Velapuri: the town Belur was, and the heaven it was called

The town at the temple gate has had several names. Old inscriptions and medieval texts call it Beluhur, Velur and Velapura; Karnataka Tourism lists Velapuri, Velur and Belapur. The Hoysalas made it their first capital, and they thought so well of it that the texts of the time call it bhuloka Vaikuntha — the Vaikuntha of the earth, Vishnu’s own heaven brought down to a river town in what is now Hassan district.

A capital, briefly

Vishnuvardhana came to power in 1110 and Velapuri was his seat. He commissioned the Chennakeshava temple in 1117, one of what his court called the five foundations of his reign, and then he moved the capital away — to Dorasamudra, Dvarasamudra, the place now called Halebidu, which means “old capital” in Kannada. He began the Hoysaleswara temple there and his descendants finished it around 1150.

So Belur’s time as the centre of things was short, and the town has spent the eight centuries since being the place where the first great temple is. That is not a small thing to be. But it explains the shape of the town today: there is a magnificent four-acre walled compound, and around it a settlement of a few thousand people with a bus stand, a hospital, a church and one commercial street.

The river

Belur stands on the Yagachi, a tributary of the Hemavati that rises in the Western Ghats near Chikkamagaluru; Wikipedia notes that historic texts also call it the Badari. Wikivoyage’s Belur page says the town sits on the Bhadra, which is a different river altogether — the temple’s own department, Karnataka Tourism and Wikipedia all say Yagachi, and they are right. The Yagachi dam is 3.5 km north of the temple on the Chikkamagaluru road, and the state tourism corporation’s second hotel here stands opposite it.

What the town does now

It receives visitors, and it has done since long before UNESCO. The shop street between the bus stand and the gate sells brass and soapstone statuettes, books about the temple, and food; Wikivoyage is blunt that the sellers work the temple exit persistently and that there is “nothing much to shop about in this temple town”. Government-approved guides wait at the gate. Two of the hotels are run by the state tourism corporation. The junction outside town, where the Hassan–Chikkamagaluru and Arsikere–Mudigere roads cross, carries the traffic for the Charmadi ghat and the coast.

And then there is the other Belur: the working town. St Michael’s Church in J. P. Nagar has been a Catholic parish since 1982, with thirty-one families. The government hospital is on Lakshmi Devi Temple Road. There is a bus stand with services to Mangaluru and Bengaluru. None of that is why anyone comes, and all of it is why the temple is still in daily worship rather than in a glass case.

The word that stuck

Of all the names, the one worth carrying round the courtyard is the description rather than the name: the Vaikuntha of the earth. Stand on the terrace at half past seven in the morning, with the low sun on the wall bands and nobody else on the platform, and it does not read as hyperbole.