Ranganathaswamy, Srirangam

Of the 108 Divya Desams — the abodes of Vishnu hymned by the Alvar poet-saints — Srirangam is the first and foremost, and devotees call it Bhooloka Vaikuntam, Vaikuntha upon earth. Two hundred and forty-seven of the four thousand verses of the Nalayira Divya Prabandham are addressed to Ranganatha here; every Alvar but one sang of him, and here Andal, having finished her Thiruppavai, is said to have passed into the god himself. His consort Ranganayaki keeps her own shrine and never leaves it: the two are brought together once a year, on Panguni Uthram.

It is also the heart of Sri Vaishnavism. Nathamuni, who recovered the scattered Prabandham, and Yamunacharya after him belonged to this place, and Ramanuja (1017–1137) made Srirangam his home for most of his long life, ordering its worship and writing the commentaries that gave Vishishtadvaita its shape. He has a sannidhi of his own within the walls, where by unbroken tradition his mortal body is seated still, renewed twice a year with saffron and camphor.

The greatest festival is the twenty-one-day Adhyayana Utsavam of Margazhi, which draws close to a million people: ten days of Pagal Pathu, then Vaikunta Ekadasi, then ten nights of Ra Pathu. On the Ekadasi morning the processional Namperumal is carried to the thousand-pillared hall through the Paramapada Vasal, the gate of Vaikuntha, opened for these ten days alone — and the crowd that pours after him holds that whoever passes it reaches Vishnu's abode at the end of life.

Srirangam is an island, a spit of land held between the Kaveri and its northern branch the Kollidam, and on it stands the temple Tamils call simply Periya Koil, the Big Temple. Here Vishnu is worshipped as Ranganatha, stretched full length in sleep upon Adishesha the coiled serpent — an image some six metres long, facing south towards Lanka. Tradition gives the shrine to Vibhishana, Ravana's brother, who was carrying the Ranga Vimana home from Ayodhya when it refused to leave this island.

The building of it has never stopped. Mandapas near the sanctum are traced to the Uraiyur Cholas of the first centuries CE, and the inscriptions — an archive in stone — run from the seventh century to the seventeenth, recording gifts from Chola, Pandya, Hoysala, Vijayanagara, Nayaka and Maratha hands.

It has also been broken and remade. Malik Kafur's Delhi Sultanate forces plundered the temple in 1311, and a second invasion followed in the 1320s; the processional deity was carried away by its priests and kept some six decades in the hills of Tirumala, returning only when the shrine was reconsecrated in 1371 under Kumara Kampana of Vijayanagara. The Nayakas afterwards fortified the temple town and its seven walls, and the great southern Rajagopuram, begun under Achyuta Deva Raya, stood an unfinished stump for four hundred years before it was completed in 1987.

The complex covers about 156 acres (63 hectares), which makes it the largest functioning Hindu temple complex in the world: seven concentric prakaras, one inside the next, holding 81 shrines, 39 pavilions and twelve water tanks. Twenty-one gopurams stand over the gates and, unusually, diminish in height inwards, so the walk to the sanctum moves from the loudest scale to the quietest. The outer enclosures are a living town of streets and shops; only the inner courts are the temple proper.

The southern Rajagopuram, consecrated in 1987, rises about 73 metres (240 ft) and is among the tallest temple towers in Asia. Over the sanctum sits the gold-plated Ranga Vimana, shaped like the Tamil letter for Om, and beneath it the reclining image — not granite but sudhai, a composition of lime and shaligram stone, darkened by its coating of fragrant thailam. Finest of the halls are the Vijayanagara thousand-pillared mandapam and the Nayaka Sesharaya mandapam, its forty rearing beasts each cut from a single stone. In 2017 the temple's restoration won the UNESCO Asia-Pacific Award of Merit, a first for a Tamil Nadu temple.