Bhagyalakshmi at Charminar is a legal temple
http://www.niticentral.com/2012/11/bhag ... emple.html
talking about the Bhagyalakshmi Temple in Hyderabad, attached to the famous heritage icon, Charminar.It’s a tiny structure, held very high on the devotion scale by lakhs of local Hindus and happens to be adjacent to Charminar, but not inside its premises.
Encroachment!!
Temple did not exist before!!
These are the screams you will hear periodically, whenever political heat is turned up in old city Hyderabad. Let’s examine the issue using the details from credible authors and important local politicians about the current episode of Bhagyalakshmi Temple.
Two key basics of Hindu worship
Firstly, we must understand one basic heritage of Hindu dharma. Hindus regard almost all things as sacred in this world. Bhagawan or Bhagawati exists everywhere. Go to any village in India and you can find numerous statues or images of Devas and Devis under trees, at the village centre, next to houses, inside houses, next to schools, in front of hospitals/clinics, in shops, in vehicles, in parks and pretty much everywhere. All it takes is a stone to form a temple once people develop enough devotion to that structure. Formal temples built at once using Agama Shastras and Prana Pratishatapana surely help, but you don’t need a formal building for worshiping. In many cases, temples evolve once devotees increase, from the smaller structure before.
So if anyone says the temple did not exist, they must understand that a temple or structure in the current form might not have existed. But that does not mean people did not regard that spot as sacred.
Secondly, one also needs to understand that Hindu dharma is an ever evolving dharma (loosely translated as religion, but not exactly a religion). You might have worshiped a Devi (goddess) in one name today, but a few generations later she might be worshiped with amore contemporary name. My great grandfather worshiped ‘Vinayak’ butI worship ‘Ganapati’, for example. Sotoday’s Bhagyalakshmi might have been worshiped with another name before, as Devis have thousands of names literally (refer to Lalita Sahasra Nama for instance). Bhagyalakshmi may have been worshiped as Maisamma or another name. It is very common in the Telangana area which has Hyderabad in it to have Yellamma, Mahankali and Durgamma as names for devis. But at the core, Hindu dharma scholars will clearly show you the link of all devi worship to the one female power of the almighty.
Why now?
So, why this hullabaloo about Bhagyalakshmi temple now? Politics! Nothing more, nothing less. One section of Hyderabad politics is against this temple (not just today, but before also), while the other section is fighting for Hindu rights aggressively. Supporting the former section of politicians, some papers produce ‘evidences’. It’s usually the same people who doubt even the narration of even the Telangana native Hindu girl Bhagmati becoming Hyder Begum after religious conversion, on whose name Hyder-a-bad has been setup.
Let’s examine the issue from variousangles.
From Books:
Read the current Government of India Minister, and former Under-Secretary-General of United Nations, Shashi Tharoor’s book Elephant, Tiger & Cellphone. On page 42 he describes Bhagyalakshmi Temple at Charminar clearly. The key takeawayfrom this very learned man’s book is this: “But at the foot of the city’s most famous monument, the four-turreted Charminar, sits a Hindutemple to the goddess Mahalakshmi,the priests chanting their mantras for centuries under the celebrated Islamic minarets.”
The book’s online link is here ->
http://books.google.co.in/books?id=uqvp ... &q&f=false
Read Srikanta Ghosh’s Indian Democracy Derailed: Politics and Politicians , published in 1997. On pages 73-74 he gives some key information. Srikanta Ghosh was with the Law Research Institute of Calcutta.
The book’s online link is here:
http://books.google.co.in/books?id=RGyO ... &q&f=false
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- The Charminar temple was in her memory.
- Even now (in 1997 when the book was written), a Harijan woman is the trustee of the temple.
- Bhagyalakshmi temple’s desecration on November 23, 1979, has no parallel. See this clipping fromthe book, for more details of why the temple was attacked in 1979.
Read Roshen Dalal’s book (page 220) where it is described as to why Goddess Lakshmi is linked to Charminar’s guard. This is more fromthe local stories. ->
http://books.google.co.in/books?id=DH0v ... &q&f=false
From the local politicians’ claims:
Let us present three local politicians, who are supporting the temple.
First, Andhra Pradesh Co
.