Mallikarjuna

Srisailam is one of the very rare shrines that is at once a Jyotirlinga of Shiva and one of the eighteen Maha Shakti Peethas of the Goddess — Shiva as Mallikarjuna and, by tradition, the place where Sati's neck fell, worshipped as Bhramaramba, the goddess 'of the bees'. A single darshan here is thus doubly sacred, gathering the two great streams of devotion, Shaiva and Shakta, on one hill-top.

The legend that binds them is tender: when their sons quarrelled over marriage and Kartikeya withdrew in anger to a distant mountain, Shiva and Parvati followed to be near him, and settled at Srisailam. To this day the shrine is a place of reconciliation as much as of power, set within the Nallamala tiger reserve, wild country that lends the pilgrimage a sense of remoteness.

Srisailam sits at the heart of a wider sacred landscape strung along the Krishna gorge — the Patalaganga at the river below, Sikhareswaram on the hill above, and the goddess-shrine of Bhramaramba beside the main sanctum — and it was here, tradition holds, that Adi Shankaracharya composed his Sivananda Lahari. To descend the long flight of steps and bathe in the Patala Ganga, then climb back for darshan, is for many pilgrims the fullest form of the visit.

Mallikarjuna crowns a hill at Srisailam, deep in the Nallamala forest of Andhra Pradesh, high above the Krishna river — which pilgrims here revere as the Patala Ganga, reached by a long descent of stone steps. Shiva is worshipped as Mallikarjuna and the goddess as Bhramaramba, and the place is honoured as the 'Kailasa of the South'.

It is among the oldest living shrines in the Deccan: inscriptions carry the site back to the Satavahana age, around the second century, and the Mallikarjuna shrine itself to about the seventh. The Reddy kings raised the Patalaganga steps and mandapas, and the Vijayanagara emperors — Harihara, and later Krishnadevaraya — added the great gopurams and halls. Chhatrapati Shivaji, a devotee of Bhramaramba, funded its renewal in 1674 and is remembered for the northern gopuram that bears his name.

The name itself is read as 'Arjuna (Shiva) worshipped with mallika', the jasmine that has long been offered here.

The temple is a vast fortified complex, enclosed by tall prakara walls — roughly a hundred and eighty metres by a hundred and fifty, and some eight metres high — whose outer faces are covered in bas-relief: processions, dancers, battles and scenes from the myths, among the finest such sculpture in the Deccan.

Four gopurams rise over the gates, the northern one Shivaji's gift, and within, the Mukha Mandapam and other halls carry richly carved pillars spanning several centuries of building. It is architecture as chronicle — Reddy, Vijayanagara and Maratha work standing side by side.