The Chalukyan Architecture of the Kanarese Districts c42.s1.2

c42.s1.2

The town of Bhatkal, situated at the extreme southern end of the Bombay Presidency, upon the coast, is snugly ensconced in a thick grove of palm trees and is surrounded by rice fields, the rich vivid green of whose young crops fill the terraced valleys among the hills, which here run down from the ghāts in broken spurs to the seashore. The town is about two miles up a tidal creek from the sea. The streets are narrow and crooked and the houses are quaint, those in the town being of a more substantial sort with tiled roofs, while those on the outskirts are generally of mud and thatch. Surrounded, as the latter are with their cocoanut groves, they are infinitely more picturesque than the former. Bhatkal has seen better days, and it would seem to have been at one time a religious centre. The number of old temples, mostly in ruins, and of about the same age, attest its former importance; and, judging from the fragments lying about—a finely carved column beside the Sultāni Masjid, for instance—there have been temples here far exceeding, in elaboration of ornament and richness of carving, any that now exist. Capitals, columns, beams and images lie about uncared for, or only so far as they can serve some present purpose. In the middle of the town, lying alongside the gutter of the public road, is the shaft of one of those lofty columns which are so strikingly characteristic a feature of the temples in these parts.