Sri Chamundeshwari, Mysuru

Karnataka Tourism puts it in the words Mysuru itself uses — the city exists because of Chamundeshwari. The Authority and the district administration alike call her the tutelary deity of the Mysuru Maharajas and the presiding deity of the city; the Endowments Department's register names her kuladevate and nadadevate in one breath, and in everyday Kannada she is the Nada Devate, the Mother of the land.

Beyond Mysuru she is counted higher still. The Ashtadasha stotram of the eighteen Maha Shakti Peethas names her in its opening verses — Chamundi at Krauncha Pattana — and that Puranic Krauncha Puri is identified with this hill, where, tradition holds, the hair of Sati came to rest. The state's own pages do not press the claim; the reckoning is old, and steadily kept.

Her greatest days are the Navaratri Karnataka keeps as Mysuru Dasara, which the state tourism department titles Nada Habba, the festival of the land. The Authority lists the Dasara utsavas from the first day of the bright fortnight of Ashvayuja to the tenth, and the celebration opens here, with puja at the Devi's door, before the palace below is lit. It closes on Vijayadashami with the Jamboo Savari, the Devi riding down in the golden howdah on a caparisoned elephant at the head of the procession to Bannimantap. The temple's own year holds more — the Ammanavara Vardhanti, her birthday, on the seventh of the dark fortnight of Ashadha, and the Fridays of that month, when the hill fills before dawn.

Chamundi Hill stands over Mysuru like a crown, some 3,489 feet above the sea and thirteen kilometres from the city. Its first name was Mahabaladri, for Mahadev, worshipped here as Mahabaleshwara in what the Sri Chamundeshwari Kshetra Development Authority — the Government of Karnataka body that keeps the shrine — calls the oldest temple on the hill; the Mysuru district administration reads an inscription of the Hoysala king Vishnuvardhana giving to it in 1128. The Authority sets the hill older still: the Skanda Purana names a sacred ground called Trimuta Kshetra ringed by eight hills, of which this is the western.

The hill's later name, and the city's, come from the Mother. The Devi Mahatmya tells of the form she took to overcome the asura Mahisha, and Karnataka holds that it ended on this summit; the Endowments Department's own record of the temple remembers Mysuru as Mahishurapura, from which came Mahishuru, and from that Mysuru. Her own name is older — Chamundi, for Chanda and Munda whom she overcame — and from her the hill is Chamundi Betta.

The Authority is plain about how the temple grew: a shrine of great antiquity with over a thousand years of background, small at first, which the centuries made great. What raised it was the throne — when the Wodeyars came to power in 1399 the Devi became their home deity — and the Authority's Kannada page names the Hoysalas of the twelfth century, the Vijayanagara rulers of the seventeenth and the Mysuru kings together as the hands that built this hill.

The temple is quadrangular and Dravida: main doorway, entrance, Navaranga hall, Antharala mantapa, sanctum and prakara, a vimana over the sanctum, and at the gate the seven-storey gopura whose shikhara carries seven golden kalashas. Krishnaraja Wodeyar III repaired the shrine in 1827 and, by the Authority's account, raised that tower; the district administration adds its gold finials, the statues he set up of himself and his three queens, and the Simha-vahana he gave in 1843, drawn still on the great days. Older accounts give the tower instead to Vijayanagara in the seventeenth century — both readings stand in the record.