Kudla (Mangaluru): the junction of two rivers

Kudla (Mangaluru) stands where two rivers, the Netravati and the Phalguni (also called the Gurupura), meet before they reach the sea ^{1 2}. That meeting gave the city its name. Kudla (ಕುಡ್ಲ, kuḍla) comes from the Dravidian word kūḍu, to join ^{3 4}. It is the headquarters of Dakshina Kannada district. In the 2011 Census the city had about 4.8 lakh people, and the wider urban area about 6.2 lakh; the exact counts are in the box above ³.

Five names, five stories

The city has at least five names. They come from different communities, and each has its own origin; they are not spellings of one name ^{3 5}.

Kudla is the Tulu name, from the meeting of the rivers. Of the five, this is the one the sources dispute least ³.

Mangaluru, or Mangalapura, is the official name. Most sources read it as mangala, auspicious, plus uru, town, after the goddess Mangaladevi, whose temple stands at Bolar ³. The form Mangalapura appears in inscriptions of the Alupa period. The name is recorded as early as 715 CE, as Mangalapuram ³. The form “Mangaluru” itself is first found in 1345 CE, according to K.V. Ramesh ³. A minority view reads mangala here as a fort or an enclosure, not the goddess. That view appears in community lists of the city’s names, not in published scholarship ⁶.

Kodial is the Konkani name. Most accounts read it as a Konkani reshaping of Kudla. It came with the Goud Saraswat Brahmins and Konkani Catholics who settled here after the Portuguese took Goa ³. Maikala is the Beary name. It has three readings and none is settled. They are collected on a Tulu studies blog, not in published scholarship ⁵. Manjarur is the form the traveller Ibn Battuta used in 1342. He described the town as sitting on the largest estuary in the Malabar country ^{3 7}.

The port and the city

The Kadambas held this region from the third century to the sixth ³. From the mid-seventh century to the end of the fourteenth, the coast’s own Alupa rulers held it, as vassals of the Chalukyas, then the Rashtrakutas, then the Hoysalas ³. Vijayanagara took it by 1345 and ran it as two provinces, Mangaluru and Barakuru ³. After that came the Portuguese, the Keladi Nayakas, the Dutch, Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan. The British took the district after 1799 ⁷. Around 1784 Tipu built the Sultan Battery watchtower at Boloor to keep British boats out of the river ⁸. The full sequence is on the timeline.

Today’s main port is at Panambur, north of the city centre ⁹. It grew out of the Mangalore Harbour Project of 1962. On 4 May 1974 it was declared India’s ninth major port, and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi opened it on 11 January 1975 ¹⁰.

The people

Tulu is the city’s main spoken language. Dakshina Kannada has more Tulu speakers than any other district in India ^{3 11}. In the 2011 Census, across the district, about 49 per cent gave Tulu as their mother tongue. Beary and other tongues came to about 16 per cent, Malayalam and Konkani about 10 each, and Kannada about 9 ^{11 12}. The city’s people include Bunt, Billava, Mogaveera and Devadiga families, Beary Muslims, Mangalorean Catholics, Goud Saraswat and Konkani Brahmins, and Jains. Beary families trace their trade back to the early Arab sea trade.

Temples, churches and mosques

The Mangaladevi temple at Bolar gave the city its official name. Its patronage is linked to the Alupa period ^{13 14}. The Kadri Manjunatha temple is from the eleventh century and built of laterite. It holds what is described as India’s oldest bronze image of Lokeshwara ¹⁵. The site shows how worship on the coast moved from Mahayana Buddhism to Shaivism ¹⁵. Sahukar Koragappa built the Gokarnanatheshwara temple at Kudroli in 1912, and Narayana Guru consecrated it. The Billava community holds it as its own ^{16 17 18}.

Sharavu Mahaganapathi at Hampankatta, in the middle of the city, is named from shara, an arrow. Its local legend says a Tuluva king, Veerabahu, shot at a tiger and killed a cow by mistake about eight centuries ago, and set up a Shiva linga here to wipe out the sin ¹⁹.

Kerala Muslim tradition counts Masjid Zeenath Baksh among the oldest mosques in the Indian subcontinent, from the time of Malik Dinar ^{3 20}. Rosario Cathedral traces its origin to 1568 ²¹. Milagres Church goes back to 1680, on land gifted by Queen Chennamma ²². St Aloysius Chapel was built in 1884. The Italian Jesuit Antonio Moscheni painted every wall and the ceiling ²³.

The district’s great pilgrimage temples lie outside the city, and each has its own page. Kateel Durgaparameshwari stands on an islet in the Nandini river. It is about twenty kilometres north of the city, inland from the Udupi road ²⁴. Polali Rajarajeshwari stands on the Phalguni in Bantwal taluk, about nineteen kilometres away ²⁵. Dharmasthala is on the Netravati, about seventy-five kilometres inland ²⁶. Kukke Subrahmanya is on the Kumaradhara in the Ghats, about a hundred kilometres away ^{27 28}.

Marnemi at Kudroli

Marnemi (ಮಾರ್ನೆಮಿ, mārnemi) is the Tulu name for the nine nights and the tenth day, the festival called Navaratri and Dasara elsewhere. In the city it is kept in two ways. Vesha troupes and tiger dancers go through the streets. The Kudroli temple holds a Dasara for the whole city. The custom of consecrating the nine Durgas there began in 1991, after the temple was rebuilt in 1989 ^{29 17}. On the evening of Vijayadashami a procession of about five kilometres leaves Kudroli. It returns the next morning for the immersion ^{30 17}. Who started the modern city Dasara is disputed. Both accounts are on the Marnemi page.

Food

The city eats what the coast eats: rice in every form, coconut, and fish in most homes. Kori rotti (ಕೋರಿ ರೊಟ್ಟಿ, kōri roṭṭi) is chicken gravy poured over crisp, dry rice wafers. It is the Sunday dish of Tuluva homes ³¹. Neer dose (ನೀರ್ ದೋಸೆ, nīr dōse), “water dosa”, is a thin, lacy pancake of ground rice ³². The city’s own sweet invention is the Gadbad: a tall glass of ice cream, jelly and fruit in layers. Ideal Ice Cream, founded here on 1 May 1975, made it famous, and its Pabbas parlour at Lalbagh, on M.G. Road, is the place people go for it ³³.

What to see

You can see the temples, churches and mosques above, the Sultan Battery watchtower on the river at Boloor ⁸, and the beaches at Tannirbhavi and Panambur. On the edge of the city is Pilikula Nisargadhama, which has a rebuilt guttu house, the manor of a village’s leading family, along with artisan workshops and a botanical garden ^{3 34}. In the villages around the city, people describe the old order of houses this way. The guttu was the Bunt house and ran the village. The barke, a Billava house with the gurkare at its head, answered to it. Billava writers use the same words differently. For them guttu barke is the name of their own ancestral houses, more than 200 of them documented ³⁵. The guttu and barke entries carry both accounts and what the gazetteer says.

Terms used on this page

• bengre — the sand spit between a river mouth and the open sea
• guttu — a landowning family’s estate and its house
• barke — a house of the old village order, named beside the guttu; its standing and its community are read two ways
• kori rotti — chicken gravy over dry rice wafers

Related

• Udupi: the matha, the coast and the university town

Sources

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Last reviewed by tulunadu.org on 3 October 2026.