Dhandayuthapani, Palani

The form worshipped here comes from the tenderest of the Murugan stories. Narada brought the gyana-pazham, the fruit of wisdom, to Kailasa, and Shiva — told it could not be divided — offered it to whichever son first circled the world three times. Murugan set off on his peacock; Ganesha, reasoning that his parents were the world entire, walked round them and won. Stung that his labour was wasted, he left Kailasa, put off his ornaments and came to this hill as a hermit. The words spoken to console him — pazham nee, 'you are the fruit' — are held to have named the place: Pazhani, which became Palani.

A second legend explains why pilgrims come bent under a burden. Sage Agastya charged the asura Idumban with carrying two hills, Sivagiri and Sakthigiri, to the south; Idumban slung them at either end of a pole and set them down at Palani to rest. When he tried to lift them again they would not move, and a boy stood upon the hill barring him. They fought, Idumban was overcome and then pardoned, and the burden he bore became the kavadi — his shrine stands part-way up, saluted before the summit.

Vows are the substance of worship here — tonsuring the head in imitation of the shorn Lord, the barefoot walk from distant towns, the kavadi borne at Thaipusam, the pots of theertha carried up for abhishekam. What comes down is prized in turn: sandal paste left overnight on the image and given out as rakkala chandanam, and the panchamirtham of banana, ghee, honey, jaggery and cardamom with dates and sugar candy, made without water or preservative — in 2019 the first temple prasadam in India granted a Geographical Indication.

The hill temple of Palani crowns Sivagiri, the higher of two hills rising from the plain in Dindigul district, where the Palani Hills fall towards the Kongu country. Murugan is worshipped here as Dhandayuthapani, 'he who bears the danda' — the staff — and the shrine is counted the third of the Arupadai Veedu, the six abodes of the god. At the foot of the hill stands the older shrine of Thiruavinankudi, named in Nakkirar's Sangam poem, the Tirumurugatruppadai.

Tradition ascribes the image in the sanctum to Bogar, one of the eighteen siddhas, said to have made and consecrated it from navapashanam, an amalgam of nine herbs held to be a lasting medicine. Worship on the hill is said to have lapsed and the image to have been lost to the forest until a Chera king, benighted after a hunt, was told in a dream to restore it; the Cheras ruled this country between about the second and fifth centuries.

Cholas of the tenth century and Pandyas of the thirteenth left grants and old Tamil inscriptions on its walls; Vijayanagara and the Madurai Nayaks carried the patronage on, and in the fifteenth century Arunagirinathar sang his Thiruppugazh here. The temple is run by Tamil Nadu's Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Department and draws upwards of seven million pilgrims a year.

The sanctum is early Dravidian work, its covered ambulatory showing Pandyan hands; a golden vimanam rises over it, and the image may be approached only by the hereditary Gurukkal priests of Palani. The first precinct holds shrines to Shiva, Parvati and Bogar; the second, a Ganapati shrine and the chariot houses, among them the golden car brought out in the evening.

The ascent is part of the pilgrimage. A stairway is cut into the rock — commonly counted at 693 steps — beside the broad yanai-padhai, the elephant path. Three winch tracks, funicular railways worked by cable, run up the hillside, with a rope car beside them, so the old and the infirm reach the summit in minutes while others still climb.