Chandranatha Basadi, Bhatkal

A basadi in the old Vijayanagara-era port town of Bhatkal, one of several Jain shrines built by the coastal merchant families the town once depended on.

Bhatkal was, between roughly the eighth and fifteenth centuries, one of the busier ports on India’s western coast — a secure harbour and shipbuilding centre trading with Africa, Arabia, the Red Sea, China and Bengal, and under Vijayanagara rule a conduit for the war-horses the empire’s cavalry depended on, brought in from Hormuz in exchange for sugar, spice and rice.

A number of the traders who built that trade were Jain, or intermarried into the town’s Jain families and took on their customs and language, and it was that prosperity — a port town’s wealth rather than a royal capital’s — that raised Bhatkal’s several basadis, this one among them. The pattern repeats along this stretch of coast: a merchant community’s trading profit, not a dynasty’s temple-building programme, is what the older Karnataka coastal shrines most often trace back to.

Written for Jain Times. Corrections are welcome — see sources and licences.