Temples in Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh is the land of Tirumala, and no shrine on earth is sought by more feet. On Venkatadri, the last of the seven Seshachalam peaks some eight hundred and fifty metres above the plains town of Tirupati, Vishnu stands as Venkateswara — Balaji, Srinivasa, Govinda — believed to have taken his stand on this hill to carry mankind through the Kali Yuga, so that the place is called Kaliyuga Vaikuntha and the Lord Kaliyuga Prathyaksha Daivam, the god made visible in this age. To Sri Vaishnavas it is Thiruvenkatam, one of the hundred and eight Divya Desams and one of only two in this state, sung by ten of the twelve Alvars in two hundred and two verses — more than any shrine but Srirangam. The documented history opens with the Pallava queen Samavai's endowment of 966 CE; in the twelfth century Ramanuja ordered the worship here upon the Vaikhanasa Agama, and Vijayanagara gilded the Ananda Nilayam, the three-tiered vimana that stands over the sanctum still. Pilgrims come bearing vows, are tonsured at the Kalyanakatta, and pour what they pledged into the Srivari Hundi; the laddu they carry home has been offered since 1715 and was given a Geographical Indication in 2009. Some twenty-four million come each year, and the chant that carries the line forward is a single word repeated without pause: Govinda.

Inland and northward the state keeps two more presences, and neither resembles the other. Deep in the Nallamala forest, high above the Krishna — which pilgrims here revere as the Patala Ganga, reached by a long descent of stone steps — Srisailam is among the very rare places that is at once a Jyotirlinga of Shiva and one of the eighteen Maha Shakti Peethas: Shiva as Mallikarjuna, the 'Arjuna worshipped with jasmine', and the Goddess as Bhramaramba, she of the bees. It is honoured as the Kailasa of the South; its inscriptions carry the site to the Satavahana age and the Mallikarjuna shrine to about the seventh century, the Reddy kings raised the Patalaganga steps, Vijayanagara added the gopurams, and Chhatrapati Shivaji, a devotee of Bhramaramba, funded its renewal in 1674 and is remembered in the northern gopuram that bears his name. Far to the north-east, on the Kalinga coast a kilometre east of Srikakulam, stands Arasavalli — Harshavalli, the abode of joy — where Surya is worshipped as Suryanarayana Swamy, Pratyaksha Daivam, the visible god. The Devasthanam holds that Sage Kasyapa installed him for the welfare of mankind and that Indra raised the shrine and dug the Indra Pushkarini with his vajra, while the temple's inscriptions are read to Devendra Varma, ruler of the Kalinga kingdom, in the later seventh century, his successors endowing perpetual lamps and a school for students of the sastras and the Vedas before the eleventh. The Lord stands with Usha, Chhaya and Padmini, Mathara and Pingala at his feet, Sanaka and Sanandana above with the umbrellas and Aruna driving the chariot, all carved from a single block of polished black granite; and the shrine is built so that twice a year, in the early hours, the rays pass the five gateways to fall on the feet of the image and stay a few minutes. Five deities are honoured here together — Aditya, Ambika, Vishnu, Ganesha and Maheswara — on the temple's own teaching that God is one and that there is no difference between Siva and Kesava. The geography is honest about itself: these three stand in three corners and make three journeys. Tirumala is reached from Tirupati, its airport at Renigunta about forty kilometres from the hill and Tirupati Main station some twenty-six, with twenty-three kilometres of ghat road above or the roofed Alipiri Mettu on foot. Srisailam has no railhead near it and is best reached by road, about two hundred and thirteen kilometres south of Hyderabad up through the tiger reserve. Arasavalli is the easiest of the three: Srikakulam Road station on the Visakhapatnam–Bhubaneswar line lies about nine kilometres from Srikakulam town, and Visakhapatnam's airport about a hundred and seventeen.