Bhimashankar

In a forgotten age, in the deep forests of the Sahyadri, there lived a rakshasa named Bhima. He was the son of Kumbhakarna, Ravana's mighty brother who had been slain by Rama in the war of Lanka, and a rakshasi named Karkati who had carried him in her womb after his father's death.

Bhima grew up in a cave-fastness in these hills, knowing nothing of his lineage, his father, or the events that had bereaved his mother.

One day, finding his mother weeping, Bhima demanded the cause of her sorrow. Karkati told him the truth at last: that he was the son of Kumbhakarna, that his father had been killed by Rama and the gods who supported him, and that she had hidden him here to keep him from the gods' wrath. The young rakshasa swore vengeance.

Bhima retreated to a deeper recess of the forest and performed long austerities to Brahma. Pleased with his devotion, Brahma granted him a boon of immense strength, strength enough to overpower the gods themselves. Armed with this boon, Bhima emerged from the forest and began his campaign of conquest.

He defeated the Devas, drove Indra from heaven, and brought the three worlds under his dominion.

Among those he tormented was a king named Kamarupeshwar, a great devotee of Shiva. Bhima imprisoned the king and forbade his worship. But Kamarupeshwar would not be deterred. In his prison cell, he shaped a small Shivling from clay and continued his daily worship.

When Bhima learned of this defiance, he stormed into the prison with his sword raised, intent on shattering the lingam and killing the king who worshipped it. As his sword descended upon the Shivling, the lingam split open, and from it emerged Lord Shiva himself, in a form of cosmic fury that the world had rarely seen.

A battle followed of such intensity that the very mountains shook. The sweat ran from Shiva's body and gathered at his feet, flowing down the slope as a stream. At last Shiva, with a single thunderous syllable, reduced the rakshasa to ashes. The gods, watching from above, descended and praised the Lord.

They begged him to remain at this spot, for here he had appeared in answer to a devotee's faith, and here his presence should be eternal.

Shiva agreed. The lingam that the imprisoned king had worshipped, the same Shivling that had split open to reveal the Lord, became the Bhimashankar Jyotirlinga, sixth among the twelve. The stream that had flowed from Shiva's sweat became the Bhima river, which today rises beside the temple and flows for hundreds of miles before joining the Krishna near Raichur.

The name 'Bhimashankar' means 'Shankar of Bhima', both because the asura was named Bhima and because the river of that name is born here. The Shiva Purana places this temple as the Jyotirlinga where the Lord destroyed a demon's pride and answered a devotee's last cry.

Bhimashankar's documented history is comparatively thin compared to Somnath or Kashi, a function of its Sahyadri remoteness, the absence of a major imperial patron in the early medieval period, and the loss of regional records during the Bahmani, Mughal, Maratha transitions.

The earliest material attribution is to the Hemadpanthi tradition: a 13th-century architectural style associated with Hemadri Pandit, minister in the Yadava court of Devagiri, characterized by dry-masonry stone construction without mortar.

The sanctum's lower courses retain this character, suggesting the present shrine was consolidated in the late Yadava or early Bahmani period (c. 13th, 14th century), though earlier wooden or stone shrines may have stood here.

The temple's modern form dates largely from the 18th century, during the Maratha Peshwa period. Local tradition strongly attributes the sabhamandap (assembly hall) and several major additions to Nana Phadnavis (1742, 1800), the influential Maratha statesman based at nearby Menavali.

While precise dated inscriptions tying him personally to Bhimashankar are sparse, the architectural style and stone-quarrying patterns of these additions are consistent with the late 18th-century Maratha temple-building idiom that Phadnavis is documented as patronizing elsewhere.

A datable artifact connects the temple to one of the most documented military events of the era: the large bell suspended in the temple courtyard, bearing a Latin inscription, is one of several church bells brought from the Portuguese fort at Vasai (Bassein) by Chimaji Appa, Peshwa Bajirao I's brother, after the Maratha victory at the Battle of Vasai in May 1739.

The bell remains at Bhimashankar today as material evidence of the Maratha, Portuguese encounter and the practice of redistributing fort-bells to patron temples.

The Sahyadri remoteness that thinned Bhimashankar's documentary record also protected it from the destruction-and-reconstruction cycle that shaped Somnath, Kashi, and Mahakaleshwar. No medieval invasion records its sack; the temple's continuity is, by Indian standards, unusually unbroken.

In the late 20th century, Bhimashankar's status as a Jyotirlinga drew growing pilgrimage and infrastructure attention. In 1985 the Government of Maharashtra notified the Bhimashankar Wildlife Sanctuary, encompassing approximately 131 sq km of the surrounding hills, primarily to protect the Indian Giant Squirrel (Ratufa indica), Maharashtra's state animal.

The sanctuary boundary places the temple within a Protected Area, regulating vehicular access, commercial development, and infrastructure expansion through the Maharashtra Forest Department alongside the Devasthan Trust.

Today the temple is administered by the Shree Bhimashankar Devasthan, with daily ritual conducted by the resident priesthood, and remains a major Maharashtrian pilgrimage destination, especially during Shravan and Maha Shivaratri.