Kamakshi Amman, Kanchipuram

What sets Kamakshi apart is something missing elsewhere: in a city crowded with temples, hers is the only temple of the Devi. The great Shiva temples of Kanchi — Ekambareswarar and the rest — keep no separate Amman sannidhi, as Tamil temples almost always do, because tradition holds that the whole Shakti of Kanchipuram is gathered here, in her alone. To seek the Goddess in this city is to be sent to Kamakshi.

She is counted among the foremost seats of the Goddess: the Ashtadasa Shakti Peetha stotra ascribed to Adi Shankara names her in its opening breath — Kamakshi of Kanchi — and the Devasthanam itself reckons the city among the fifty-one peethas, where Sati's navel is said to have fallen, whence the name Nabhi Peetham.

Tradition holds that Adi Shankara, finding the Devi here in her fierce aspect, set the Sri Chakra before her and drew her into her serene form; that yantra, kept under fresh lotus flowers, is worshipped in the sanctum beside her, and the Kamakoti Peetham he is said to have founded here still bears her name. She sits in Padmasana, holding noose and goad in her upper hands and, in the lower, the bow of sugarcane and arrows of flowers — the weapons of Tripurasundari, who conquers by sweetness. Navaratri fills the temple for nine nights, and the Masi Brahmotsavam of February–March draws the great Ther through the four streets.

Kanchipuram stands among the seven moksha-puris, the cities whose dust is said to grant liberation, and has long been called the city of a thousand temples. Its western half is Shiva Kanchi and its eastern half Vishnu Kanchi, and between them, in the heart of the old town, is the shrine of Kamakshi — the Devi from whom the whole city takes its spiritual centre. Her name is read as ka-ma-akshi, she in whose eyes are Saraswati and Lakshmi, one glance from her carrying both learning and abundance.

The temple's beginnings are old and not exactly datable. Its foundation is generally placed with the Pallavas, between the fifth and eighth centuries, when Kanchi was their capital; the Cholas and later the Vijayanagara rulers rebuilt and enlarged it, and the five-acre complex standing today is largely their work.

The eighteenth century left a wound the temple still remembers. In the disorder of the Carnatic Wars the solid-gold processional image was carried away for safety — smuggled out, tradition says, wrapped as a sick child in a palanquin — and came to rest at Thanjavur, where it is worshipped still as Bangaru Kamakshi, the Golden Kamakshi. The Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham, which moved south with it, returned; the Peetham is still the temple's hereditary trustee.

The temple is Dravidian in manner, low rather than lofty, spread over five acres behind plain walls pierced by gopurams. Its glory is the gold: the vimana over the sanctum and the towers above the inner shrines are sheathed in gold plate, mirrored in the pushkarini, the tank on which the float festival is rowed.

The goddess sits at the centre of the Gayatri Mandapam, a hall whose four walls are said to stand for the four Vedas and its twenty-four pillars for the twenty-four syllables of the Gayatri mantra; unusually for a Tamil shrine, she faces south-east. Within the same enclosure is Kalvar, Adi Varaha Perumal, one of the hundred and eight Divya Desams — a Vishnu shrine of the first rank inside a temple of the Devi. Around the prakarams stand Bangaru Kamakshi, Saraswati, Annapurna, Kala Bhairava and a shrine to Adi Shankara himself.