Place · Pushti Marg temple town · India
Kankroli
The Rajasthan Pushti Marg temple at Kankroli in Rajsamand district, Rajasthan, 40 kilometres from Udaipur — one of the Sapt Haveli (Seven Primary Havelis) of Vallabhacharya's Pushti Marg Krishna sampradaya, holding the Dwarkadhish image of Krishna. The deity was moved to Kankroli from Asotia in Mathura in 1671 under Aurangzeb's anti-temple campaign, around the same time the Shrinathji image moved to Nathdwara (both images had originated in the Mathura-Vrindavan Braj region). The Mewar Maharana Raj Singh I granted the land for the Kankroli haveli on the shore of Rajsamand Lake. The haveli's distinctive Pichhwai cloth-painting tradition behind the deity, the eight daily seva rituals, and the 20-plus-million-rupee annual darshan traffic make Kankroli one of the four most important Pushti Marg centres (with Nathdwara, Mathura and Kamyavan).
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Tradition
- Pushti Mārga tradition; comparative sacred geography
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 25.100, 73.880 (approximate)
Approximate locator, added to carry the Pushti Mārga image network — the chain along which the principal Vallabhite murtis were moved west out of Braj.
Connections (2)
- Image migrationPushti Mārga
Vitthalnāth divided the seven principal svarūpas among his seven sons, and when Braj became unsafe in the 1660s the images travelled separately into Rajput protection. Dvārkādhīsh reached Kankroli, Shrīnāthjī Nāthdvāra, forty kilometres apart — a sectarian inheritance turned into a map by a flight. Each of the seven houses developed its own liturgy, cuisine and pichhwai style around its image, so a sectarian split produced seven distinct material cultures within two centuries.
- Image migrationMathurā
Dvārkādhīsh, another of the seven principal Pushti Mārga images, was at Mathurā until Aurangzeb's iconoclasm and went west with the rest in the 1660s, settling at Kankroli on the Rājsamand lake. Two of the seven ended up forty kilometres apart in Mewar, which is why that small district holds so much of the sect.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Kankroli”. Archaeological Survey of India and State Archaeology monument records, and the standard regional literature.
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