During our innumerable field visits to the various temples of Maharashtra, we make it a point to interact with the pujaris of the temple. The temple is alive as long as its deity is worshipped as per the rules and paddhatis, and therefore the role of the temple priests is foundational in the temple ecosystem. Throughout the year, they facilitate daily temple rituals, temple festivals, and special pujas.

Who are the Guravs?

In Maharashtra, there is a distinct community of people who maintain and act as priests to the innumerable Śaiva temples that dot the landscape of this region. They are called Guravs, a term derived from the word Guru or from the Kannada word Gorava, meaning a Śaiva mendicant. Like most communities in Maharashtra, Guravs are agrarian, but what makes them special is that they have a hereditary role in managing the Śaiva temples and many Devi temples of the region.  During our intensive survey of all the heritage temples as part of the Pune Project, except for a handful of Śaiva temples which employed priests of Teli, Kumbhar, Simpi, Lohar, or Brahmin community, most of the temples, big or small, had a hereditary Gurav priest. Even the oldest Śaiva temple of the Pune district, the 11th-century Bhuleshvar temple had a Gurav priest whose family has been entrusted to manage the temple for the last 4 generations. Before we proceed, it must be clarified that not all people classified as Guravs are priests, only a very small subset of them are, just like the case with Brahmin priesthood.

The reference to Guravs and their role of the hereditary priesthood of temples is in one of the earliest of Marathi texts, Leelacharitra, a text composed in 1283 CE belonging to the Mahānubhav Samapradāya. The text portrays them as priests responsible for the maintenance and performing worship at the temple. Thus, the Gurav priesthood of Maharashtra is at least 800 years old and likely more than 1000 years old. Interested readers can refer to the works of Dr. Jayant Balchandra Bapat who has done extensive research on the history and social-political background of the Gurav community.

Why do Guravs still act as Temple Priests? 

In the overwhelming majority of the cases, the temple income is not enough to sustain the family of the priests. A family member usually works in a different profession, usually agriculture or a small-time trade, to sustain themselves. If it’s a nuclear family, then usually the husband is working and the wife takes care of the daily rituals of the temple. A prominent example is the magnificent 18th-century Siddheśvar temple at Talegaon Dhamdhere, where the female Gurav priests take care of the morning and evening rituals of the temple, while the husband works in the Pune city. As is usually the case, this temple was built and owned by the Maratha Sardars, in this case, the Brahmin Fadnavis family, but the priests are one of the Gurav families of the village. Sometimes different Gurav families have been assigned hereditary priesthood duties for a particular temple. In such cases, the families take turns, mostly on a yearly basis, to act as temple priests.

The question is why would someone from a Gurav family want to act as temple priests when it would involve a significant hit to their income? The answer usually, in almost all cases, is tradition and devotion. There is an ingrained sense of duty that since their forefathers were the priests of the temple it is their responsibility to continue the tradition.  Almost all the Gurav priests would tell us with immense pride the number of generations their family has been the priests to a particular temple, and in most cases, it was upwards of four generations, which basically implies that their great-great grandfathers were also the temple priest of this same temple, and the current generation is just continuing the tradition that they have inherited from their forefathers.

The second reason was too obvious for them to merit an articulation. But it may not be obvious to the outsiders. They are devoted to Lord Śiva. Living in the modern urban world we sometimes forget or we don’t even have the experience of what it really means to be devoted to their Lord. For a Gurav, devotion and service to Lord Śiva is the only constant of their lives in a rapidly changing world be it the concretization of their ancient agrarian landscape or the diminishing away of village life and its rituals. They are well versed with all the minutia of Purāṇic Śaiva rituals and in most cases, they have their personal sādhana. My observation is mainly based on interaction with the older cohort of Guravs, I am unaware of the situation among the younger generation and how keen are they to take their family tradition forward.

Concluding Observation 

Despite the popularity of Viṭṭhala worship, the predominant faith of the people of Maharashtra has been Śiva and Devi worship since at least the last 1700 years from the time when Vākāṭakas ruled much of the Deccan. The monumental ancient Śaiva rock cut caves and temples, and the innumerable early medieval Śaiva temples are a testimony to the deep abiding faith of the people in Śaivism. Almost 80% of the heritage temples we have documented in the Pune district belong to Śiva, and the same is the case across all of Maharashtra. These Gurav families are an inheritor of this millennia-old venerable tradition of Śaiva worship, and it is their devotion that despite the numerous socio-economic upheavals through the ages, the worship of Lord Śiva in his temples, both big and small, still continues undiminished and uninterrupted.