Mediaeval Temples of the Dakhan c12.s3.2

c12.s3.2

Viṭhobā is said to have come originally from Dwārkā on a visit to a certain youth Puṇḍalika who constrained the god to take up his abode at Paṇḍharpur. How he came, or the date of his coming, no man knows: these are idle questions; he came and that is enough. But though we cannot tell when he came, we can make a shrewd guess as to when he was housed in his present temple. It is a more or less recent structure, but there are remains of older temples about the town, and evidence that this particular one has been in part built from the materials of a more ancient shrine; but whether it stood on the site of the present one it is hard to say. That the present temple succeeded an older one to the same deity there can be little doubt, for an inscription upon a pilaster of a former temple, now used as an overhead beam in the present, tells us, in Kanarese and Sanskrit, that the Hoṣāḷa king Vira-Someśvara, in *Samvat* 1159 (A. D. 1237), gave a gift of gold to the god Viṭṭhala, which is an older form of the name Viṭhobā. Portions of this inscription, in its present position, are covered by the overlapping of the capitals of the pillars below it, thus shewing that it could not have been engraved in its present position. Between the present temple and the river is a portion of an old temple converted into a *chāvaḍi* or police station. The pillars are all standing in their original positions, and upon one of them is an inscription in Sanskrit verse recording the fact that a subordinate chief Kesavamaṇḍalika performed the *aptoryama* sacrifice in the temple of Paṇḍuranga Viṭṭhala on the banks of the Bhimarathī in *Samvat* 1192 (A. D. 1270). This would make it appear that this was the original temple of Viṭhobā. Between this, again, and the river, are the remains of two other small shrines. The present temple of Viṭhobā, which is shut in upon all sides with houses has been built in instalments, the *śikhara* or spine having been erected within the last sixty years; the substructure might go back two hundred years, hardly more.