Gommatagiri

A Bahubali monolith of about twenty feet on a granite hillock near Mysuru, anointed each year at Mahamastakabhisheka.

Gommatagiri’s Bahubali is smaller than the great coastal colossi at Shravanabelagola, Karkala and Venur, and less visited than any of the three, but it belongs to the same tradition of Ganga-era Karnataka patronage: a twelfth-century figure, tradition holds it was raised under Western Ganga rule, on a granite outcrop a short distance outside Mysuru rather than on one of the coast’s better-known pilgrimage circuits.

The four Karnataka Bahubalis — Shravanabelagola, Karkala, Venur and Gommatagiri — are together the clearest evidence of how the tradition of raising monolithic Bahubali images spread inland as well as along the coast: a single religious form repeated by different dynasties across more than six centuries, from Shravanabelagola’s tenth-century statue to Venur’s in 1604, rather than a single monument that happened to be copied once.

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