Ranganathaswamy Temple, Srirangam

Twenty-one gopurams, tiered gateway towers crowded with painted sculpture, rise in procession across a river island in the Kaveri, and the tallest of them, the thirteen-storey Rajagopuram, reaches about 73 metres. The Ranganathaswamy Temple at Srirangam is less a single building than a walled sacred town: seven concentric enclosures, their walls running to more than six miles in total, close in one inside the other around the shrine of Vishnu as Ranganatha, reclining on the coiled serpent Adishesha. It is counted first among the 108 Divya Desams, the Vishnu shrines praised by the Tamil poet-saints known as the Alvars, and it is often described as the largest functioning Hindu temple complex in the world, spread over some 155 acres with 81 shrines, 39 pavilions and many water tanks.

The temple's beginnings reach back into the early centuries of the Chola kingdom, and more than 600 inscriptions record gifts and rebuilding by Cholas, Pandyas, Hoysalas, the Vijayanagara empire and the Nayaks from the 7th to the 17th century. In the 11th and 12th centuries the philosopher Ramanuja lived and taught here, and the temple became the heart of Sri Vaishnava thought. In 1311 the armies of the Delhi Sultanate under Malik Kafur sacked a "golden temple" on the Kaveri, generally identified with Srirangam, and a second invasion followed in the 1320s. The processional image was carried away for safekeeping and wandered for decades before being brought back after the Vijayanagara rulers took the region in 1378. Temple tradition preserves a story from this period of a Sultan's daughter who grew devoted to the captured image and followed it south; she is still honoured in the temple as Thulukka Nachiyar.

The outer two enclosures are lived-in streets of houses, shops and flower stalls; the inner five hold the shrines, halls and tanks. The sanctum carries a gilded vimana shaped like the sacred syllable om. Among the halls, the granite Thousand-Pillar Mandapa dates from the Vijayanagara period, while the Nayak-era Sesharaya Mandapa is known for its monolithic piers carved as rearing horses with riders. The Rajagopuram itself had stood unfinished since around 1500; its upper tiers were completed only in 1987, with support from the Ahobila Matha.

Getting there

The temple occupies the island of Srirangam, part of the city of Tiruchirappalli, whose old centre around the Rock Fort lies about 4 km to the south across the Kaveri; the small town of Bhikshandarkovil is about 3 km away. Tiruchirappalli International Airport (TRZ) is about 11 km to the south. Srirangam has its own railway station on the line between Chennai and Tiruchirappalli.