UDUPI/MANGALURU:The devastating earthquake in Nepal on Saturday has shaken the people of the temple town of Udupi. Reason: This coastal town has had religious links with Kathmandu’s Pashupatinath Temple for over 300 years. Udupi’s special archaks (Smartha Brahmins) had been specially chosen to head a panel of archaks of the Pashupatinath Temple.
As the news of the quake broke out, some elders had begun making frantic calls to Kathmandu to know about the safety of Udupi’s Raghavendra Bhat and Ganesh Bhat, who are the head and assistant archaks respectively at the temple.
However, Raghavendra Bhat and his wife had returned to Udupi and were in Mangaluru at the time of the earthquake. There is no word yet from Ganesh Bhat.
“We are all very concerned about the well-being of Ganesh. We were unable to establish contact with him so far...we will keep trying,” Sugunendra Thirtha, Swamiji of the Puthige Math in Udupi, told Express.
Sugunendra Thirtha Swamiji had brought King Birendra of Nepal and his wife Aishwarya to Udupi in 1991 for the inauguration of the Geetha Bhavan.
Karnataka’s links with the temple, according to sources, dates back to the time of establishing the Shivalinga: one Rajapati Aradhya Sharma, a Veerashaiva Brahmin from Karnataka, was present in the temple at the time. Later, between 1450 and 1460 AD, Yaksha Malla, the king who ruled Nepal at the time, decided to invite ‘Bhatta-Brahamanaru’ from the South to preside over the puja at the temple and sage-philosopher Shankaracharya was adopted. Yaksha Malla’s insistence on priests from the south is linked to the supposed visit of Adi Shankaracharya to the temple site in Nepal in the 9th century.
The ‘Bhatta-Brahmanas’ chosen by King Yaksha Malla and his successors for presiding over the puja are Smartha Brahmins, most of them attached to the Sringeri Mutt. Many other priests have come from the undivided Dakshina Kannada district. The Pashupatinath Temple’s present head priest is Ganesh Bhat of Hiliyana in Kundapur taluk of Udupi district. His predecessor was Mahabaleshwara Bhat Bairy from Belve, Kundapur, who returned to Bengaluru. Ganesh Bhat is assisted by other priests who are also from this coastal region.
Communist Action: Udupi town had shown intense resentment when the Communist regime in Nepal under Prachanda had thrown out the Udupi archaks in a vindictive move against Brahmins and Purohits. One of the archaks was Rawal Padmanabha Shastry.
