Brav­ing the hot sun, we ven­tured out towards Begur last Sun­day morn­ing. I had come across a men­tion of this ham­let some­where online and had seen a cou­ple of pho­tographs of an old tem­ple. And then there was another rea­son why I wanted to visit this par­tic­u­lar town. Accord­ing to his­tory, the name ‘Ben­ga­looru’ appar­ently occurs for the first time on a 9th cen­tury stone inscrip­tion in the town of Begur. This Ban­ga­lore ham­let was part of Gan­gavadi 96000, the numeral being a revenue-pin code of those days.

Begur, we dis­cover, is hardly around 5 kms from the Bom­mana­halli junc­tion, off the Bangalore-Hosur high­way. The roads are pretty bad right from Bomana­halli and due to some com­mo­tion on the roads (elec­tion fever), we actu­ally had to bat­tle heavy traf­fic to get to the town.

Begur is said to have been a promi­nent place dur­ing the rule of the Chola king­dom. We reached the first tem­ple, which is sit­u­ated beside a tank, called the Naganatheswara tem­ple dat­ing back almost 1200 years. It has five lingams con­tained within it. The main com­plex has a few beau­ti­ful stat­ues and a small statue of a Nandi bull.

In the com­pound, you can also see the remains of a very old fortress, which is home to another tem­ple about a kilo­me­tre away : the Kashi Vish­wanatha tem­ple . Of course, we would have never known about it if not for a local gen­tle­man called Srini­vas who vol­un­teered to take us there. There are no mark­ings or signs any­where so we were quite lucky to bump into him.

Srini­vas seems to be some­one who is linked closely with the tem­ple as he tells us more about its his­tory and her­itage. There doesn’t seem to be much being done from the government’s side though to pre­serve the tem­ples, which is rather sad.

The sec­ond tem­ple espe­cially, located in the mid­dle of a big field, wears a rather ‘uncared for’ look and though they had painted it recently (red and white over the nat­ural stone colour) there were enough signs to say that it wasn’t get­ting the atten­tion it deserved.

The priest at the tem­ple led us inside a lit­tle shed like struc­ture where there are 2 big stat­ues of Hanu­man and another god (for­give me for for­get­ting his name). Behind these stat­ues is a secret pas­sage, says the priest, which they have blocked off now. There’s no telling if it’s really true or one of those myths to cre­ate some mys­tery about the place, but we can’t exactly ask for proof.

The main tem­ple com­plex has another lit­tle white­washed struc­ture that houses one of the most beau­ti­ful black stone sculp­tures (3 actu­ally) that I have seen. The stone still has a lovely shine and the stat­ues are in great con­di­tion, even after around 2000 years (that’s how old they are accord­ing to Srinivas).

Srini­vas then takes us to his house and shows us more pic­tures of the tem­ple. He offers us bourn­vita and bis­cuits, which we gladly drink down and gob­ble up respec­tively, before get­ting back on the road again.

We decide to visit a 3rd tem­ple (since we’re in the mood for that kind of thing) at Banerghatta. From Begur we get onto the NICE road from where we con­nect to Banerghatta road. The Zen had to do a lot of off-roading, but behaved rather well. Unfor­tu­nately, for us, we find that the main tem­ples at the base of the hill and on top are both being ren­o­vated. With the sun blaz­ing in full force by now, we’ve had our fill of tem­ples and decide to wrap up our tour for the day.

~~ The Begur Tem­ples Album