Sri Manjunatha Swamy Temple, Dharmasthala

Dharmasthala is best known not just for its deity but for who looks after him: the temple’s rituals to Manjunatha, a form of Shiva, are conducted by Madhwa Brahmin priests belonging to the Vaishnava tradition, while its administration has for close to twenty generations been the hereditary responsibility of a Jain family of the Bunt community, the Pergades. The head of that family carries the title Dharmadhikari, or Heggade — a role the current incumbent, D. Veerendra Heggade, has held since 1968 — making the temple a striking, long-running example of cross-tradition cooperation rather than a site run within a single sect. Temple tradition traces the founding itself back roughly 800 years, to around 1200 CE and a figure remembered as Birmanna Pergade, though the precise date rests on tradition more than independently verified record.

The site’s name, meaning roughly “abode of dharma,” is explained by a founding legend in which the ancestral Jain household was asked, through a divine visitation, to open its home to righteous conduct and to worship beyond its own community — an origin story that helps account for the temple’s unusually plural character today. Alongside Manjunatha’s sanctum stand shrines to the goddess Ammanavaru and to the Jain Tirthankara Chandraprabha, together with four guardian deities (Kalarahu, Kalarkayi, Kumaraswami, and Kanyakumari), so that Shaiva, Vaishnava, and Jain devotion are all accommodated within the same temple complex.

The temple’s continuity was reinforced in the 16th century, when the Madhwa saint Vadiraja Tirtha reconsecrated it at the invitation of the administrator of the time, Devaraja Heggade — an episode often cited as cementing the arrangement under which Vaishnava priests have continued to serve a Shiva deity administered by a Jain family ever since. Today Dharmasthala is among the most visited pilgrimage and charitable centers in coastal Karnataka, known as much for its scale of daily free dining (annadana) for pilgrims as for its temple rites. Its largest annual observance is Lakshadeepotsava, a five-day festival of lights held in the Hindu month of Kartika (November/December) with religious seminars, cultural programs, and handicraft exhibitions; the temple also marks Navaratri with nine days of special worship at the Ammanavaru shrine, Maha Shivaratri, and a nine-day Annual Jathre car festival each April.