women’s unit in the Malwa army. PIB’s feature adds that she is “famously known” as the Philosopher Queen.

Indore’s university, founded in 1964 as the University of Indore, was renamed Devi Ahilya Vishwavidyalaya in 1988, according to its own page. On 20 September 2024 the Prime Minister launched the Punyashlok Ahilyadevi Holkar Women Startup Scheme in Maharashtra, which offers up to Rs 25 lakh to women-led startups and reserves 25 per cent of its provision for women from backward classes and economically weaker sections.