Jogulamba, Alampur

To stand among the eighteen Maha Shakti Peethas is to hold a place of the first rank in the sacred geography of the Goddess, and Jogulamba's is made the more striking by her fierce Yogini form and by the deep antiquity of Alampur around her.

The reinstalled image is worshipped in her terrible aspect, upon the corpse, and the pilgrimage here is bound up with the neighbouring Navabrahma temples and with Srisailam beyond, of which Alampur is the western door. For the devout, the goddess who was hidden and then restored carries a particular power — a faith that outlasts even the fall of temples.

The reconsecration of 2005 restored a worship broken for six centuries, and the goddess is once more served through the day with the fierce, Tantric rites her form demands. Set among the Navabrahma temples by the Tungabhadra, the shrine rewards a slow visit: the early Chalukya carving of Swarga Brahma, the river at the confluence, and the rare sense — among living temples — of a sacred place lost and deliberately brought back to life.

Alampur stands on the bank of the Tungabhadra, close to where it joins the Krishna, in Jogulamba Gadwal district of southern Telangana. Known as the western gateway of Srisailam and as Dakshina Kailasam, it is an ancient sacred town, and its goddess, Jogulamba — 'the mother of the yoginis' — presides over one of the eighteen Ashtadasha Maha Shakti Peethas, traditionally counted the fifth.

By the Shakti Peetha tradition it is here that the upper teeth of Sati fell, and the Bhairava who guards the seat is Bala Brahmeshwara, worshipped in the adjoining Bala Brahma shrine. Jogulamba is a fierce, Tantric form of the Devi, shown seated upon a corpse with a scorpion, a frog and a lizard upon her head — an aspect said to grant the accomplishments of yoga.

The shrine's history is one of loss and return: it was destroyed around 1390, in the wars of the age, and the goddess's image was hidden away in the Bala Brahma temple for centuries while the Vijayanagara kings fortified the complex. Only in 2005 was the Jogulamba temple rebuilt on its original site and the deity reconsecrated.

Jogulamba's shrine sits beside one of the treasures of early South Indian architecture: the Navabrahma temples, a group of nine Shiva temples raised by the Badami Chalukyas in the 7th and 8th centuries in an early northern (Nagara) manner rare in the Deccan — among them the celebrated Swarga Brahma, with its fine sculpture and pierced stone windows.

The Jogulamba temple itself, rebuilt in 2005, is a newer structure within this historic ensemble by the river. The whole complex is protected by the Archaeological Survey of India, and parts of it were relocated to higher ground when the waters of the Srisailam reservoir rose.