Shri Anand Krishna Bihari Ji Temple

Tucked into the tight lanes of Jaipur's old walled city, a short walk behind the Tripolia Gate and only a few hundred metres from the eastern wall of the City Palace, Shri Anand Krishna Bihari Ji Temple is one of the Pink City's quiet thikana shrines.

• A thikana temple houses a household deity kept by a hereditary custodian family, and most day-visitors stride past this one on their way to bigger sights.
• Its plaster facade of scalloped arches opens off Chandni Chowk, across the lane from the Brij Nidhi temple, and a modest courtyard leads to the sanctum where Anand Bihari Ji, a dark-stone form of Krishna, is dressed and adorned afresh for every darshan.
• The deity belongs to the Gaudiya-Vaishnav devotional stream that flowered around Vrindavan and the wider Braj country.
• Jaipur's Kachhwaha rulers were ardent Krishna devotees, and over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a cluster of Braj deities and their sevayat families settled inside the new capital's walled precinct, each in its own thikana temple; the far larger Govind Dev Ji shrine behind the City Palace is the best-known of them.
• Anand Bihari Ji sits within this same lineage, its sanctum run by hereditary priests who keep the traditional rhythm of daily seva, from waking and bathing the Lord in the morning to putting him to rest at night.
• Because it is a neighbourhood shrine rather than a monument, the mood is intimate: a handful of local devotees, the smell of tulsi and incense, and the soft clang of the aarti bell rather than crowds and cameras.
• The temple's one moment of wider fame comes with the monsoon, when the Rang Malhaar art gathering fills the courtyard with Jaipur painters celebrating the season in colour.
• Janmashtami and the Braj-style jhula (swing) festivals bring kirtan into the small space.
• For the vegetarian traveller the setting could hardly be friendlier.
• Temple prasad is pure vegetarian, and the surrounding old-city bazaars form one of India's great meat-free food quarters.
• Johari Bazaar's Laxmi Misthan Bhandar (LMB), an explicitly eggless sweet house and thali kitchen, is a few minutes' walk; the kulhad-chai counters of Chaura Rasta and the rooftop thali at Ganesh in Nehru Bazaar are close by too.
• As always, confirm that any baked sweet is genuinely eggless before you buy.
• Give the visit twenty to thirty unhurried minutes.
• Remove your shoes, dress modestly, keep your voice low, and plan around darshan timings, as the deity rests through the middle of the day and the sanctum curtains are drawn between services.