Place · hill station & river source · India
Mahābaleshwar
Also known as Mahābaleshwar — Krishnā source
The 1,353-metre hill station in Satara district of Maharashtra from which five rivers rise within or beside the old 13th-century Mahabaleshwar temple — the Krishna, Koyna, Venna, Savitri and Gayatri — issuing from carved stone cow-mouths inside the shrine. The temple is a Yadava-period Shiva shrine with a reclining Nandi. The Krishna begins its 1,400-kilometre journey across the Deccan to the Bay of Bengal from this spring. The adjacent Panchganga temple makes the geography of the Krishna basin ritually anchored at a single point. The British developed Mahabaleshwar as a summer retreat for the Bombay Presidency in the 1820s under John Malcolm.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Tradition
- River mahatmya; Shaiva tradition
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 17.923, 73.658
Connections (1)
- AnalogueTryambaka / Trimbakeshwar
At Mahabaleshwar the Krishna runs out of a spout inside a temple and at Trimbakeshwar the Godavari rises at the foot of Brahmagiri hill beside a jyotirlinga. Both are Sahyadri sources of rivers that cross the whole peninsula to the Bay of Bengal, and at both the shrine is the source rather than a marker near it — the water is architecturally enclosed.
On these journeys
Sources
Mahabaleshwar Panchganga Temple
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