Thiruttani Murugan

Thiruttani is the abode of peace. Murugan came to this hill, tradition says, after the Surasamharam at Tiruchendur — after the long war and the slaying of Surapadman — and here his anger cooled and he grew still. Alone among the six abodes, Thiruttani does not enact the Surasamharam: instead flowers are showered on the god to settle his wrath, and the hill is called Shantipuri, the place of peace. Devotees come for exactly that — the quieting of anger and the ills that follow it — and it is said that whoever worships here wholeheartedly for five days together does not go away empty.

It is also the hill of the wedding with Valli. Murugan's two marriages are remembered at two shrines: Deivanai, Indra's daughter, was given to him at Thiruparankundram, while Valli — the hunter chieftain's foster-daughter, of the hill country — belongs to Thiruttani, and in the month of Margazhi the god is still bathed here before that wedding. From Indra came dowry gifts kept to this day: the elephant Airavata — which is why every elephant here faces east rather than the deity, at Indra's own asking — and a sandal-stone on which the paste for Murugan's abhishekam is ground, carried home by devotees as medicine.

The climb is part of the darshan. Three hundred and sixty-five steps rise to the shrine, one for each day of the year, and on the night of the thirty-first of December bhajan parties come up them singing Tiruppugazh and burning camphor on every step, so that the new year begins at the god's feet. Thiruttani stands about sixty-five kilometres from Tirupati, and for many families the two are a single journey — Balaji on the seven hills, and then Murugan on Thanigai.

Thiruttani crowns Thanigai hill in Tiruvallur district of Tamil Nadu, close to the Andhra border and about eighty-five kilometres from Chennai. It is the fifth of the Arupadai Veedu, the six battle-camps of Murugan, and Nakkeerar's Sangam-age Tirumurukarruppatai, which guides a devotee from shrine to shrine, already names this hill. The place-name itself is read as Seruttani — seru, anger, and thani, its cooling — for the story the hill exists to tell.

Stone carries the temple through the medieval centuries. Inscriptions here record gifts from the Pallavas, the Cholas and the Vijayanagara rulers between about the tenth and the fifteenth century — for worship, for perpetual lamps, for festivals — and the shrines of Valli and Deivanai flanking the sanctum are ascribed to Vijayanagara times. It is today maintained by the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments department of Tamil Nadu.

Poets have kept it alive. Arunagirinathar sang Thiruttani in his Tiruppugazh, and it was here, tradition holds, that the young Muthuswami Dikshitar met an old man on the steps who put a piece of sugar-candy in his mouth and vanished — from which came Sri Nathadi Guruguho, the first of his kritis and the source of the Guruguha signature of his life's work.

The temple faces east on the hilltop, its precincts ringed by stone-slabbed corridors. Over the sanctum rises the three-tiered Dravidian Ananda Vimanam, gold-plated in 2010; a tall nine-tier rajagopuram has been raised in recent years before the older three-tier gate tower.

The image is unusual twice over: Murugan stands with his left hand at his hip and a vajra vel — the thunderbolt lance — in his right, in place of his ordinary vel, and his mount is the elephant rather than the peacock, a pairing shared only with Swamimalai. The sanctum is said to hold a lakh of rudraksha beads, and for three days each March the rising sun reaches through the eastern opening to touch the deity's feet on the first day, his chest on the second and his head on the third.