Where to Stay in Sehore, Madhya Pradesh

What is Sehore known for?

Sehore carries the older name Siddhapur, and pilgrims come for the Vikramaditya-era Chintaman Siddh Ganesh shrine, for Kubereshwar Dham, and for the hilltop Bijasan Devi temple at Salkanpur in the same district. Shaiva, Shakta, Jain, Vaishnav, and Nath priests all treated the place as a seat of worship. Administration is the other half, since the municipality is the headquarters of Sehore District and holds the courts and offices that the country around it comes in to use.

What are the main landmarks in Sehore?

Four sites carry the district. Sarru Maru holds Buddhist caves and a large stupa, Ginnorgarh Fort keeps its walls, and the Bijasan Devi temple crowns the hill at Salkanpur. Chintaman Siddh Ganesh and Kubereshwar Dham hold the town end, with the tomb of Kunwar Chain Singh and the site at Talpura further out.

Idols surface in the rivers. Figures of Vishnu, Ganesha, Nandi, Garuda, Mahavira, and Gautam Buddha have been pulled from the Seevan and the Kolar.

What is the history of Sehore?

Sidrapur is where the name starts. A rock-edict found in the Seevan river gives that form, Siddhapur is the older name in local use, and a separate account traces the modern spelling to the British hearing Sher, the lion, in a district where lions were then thick in the jungle. Rule changed hands often.

Sehore belonged to Awanti, then to the Magadh dynasty, and afterwards to Chandragupta I, Harshavardhan, Ashoka, Raja Bhoj, the Peshwa chiefs, Rani Kamlapati, and the Nawabs of the Bhopal dynasty. Ancient lore puts Maharshi Patanjali here in penance, and Shaiva, Shakta, Jain, Vaishnav, Buddhist, and Nath priests each made the place a seat of worship. Then came the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

Sehore rose against Company rule, and Robert Hamilton brought a detachment of the Bombay Army to retake the town from rebels that included mutinying sepoys, after which hundreds were tried and executed. Sikandar Begum, the Nawab of Bhopal, refused to join, which weighed heavily in the suppression. Schooling arrived earlier than most of it.

High School of Sehore was founded in 1835 by the political agent Lanciet Likinson, who also had the first English translation of Abhijñānaśākuntalam written, and its pupils included Hidayatullah. Sehore stayed the seat of the political agent of the British Raj until 1947, the Bhopal estate merged with India in 1949, and in 1972 the district was split so that Bhopal could be carved out of it.

Where is Sehore?

The Vindhya Range starts here. Sehore stands in its foothills in the middle of Malwa, south-west of Bhopal, at an average elevation of 502 metres, with the plateau falling away toward the Narmada. Seven districts ring it.

Bhopal, Raisen, Harda, Hoshangabad, Dewas, Shajapur, and Rajgarh all share a boundary with Sehore District, and the Seevan is the one river that runs the length of it. The Parwati, Newaj, Dudhi, and Kolar drain the ground beyond.

What is the climate of Sehore?

Elevation takes the edge off. Sehore sits at 502 metres in the Vindhya Range foothills, high enough that the hot months before the rains bite less hard than on the plain below. The rains then fill the Seevan and the Kolar, and the tracks up to Salkanpur turn heavy underfoot.

Cool months are the working season. Pilgrim traffic to Bijasan Devi peaks through the Navratri weeks, and the drive along the Bhopal-Sehore-Indore highway is at its easiest once the wet has drained off the Malwa ground.

How do you get to Sehore?

Two ways in, both short. The Bhopal-Sehore-Indore highway carries road traffic straight through the town, and Bhopal lies 38 km back along it, which makes the run a routine bus journey rather than an expedition. Sehore railway station sits on the Ujjain-Sehore-Bhopal branch line, part of the Western Railway route between Bhopal and Ratlam, and works two platforms.

Long-distance services call here. Trains run to Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Nagpur, and Puri, while the nearest airport is at Bhopal.