Ramanathaswamy Temple
Interesting facts
- King Jeyaveera Cinkaiariyan of Jaffna had stone blocks shipped across the strait from the Koneswaram temple at Trincomalee to renovate the sanctum.
- The Sri Lankan king Parakrama Bahu, who reigned from 1153 to 1186, is credited with work on the temple's sanctum.
- Where the third corridor meets the path from the western gopuram, the floor is laid out like a chessboard, a space known as the Chokkattan Mandapam.
- Statues of Muthuramalinga Sethupathi and his two chief ministers stand at the western entrance to the great corridor he built.
- Tradition says the shrine began as a simple thatched shed before centuries of royal patrons turned it into a stone complex.
- It is the southern point of the Char Dham, the four sacred abodes at the corners of India: Badrinath, Puri, Dwarka and Rameswaram.
- It is one of the 276 shrines praised in hymns by the Tamil Shaiva poet-saints Appar, Sundarar and Sambandar.
- The temple is also said to hold the samadhi of the sage Patanjali, who is honoured with a separate shrine.
- Rameswaram island counts 64 sacred bathing places in all, and the Skanda Purana singles out 24 of them as the most important.
- Pillars carved with the fierce god Virabhadra holding a sword and a horn are thought to be additions of the Vijayanagara period in the early 1500s.
Why it is worth it
On the island of Rameswaram, at the very tip of the Indian mainland's reach towards Sri Lanka, stands one of the holiest shrines of Shiva and the southernmost of the twelve Jyotirlingas. The legend that anchors it comes from the Ramayana: Rama is said to have worshipped Shiva here in the form of a lingam, and tradition speaks of two of them in the sanctum, one made of sand and another brought by Hanuman from the Himalaya, with Rama asking that Hanuman's be worshipped first. For pilgrims, the visit is tied to the sea and to water, and the temple is as much a place of ritual bathing as of worship.
What makes Ramanathaswamy extraordinary to look at is its corridors. The temple grew over many centuries, with the Pandyas in the twelfth century, the Jaffna kings who rebuilt the sanctum around 1380–1410, and the Sethupathi rulers of Ramnad who gave the complex its present shape in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The outer corridor, completed under Muthuramalinga Sethupathi in the late eighteenth century, runs for about 1,200 metres in total, with sides of roughly 120 and 195 metres, and is lined by some 1,200 pillars. The ceilings and the pillars' carved brackets recede into the distance in long, rhythmic perspectives, so that the corridor feels less like a passage than a forest of stone, and it is generally counted the longest of any Hindu temple.
Above the walls rise the gopurams, the tallest of them about 53 metres high. Within the precinct lie twenty-two theerthams, holy wells and tanks that tradition links to Rama's arrows, and pilgrims move from one to the next, being doused with buckets of water at each, before going in for darshan. The first of the sacred waters lies outside the walls: Agni Theertham, on the shore of the Bay of Bengal, where many pilgrims begin by wading into the shallow sea.
Getting there
The temple is in the heart of Rameswaram town on Pamban Island, a few hundred metres from the shore. The nearest airport by distance is Jaffna (JAF) in Sri Lanka, across the strait, but the practical one is Madurai Airport (IXM), about 147 km away in a straight line. Rameswaram railway station is linked to the mainland by the Pamban rail bridge, and Madurai Junction is roughly 170 km away by rail and road.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Ramanathaswamy Temple is a Hindu temple dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva located on Rameswaram island in the state of Tamil Nadu, India. It is one of the twelve Jyotirlinga temples. It is one of the 276 Paadal Petra Sthalams, the sacred sites glorified by the Nayanars, Appar, Sundarar, and Sambandar, with their songs. According to tradition, the lingam of the Ramanathaswamy Temple was established and worshipped by Rama before he crossed the bridge called Rama Setu to the island kingdom of Lanka, identified with Sri Lanka. It is one of the Char Dham pilgrimage sites. The temple was expanded during the 12th century by the Pandya Dynasty, and its principal shrine’s sanctum was renovated by Jeyaveera Cinkaiariyan and his successor Gunaveera Cinkaiariyan, monarchs of the Jaffna kingdom. The temple has the longest corridor among all the Hindu temples of India. It was built by King Muthuramalinga Sethupathy. The temple is considered a pilgrimage site for Shaivites, Vaishnavites, and Smartas.
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