Newly appointed Pashupatinath priests Bishnu Prasad Dahal (right) and Saligram Dhakal at the temple on January 1. (AFP)

New Delhi, Jan. 4: The Pashupatinath priest row in faraway Nepal has a Brahmin community from Karnataka’s Udupi region worried.

The Bhattas, who reside in the Karnataka-Kerala border area of Udupi, have served as priests in the Pashupatinath temple for nearly 300 years.

Three days ago, the Maoist government’s police stormed the Shiva shrine in Kathmandu and replaced the Indian chief priest, Mahabaleshwar Shastri, with a Nepalese national.

“The Bhattas have been performing puja in the Pashupati temple since time immemorial. My humble request to the Nepal government is that they should not mix up politics and God. Please do not break an age-old tradition,” said Narasimha Adiga, a Bhatta community leader who is the chief priest of the Kolloor Mookambika temple in Karnataka.

Nationality should not be a criterion while appointing priests, Adiga said. They should be assigned the duty after assessing whether they have the required knowledge to conduct the ritualistic worship.

There are several stories on how the Bhattas came to be the priests in the Pashupatinath temple.

One account connects the community with the Shankaracharya in the sixth century. The Shankaracharya had gone to Pashupatinath on a pilgrimage and found the temple had no priests. He sent for Brahmins from the southern India community to look after the temple. The story goes that the Shankaracharya himself served as a priest for a while there.

Another version says the Indian priests were appointed by a Nepal king in the 17th century to make sure that Pashupatinath was worshipped even during the period of official mourning after a monarch’s death.

According to Nepali custom, all religious services had to stop for a year after a king’s death. As Pashupatinath was to be worshipped every day, Indian priests were deputed.

Another version says Indian priests were considered to have superior knowledge of the scriptures.

According to community leader Parameswara Adiga, the Bhattas who went to Nepal still maintain close links with those in India. “For every major event in the community, they would come. The Bhattas who have gone to Nepal always come back for marriages. Recently, there was one such marriage,” Parameswara Adiga said.

He says the Bhattas who have gone to Nepal as priests always come back to their native village once their stint is over.

One of the best known among the Bhatta priests in Nepal was Raval Padmanabha Shastri Adiga, who served the Pashupatinath temple from 1955 till his retirement in 1993.

Appointed chief priest in 1967, he started the practice of using temple funds for local development.