Venkateswara Swamy, Tirumala

To Sri Vaishnavas this is Thiruvenkatam, and it stands high among the hundred and eight Divya Desams: ten of the twelve Alvars sang of it, in two hundred and two verses of the Nalayira Divya Prabandham — more than any shrine except Srirangam — and it is one of only two Divya Desams in Andhra Pradesh, the other being Ahobilam. It is counted, too, among the eight swayambhu kshetras of Vishnu, where the image is held to be self-manifested.

The claim made for Venkateswara is a particular one. Other ages had avatars who came and departed; in this darkened one, tradition holds, the Lord remains present on this hill for the whole length of the Kali Yuga, and darshan here is said to reach further than anywhere else. Pilgrims come bearing vows. Hair is offered at the Kalyanakatta, where lakhs are tonsured every month, and what was pledged to the Lord goes into the Srivari Hundi — offerings that have made this the wealthiest temple in the world.

The Srivari laddu carried home from here has been offered since 1715 and received a Geographical Indication in 2009, the first temple prasadam in India to be so protected: only what is made in the temple's own kitchen may lawfully be sold as Tirupati laddu. Some twenty-four million pilgrims come each year, more than sixty thousand on an ordinary day, and TTD orders them through three queues — Sarva Darshan, free but often a wait of many hours; Special Entry Darshan at ₹300, released online in monthly quotas that sell out within minutes; and Divya Darshan for those who climb the steps. The chant that carries the line forward is a single word, repeated without pause: Govinda.

Tirumala stands on Venkatadri, the last of the seven Seshachalam peaks, some eight hundred and fifty metres above the plains town of Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh. Here Vishnu is worshipped as Venkateswara — known equally as Balaji, Srinivasa and Govinda — believed to have taken his stand on this hill to carry mankind through the Kali Yuga, so that the place is called Kaliyuga Vaikuntha and the deity Kaliyuga Prathyaksha Daivam, the god made visible in this age.

The documented history begins with the Pallavas: the first recorded endowment was made in 966 CE by the queen Samavai, who gave jewels and two parcels of land to keep the festivals. Chola and Pandya donors followed. In the twelfth century Ramanuja ordered the worship here upon the Vaikhanasa Agama and introduced the recitation of the Nalayira Divya Prabandham — the shape the ritual still keeps.

Its greatest age was Vijayanagara's. Krishnadevaraya came again and again, installing statues of himself and his consorts on 2 January 1517, and his gifts of gold and jewels gilded the roof of the Ananda Nilayam. Maratha and Mysore patrons followed, the East India Company handed the shrine to a line of mahants in 1843, and the present trust, the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams, was constituted by the TTD Act of 1933.

The temple is Dravidian, built in concentric walled enclosures. The pilgrim enters by the Mahadwaram, a five-storeyed gopuram in the outer wall, crosses the Sampangi Prakaram, passes the silver-plated inner gate called the Vendi Vakili, and comes at last to the gilded Bangaru Vakili.

Beyond it the deity stands facing east, served in the Vaikhanasa manner from the Suprabhatam before three in the morning to the Ekanta Seva at night. Over the sanctum rises the Ananda Nilayam, a three-tiered vimana sheathed in gold and carrying sixty-four figures of the gods; it has been gilded and re-gilded across a thousand years, most famously from Krishnadevaraya's gift. Outside, two great roofed queue complexes hold the waiting crowds.