Raghunath Temple, Aravali

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About Raghunath Temple

Raghunath Temple is a Hindu temple located in Jammu in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. It consists of a complex of seven Hindu shrines. Raghunath Temple was constructed by the first Dogra ruler Maharaja Gulab Singh in the year 1835 and later his son Maharaja Ranbir Singh got it completed in the year 1860 During Dogra rule. The temple has many gods in its complex of shrines, but the presiding deity is Rama – also known as Raghunath, an Avatar of Vishnu. All the spiral-shaped towers have gold plated spires. The niches in the walls of the shrines are decorated with 300 well-crafted icons of gods and goddesses including those of Surya and Shiva, but most are particularly related to the life stories of Rama and Krishna. The paintings in the 15 panels of the main shrine are based on themes from Ramayana, Mahabharata, and Bhagavad Gita. The temple premises include a school and a library that preserves over 6,000 manuscripts in many Indian languages, with a notable collection of Sarada script Sanskrit manuscripts. The temple witnessed two terrorist attacks in the year 2002, when Islamic militants attacked it in March and November, with grenades and indulged in indiscriminate firing which resulted in the death of 20 devotees and also in injuries to over 40 people.

History

Library and religious school

During the reign of Ranbir Singh, the temple complex started a pathshala (school) which welcomed students from all castes and classes. The temple housed a library with some 6,000 manuscripts. These are mostly copies made from manuscripts not available for sale, in Devanagari from Sarada originals, by scribes employed by the library in the nineteenth century. The library added to its collection, in the 19th-century, a dozen rare Sanskrit birch bark codices in the Sarada script as an object of curiosity. The collection as indexed by Stein, included Sanskrit manuscripts (predominantly Devanagari) of Vedic literature, grammar, lexicography, prosody, music, rhetoric, Kavya, drama, fables, dharmasutras, Mimamsa, Vedanta, Samkhya, Yoga, Nyaya, Jyotisha, Architecture, Medicine, Epics, Puranas, Bhakti and Tantra.Singh funded a translation centre and included an effort to translate texts in Arabic and Persian languages into Sanskrit. According to Zutshi, this inter-religious initiative was praised by his contemporaries.The Raghunath temple remains a significant scholarly source of Sarada script manuscripts and one of the largest collection of Hindu and Buddhist texts of the Kashmir tradition. The Raghunath temple has been an early promoter of digitization initiative of the manuscripts it houses, and has started the eGangotri initiative to digitize ancient manuscripts from other parts of India.

Raghunath Temple is located in City of Aravali state of Rajasthan which has other variety of things to explore

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