History and legends of Gokarna

The story is told in the Puranas and repeated in every lane of the town. Ravana, the king of Lanka, won the Atmalinga from Shiva through penance, on one condition: wherever it first touched the ground, there it would stay. On his way home the gods arranged a false dusk. Ravana stopped for his evening prayers and handed the linga to a Brahmin boy, who was Ganesha in disguise; the boy set it down, and it fixed itself to the earth. Ravana pulled at it with all his strength and could not lift it, and so it is called Mahabaleshwara, the all-powerful.

The tradition adds two details that are still on show. The dent on the head of the black-stone Ganesha in the Maha Ganapati Temple is said to be Ravana's blow. And the pieces Ravana tore away in his struggle are said to have become the Panchalinga shrines along the coast. The name Gokarna, 'cow's ear', is tied to a cow in the same story; another legend places Shiva's emergence from a cow's ear in a small cave near Kudle Beach. These are sacred stories, told as such.

The written record starts early. Kalidasa's Raghuvamsha, a 4th-century Sanskrit poem, has King Raghu worshipping the Lord of Gokarna, and tradition counts Gokarna among the Muktikshetras, places of liberation. Karnataka Tourism calls it one of the seven Muktikshetras of Karnataka and the 'Dakshina Kashi', the Varanasi of the south. The Tevaram hymns of the Tamil Shaiva saints (6th–7th centuries) include it among their sacred sites.

The first structural temple of Mahabaleshwara is attributed to the Kadamba dynasty, which ruled from Banavasi from the 4th century, and to its founder Mayurasharma. Most of the present complex, with its pillared halls, belongs to the Vijayanagara period (14th–16th centuries), when kings such as Harihara I and Bukka Raya I granted land to the temple. After Vijayanagara fell, the Nayakas of Keladi and of Sonda kept up the endowments. In 1676 the English traveller John Fryer came at Maha Shivaratri and described the festival at length.

In the 16th century this stretch of coast belonged to Rani Chennabhairadevi of Gersoppa, a ruler under Vijayanagara who held power for about 54 years. Portuguese traders called her the Pepper Queen for the spice that left through her ports. Mirjan Fort, a laterite fort with a moat about 21–22 km from Gokarna, just off NH-66 north of Kumta, is tied to her name, though who built it is disputed: other versions credit a Nawayath sultanate as early as the 1200s, or the Bijapur noble Sharif-ul-Mulk, with the Archaeological Survey of India dating the building to 1608–1640. The ASI excavated the site in 2000–01 and found laterite structures, a water tank, Chinese porcelain and a Portuguese gold coin of 1652.

South of town, on the Aghanashini estuary, salt has been made by hand at Sanikatta since 1720, which makes it the oldest salt village in Karnataka. Couples of the Agera community still work the pans under a cooperative that has run them since 1952, and the brown crystals dry in rows visible from the Kumta road.

The temple's own recent history is a legal one. In 2008 the Karnataka government handed its management to the Ramachandrapura Math; the High Court quashed that decision in 2018, and in 2021 the Supreme Court, as an interim arrangement until it decides the appeal, placed the temple under an overseeing committee chaired by retired Supreme Court judge B. N. Srikrishna, with orders to adhere to all its traditions. Karnataka Tourism describes the temple as managed by this committee.