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Deities
Ḍāgunji Ganeśa
Ḍāgunji — rare 2-handed Ganesha of Uttara Kannada
Ḍāgunji — rare 2-handed Ganesha of Uttara Kannada
No primary scriptures are catalogued for this entry yet. If you know of scriptural references we have missed, please contribute them.
The Gaṇeśa at Ḍāgunji, near Gokarna in Uttara Kannada district on the Karnataka coast, is locally famous for an iconographic peculiarity: the image is treated as having fewer arms than is usual, and the tradition attached to it distinguishes it sharply from the four-armed and many-armed forms of the deity's standard iconography. That distinctiveness is why the shrine has its own identity in the region's Gaṇeśa cults and why it is worth a separate record from the general Gaṇeśa entry.
Ḍāgunji is also a sītā — a self-manifested shrine — in the tradition, and the corpus records a legend of a sage, Śaunaka by name, establishing the cult here. Such foundation legends are common to old pīṭhas and are not, in themselves, historical evidence; the name of the sage, the terms śāunaka here, and the sense in which the shrine is called sītā all need to be taken from a local or regional source rather than from summary pages.
The shrine is served by a temple establishment that maintains a set of brass panels depicting the twenty-one forms of Gaṇeśa (ekaviṃśatī), a form of the enumeration of Gaṇeśa's manifestations that circulates in the southern tradition. The Vaishnava Daśāvatāra and Śaiva Śivaśatarūpi enumerations are better documented elsewhere in this corpus; the Gaṇeśa set at this shrine should be described from what is actually on the panels.
The local calendar follows the coastal Karnataka pattern, in which the Hasti festival (paintings of the elephant-headed deity drawn in kansaarle, the North Canara tradition of house-front painting) is central. Deities are carried in procession, and the shrine participates in the Pīṭhi (caravan) system by which village deities visit one another's festivals on fixed mutual dates — a reciprocal arrangement that is documented in the North Canara coastal belt and should not be described as if this shrine were independent of it.
The Karnataka coastal gazetteers and ASI reports are the primary local sources; Majumdar's Encyclopaedia for the general Gaṇeśa material only.
For a named guardian, ideally a Kannada speaker from Uttara Kannada: how many arms the image actually has, and by what textual or local authority that is asserted; the Śaunaka legend as it is actually told; the foundation and administration of the shrine; and the list of the twenty-one Gaṇeśa panels as displayed. The corpus frontmatter also labels this shrine "Shaiva", which is almost certainly a mis-classification inherited from a batch — a Gaṇeśa shrine is Ganapatya or Vaiṣṇava in affiliation — and the field should be corrected rather than carried forward.
