Bhagya Lakshmi Temple – Charminar

About Bhagya Lakshmi Temple

According to the Muslim Priest of Charminar altar, the original stone in question was a guard stone placed near the corner to protect the walls of Charminar from automobiles. In 2012, Times of India reported citing old people that in the late 1960s, the temple building was built on the eastern side of the iconic Charminar and opened for visits by devotees.

Times of India referred to the popular folklore that the holy stone was laid at the site several years ago at an unknown date, most likely since the Quli Qutub Shah period. Soon the stone was being idolized as a symbol of prosperity by the residents. Others insist that the temple did not exist there until it was erected few decades back and called the claims of the temple being “as old as the Charminar” as completely ‘baseless’ claims.

Claims of newer origins of temple are proposed by historians such as Narendra Luther, who maintain that the temple had no existence of any sorts until the 1960s when it was erected un-necessarily by some locals. According to historians, one of the guard stone similar in shape to a milestone near Charminar was painted with saffron color in 1965, and an old woman became the person in-charge of this shrine. After an Andhra Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation bus collided with the stone and damaged it, a pucca structure was created at the site.

The stone was replaced with an idol of the goddess Lakshmi. English newspaper The Hindu supports the claim that Temple was built in the 1960s and produced pictures of Charminar taken in the year 1957 and 1962 showing that no temple existed at the said location. A picture taken in 1986 shows the temple structure. In 2012, Archaeological Survey of India in an RTI response categorized the temple structure as an unauthorised construction.

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Local Congress leader G. Niranjan considers the co-existence of the two structures as a reflection of Hyderabad. He claimed that Charminar had places of worship for both communities for several centuries and it was sending a message to the entire world about rich secular traditions and the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb of Hyderabad. A book sources the name of the shrine in the memory of the Queen Bhagmati (or Bhagyavati).