Madan Mohan Temple, Bagbazar

  • The annakut day is the day of offering gratitude to Lord Krishna on the fourth day of Diwali. 
  • The Madan Mohan Temple, Bagbazar is located at 520, Rabindra Sarani, near Kumartuli. 
  • This temple was built by Gokul Chandra Mitra in 1761, one of the earliest settlers of Calcutta who acquired immense wealth through salt trade. Gokul Chandra associated with traders like Gobindaram Mittar, Banamali Sarkar and Umi Chand during Siraj-ud-Daulah’s attack in 1757. 
  • His palatial house on 56 bigha area behind the Madan Mohan Temple is now in shambles. 
  • The temple comprise of a 300 year old grand thakur dalan has gigantic doric pillars reflecting European style, huge rooms and a wide marble stairways and the silver throne on which is seated the deity of Madan Mohan (Lord Krishna) and Radhika. 
  • In the Eastern side of the courtyard is the jhulan-dalan where the idol of Madan Mohan was established earlier. Close by at the raash-mancha the deity is brought every year during the raash festival followed by local fairs and devotees.
  • It is believed that the idol of Madan Mohan dates back to 500 years and belonged to a poor priest called Dharani who resided in Bishnupur.  The deity was forcefully obtained by Raja Bir Hambir (1591- 1616) of Mallya Kingdom. In 1694, Raja Durjan Singha of the Mallya Kingdom built the temple of Madan Mohan in Bishnupur. Raja Chaitanya Singha of Mallya dynasty fell into serious financial debt due to family disputes and mortgaged the deity to Gokul Mitra. A controversy exists as to whether Chaitanya Singha was unable to free the mortgage or whether Gokul Mitra returned a replica deity to him. 
  • Another belief is that Gokul Mitra dreamt that Madan Mohan was leaving his residence and going to Bishnupur and would return once every year, the day after Kali Puja, during Annakut, disguised as a fly. From then onwards, Annakut festival is celebrated in Madan Mohan temple with great pomp and glory. The estate provides food to all the devotees on that day. Till now, villagers come from Bishnupur every year on this day to Bagh bazar.
(Adapted from http://thegangeswalk.com/madan-mohan-temple/)

The temple




Entrance






Devotees at the festival

A fair set up for the festival

The following pictures of the temple are sourced from the internet

The Deity

Marble stairway

Hallway

Thakur Dalan

Annakut showering of rice 

Pictures of Annakut being observed at a domestic household (Sri Sri RadhaMadan Mohan Jiu Thakur Bari, 28, B. K.Pal Avenue) near Madan Mohan Temple








Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mirza Ghalib's connections with Kolkata

Image
Mirza Asadullah Baig Khan  (27 December 1797 – 15 February 1869) also known by the pen names of  Ghalib  and  Asad  was an Indian poet who wrote in Urdu and Persian and is renowned for his work Dabir-ul-Mulk, Najm-ud-Daula .   His works describes the fall of the Mughal empire, the establishment of the British East India Company Rule and the Sepoy mutiny – the political scenario during his lifetime.   Mirza Ghalib was born in Kala Mahal, Agra into a family of Mughals who moved to Samarkand (in modern-day Uzbekistan) after the downfall of the Seljuk kings. At the age of thirteen, Ghalib married Umrao Begum, daughter of Nawab Ilahi Bakhsh and settled at Delhi.   He visited Kolkata to appeal to the East India Company to restore the full pension in lieu of his family estate annexed by the British.     Ghalib had left for Kolkata on November 1826 and reached the ...
Read more

East Kolkata Wetlands

Image
‘ Wetlands are areas where water covers the soil, or is present either at or near the surface of the soil all year or for varying periods of time during the year’. The East Kolkata Wetlands are an amalgamation of natural and man-made wetlands  lying east of the city of Kolkata.  The wetlands cover 125 square km and include salt marshes, and agricultural fields, sewage farms and settling ponds. The primary utility of the area is to treat Kolkata's sewage. This functionality has earned the place its nickname – ‘ Kidney of Kolkata ’.  The nutrients thereby accumulated in the wastewater are used to sustain fisheries and agricultural lands .  This site designated to be of international importance under the Ramsar Convention , also known as "The Convention on Wetlands", an intergovernmental environmental treaty established in 1971 by UNESCO, which was implemented in 1975.  The name East Calcutta Wetlands was coined by late Dhrubajyo...
Read more

Acharaya Girish Chandra Bose and Bangabasi College

Image
Girish Chandra Bose (October 29, 1853 – January 1, 1939) was an Indian educator and botanist who hailed from the village of Berugram in the Burdwan district of India.  After his graduation from Hooghly College in 1876, he was appointed as a lecturer of science at Ravenshaw College , where he worked until 1881. He was offered a state scholarship to study agriculture at the Royal Agricultural College (Cirencester, England). He took life membership of the Royal Agricultural Society in 1882, and in 1883 was elected a Fellow of the Chemical Society. He completed his degree at the Royal Agricultural College in 1884.  After visits to Scotland, France and Italy, he returned to India. A Manual of Indian Botany written by Bose, was intended as textbook containing plants of India, in contrast to the European textbooks commonly used at the time. He also started the first agricultural journal in India . The journal, founded in 1885, was published both in English (as Agricultural Gazette...
Read more