Shri Mohiniraj Devalay

This is another sacred piligrimage centre located on the banks of sacred river pravara is in the central part of Nevasa Taluk at a distance of 23 kms from Shingnapur.

It is a place delivering of divine Dharm is the messages of Bhaghawan Shri Mahavishnus’one of the avathar taken when devas’ and asuras’ churned the samudr with mountain holding with the snake king Vasuki. The very beautiful idol of Shri Mohiniraj is the avathar of Shri Mahavishnu.

Temple is situated here. The sculptural beauty of the idol is in Hemadpathi sculprural syle. In the entire Bharat this is only one temple of this type.

Shri Mohiniraj devi is a swayambhu and it is in Ardhanareeshwar roop, means, right half of idol is nara that is actually Shri Mahavishnu and left half is nari Nateswari.This temple was constructed during the reins of one Shri Chandrachood a Jagirdhar in the year 1773, but the muslim invaders smashed the temple and thrown idol to the river waters. In the beginning of nineteenth century the divine gave darshan to a devotee in the dreams and asked him to remove the idol from the river and re-install, which the devotee followed and carriedout ITS message. Every year during Magha Masa (ie; January/Feb) from shasti to shasti (that is almost a month) special poojas and chariyot utsav of the diety shall be performed with pomp and pleasure by the people. On the walls of temple inside, the beautiful sculptural pictures of various roopas and avathars’ of Shri Mahavishnu we can see even today. A poetic version in Maratti language was inscribed on the walls as follows;

As already stated above when dev-danav after churning the ksheera sagar {milk sea}it has produced the varieties of dimonds and other valuable items from the sea. When both were fighting in the distribution Shri Mahavishnu came there in the Mohini roop and started distributing starting from devathas line, the rahu and kethu who tried to get the amruth from Her both of them shifted from danav line to devas line which Vishnu noticed only after giving the amruth to both Rahu and Kethu grahs. By their misbehaviour Shri Mahavishnu terribly got angry, so He chopped off the head of Rahu with His Sudarshan chackra. This incident occurred in this particular place. From the mouth of Rahu murthy the water is coming out and joining to the river again. Some time later, one of the avthar of ShriMahavishnu’s Shri Mohiniraj temple came into existence.