Kapaleeshwarar, Mylapore

The sthala purana is the town's own name. Mahadev was expounding the truth to Parvati on Kailasa when her glance went aside to a dancing peacock, and for that he bade her take the peahen's form and worship him below; she did penance on this shore before his lingam under a punnai tree until he received her again. Mayil is Tamil for peacock: from her penance came Mayilai, and from Mayilai, Mylapore. The peahen is carved there still, at worship before the lingam under the punnai; the Mother here is Karpagambal, she who is the karpagam, the wish-yielding tree of the gods.

Sambandar sang Poompavai back to life here: before the pot that held the ashes of Sivanesar's daughter, dead of snakebite, he sang the padhigam that names the festivals of Mylai one by one and asked how she could let them pass. Mylapore gave the canon one of the sixty-three too — Vayilar Nayanar, said to have built Mahadev a whole temple within his mind; his shrine and Margazhi guru puja are kept here.

The year turns on Panguni. The Brahmotsavam of that month, mid-March to mid-April, runs ten days from the kodiyettam to the Thirukalyanam at the full moon; the ther goes out on the seventh day, and on the eighth the Arubathimoovar, when the bronzes of all sixty-three Nayanmars are carried in palanquins through the mada streets. It is the largest day of Mylapore's year and one of Chennai's: the streets fill wall to wall, hawkers and giant wheels take the roads leading in, the city police divert traffic across the quarter, and a procession that sets out after three is still going past six.

Mylapore is older than Madras — a port and temple town before Fort St George rose up the coast — and Kapaleeswarar stands at the middle of it, the tank on one side, four mada streets squared about its walls. Tamil Nadu's Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments department, which administers the temple, knows it by its older name, Thirumayilai.

Its place in the Tamil Shaiva canon is settled: Thirumayilai is one of the 276 Paadal Petra Sthalams sung in the Tevaram, and Thirugnana Sambandar's Poompavai padhigam is sung on it. What is debated is the ground — Sambandar, and Arunagirinathar after him, describe a shrine standing by the sea, and this temple stands more than a kilometre inland, facing west.

Most scholars read that as relocation: the older temple on the shore where the San Thome cathedral now is, pulled down after Mylapore passed to the Portuguese in 1566. Its inscriptions turn up near the beach and in the cathedral wall, among them a broken twelfth-century Chola record naming the Nataraja of the Kapaleeswara temple. Others hold that the temple never moved and was only rebuilt. The present structure is not in dispute: Vijayanagara in manner, its shrines and small west gopuram built by Mylapore's Nattu Mudaliars, with a plaque within dating the rebuilding to about three hundred years ago.

The temple faces west — unusual, and itself part of the argument about the older site — while the great gopuram stands over the eastern gate: seven tiers and about a hundred and twenty feet, some thirty-seven metres, of stucco figures in high colour, raised in its present form early in the twentieth century and commonly dated to 1906. It is the landmark of the quarter, seen above the roofs from across the tank. The smaller western gopuram looks out over that tank, the theppakulam, with its sixteen-pillared mandapam standing in the water.

Within the walls Kapaleeswarar's lingam, held to be swayambhu, stands in the sanctum and Karpagambal in her own shrine beside him, while the sixty-three Nayanmars stand in bronze along the prakara. The courtyard keeps the punnai, the sthala vriksham, and the temple's water is the Kapali theertham.