Place · Parashurama Kshetra city · India
Mangaluru / Mangalore
Also known as Mangalore, Mangalore / Mangaluru, Mangaluru
Western-coast city read as part of Parashurāma Kshetra, the Konkan and Tulu shore held in tradition to be land the sage reclaimed from the sea by hurling his axe from the Sahyādri, and the setting of his austerities.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Tradition
- Parashurāma Kshetra tradition; comparative sacred geography
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 12.910, 74.860 (approximate)
Approximate locator; the book describes the place relationally rather than supplying a modern coordinate.
Connections (5)
- Craft tradition ofBūta Kōla, Tulu Nadu
Būta kōla belongs to the Tulu-speaking coast around Mangaluru, and the kambala buffalo races, the daiva shrines in family compounds and the nema calendar are parts of the same order. The 2022 film Kantara took it to a national audience and provoked a sharp argument within Tulu Nadu about who owns the depiction — performers from the Nalike, Pambada and Parava communities pointing out that the practice is their hereditary work and the profits were not.
- Patronage networkWilliam Bolts
Mangalore was the anchor of Bolts's Indian scheme, and it worked only because Haidar Ali of Mysore wanted European buyers who were not the East India Company and would sell him arms. Austria got a pepper trade on the Kanara coast without a fort, a garrison or a treaty obligation — and lost it when Mysore's war with the Company made the coast untenable in 1783.
- Alternative toAlappuzha
Alappuzha and Mangalore are the two ends of the Malabar and Kanara coast and solved opposite problems. Mangalore has a natural river-mouth harbour and its own language and inheritance customs; Alappuzha had no harbour at all and had canals cut inland in the 1760s to make one. Kerala's coast is a lagoon system, so its ports are usually engineered rather than found.
- Life routeRani Abbakka
Rani Abbakka of Ullal fought the Portuguese from her small coastal kingdom south of Mangalore across three decades of the sixteenth century. Ullal was the port of the Mangalore reach, and the Portuguese Estado da Índia’s attempts to force it into the pepper monopoly are recorded from their own archives. She held the port through several assaults before being captured and killed in prison, and Ullal is the setting of every account of it.
- Site withinBhagavati / Gokarnatha, Mangaluru
The Kudroli Bhagavati-Gokarnatha temple sits within Mangaluru, Karnataka, built in 1912 by Narayana Guru as a temple open to all castes including Dalits. The temple opened a decades-long campaign for Dalit temple-entry in both Kerala and Dakshina Kannada. Managed by the Billava community, Kudroli's Mangaluru Dasara festival each October (begun 1991) is one of coastal Karnataka's largest festivals and anchors the modern city's distinctive reform-era religious geography.
On these journeys
- ʿAbd al-Razzāq — Herat to Vijayanagara (1442–44)
- South India — the other landscapes
- Austrian India — 1722 to 1785
Sources
Wikipedia, “Mangaluru”. ʿAbd al-Razzāq Samarqandī, Maṭlaʿ-i Saʿdain (in Major, India in the Fifteenth Century).
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