Murudeshwar: history and legends

The story told at Murudeshwar is a legend from the Shaiva tradition of this coast, and it is shared with Gokarna. Ravana, the king of Lanka, won from Shiva the Atmalinga, a linga holding Shiva's own power, on one condition: it must never be set on the ground before it reached Lanka. On the way, as dusk fell (in some tellings because Vishnu darkened the sky), Ravana stopped for his evening prayers and handed the linga to a Brahmin boy. The boy was Ganesha in disguise, and he set it down at Gokarna, where it held fast.

Ravana tried to tear it out and in his fury flung away its coverings. The cloth that wrapped the linga is said to have landed on Kanduka Hill, at the place then called Mrideshwar, and the town's present name comes from it. The temple's linga is called Sri Mridesa, or Murudeshwara.

According to the same legend, the parts Ravana threw became shrines along the coast.

What visitors see today is recent. The temple and its complex were renovated with funding from R. N. Shetty, a businessman born in Murudeshwar whose father had been the temple's hereditary administrator.

The Shiva statue on Kanduka Hill is 123 feet (37 m) tall. It was made by sculptors from Shivamogga led by Kashinath, took about two years and cost about ₹50 million, and it was set to catch direct sunlight. Karnataka Tourism calls it among the tallest Shiva statues in the world, and in places the second-tallest; Wikipedia ranks it third, after the Statue of Belief and the Kailashnath Mahadev statue. Beneath it is the Bhukailasa cave, a museum with life-size sculptures of the legend.

The Raja Gopura, the twenty-storey gate tower, was built in 2008 and is about 249 feet tall; a lift runs to the top. Only the sanctum was left unmodernised: the linga sits about two feet below ground level, and devotees performing sevas view it from the threshold.

The written history nearby belongs to Bhatkal, about 16 km south. In the Vijayanagara period it was a port trading spices and sugar; in 1502 a Portuguese fleet under Vasco da Gama attacked and burned it. Merchant money from that trade built the town's stone temples: the Jain Chandranatheshwara Basadi, between about 1500 and 1556, and the Khetapai Narayana temple, put up by the merchant Khetapai and his sons in 1546 and now protected by the ASI. To the north, the island fort of Basavaraja Durga off Honnavar dates from the 16th century.

Later, Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan made Bhatkal the base of their naval force on the Canara coast, and the British took it in 1799. Bhatkal is also home to the Nawayath community, Muslims of Arab and Persian seafaring descent, whose cuisine includes Bhatkali biryani.