Murudeshwar

Everything here hangs on that one thread, and the coast does not count it a lesser inheritance. Gokarna holds the Atma-linga; this hill holds what had lain against it. The cloth touched Shiva's own self, and the ground it fell upon was made a kshetra by that touch. Pilgrims who come to Gokarna turn south to finish the journey here; along the karavali the two shrines are spoken of in one breath.

Maha Shivaratri is the temple's own night. On the fourteenth of the waning moon, when the whole Shaiva world keeps vigil, the gathering at Murudeshwar is the largest of its year: abhishekam through the dark hours, bhajans that do not stop, the sea sounding below the hill until morning comes up behind the Ghats. Darshan is free every day of the year, and the queue moves quickly except on that night.

The story does not begin here. It begins seventy-eight kilometres up this same coast at Gokarna, where Ravana, after a tapasya of terrible severity, received from Mahadev the Atma-linga — Shiva's own self in stone — on the single condition that it not be set upon the earth before Lanka. Ganesha came to him as a brahmachari boy and offered to hold it while he made his evening sandhya; the boy called three times, was not answered, and set the linga down. It has not been lifted since: that linga is Mahabaleshwar of Gokarna.

What Murudeshwar remembers is what followed. Ravana strained at the linga and could not move it, and in his anguish tore away its wrappings and flung them along the coast. The vastra — the cloth that had covered the Atma-linga — came down on Kanduka-Giri, the hill above this shore. From it the place took the name Mrideshwara, and Mrideshwara, worn smooth by generations of speech, is the Murudeshwar of today.

The temple that keeps that ground is an old one, and its documented history thin; what the sources hold in common is the sanctity, not a date. The deity is Sri Mridesa Linga, set about two feet below the floor of the sanctum, and the shrine is known formally as Mhatobar Shri Murudeshwar. Karnataka's tourism department names it plainly for what the katha gives: Murudeshwara is where a part of the Atma-linga's covering fell.

Kanduka-Giri is a low headland thrust out into the Arabian Sea, and water stands on three sides of the temple. The sanctum itself is modest — the linga below floor level, the older shrine plain and low against all that has since grown around it — and that plainness is worth noticing, because what the highway sees is something else entirely.

Above the hill stands the Shiva of Murudeshwar: seated in dhyana, a hundred and twenty-three feet, thirty-seven metres, among the tallest images of Mahadev anywhere, the trident against the sky and the open sea moving beneath. It is a wonder, and it is a work of our own time; it should be known as both. Sculptors under Kashinath of Shivamogga cut it, and the industrialist and philanthropist R.N. Shetty paid for it; his trust has carried the temple's renovation. Behind it the Raja Gopura climbs twenty storeys, some two hundred and forty-nine feet by the state's account, completed in 2008, with a lift that carries darshanarthis up for the view. Beneath the statue the Bhukailasa cave gallery tells the whole katha in life-size sculpture — Ravana, Ganesha, the linga set down.

None of it is what makes the ground holy. The sanctity is the vastra and the linga in the sanctum; the statue and the gopura are the coast's own offering laid over an old shrine, given in gratitude and in scale.