India Guide
Tamil Nadu
Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple
Address: 6km north of Trichy Junction, at Srirangam
Price: Camera Rs50, video camera Rs100
The SriRanganathaswamy Temple is among the most revered shrines to Vishnu in south India, and also one of the largest and liveliest. Enclosed by seven rectangular walled courtyards and covering more than sixty hectares, it stands on an island defined by a tributary of the River Kaveri. This location symbolizes the transcendence of Vishnu, housed in the sanctuary reclining on the coils of the snake Adisesha, who in legend formed an island for the god, resting on the primordial Ocean of Chaos.
Frequent buses from Trichy pull in and leave from outside the southern gate. The temple is approached from the south. A gateway topped with an immense and heavily carved gopura, plastered and painted in bright pinks, blues and yellows, and completed in the late 1980s, leads to the outermost courtyard, the latest of seven built between the fifth and seventeenth centuries. Most of the present structure dates from the late fourteenth century, when the temple was renovated and enlarged after a disastrous sacking in 1313. The outer three courtyards, or prakaras, form the hub of the temple community, housing ascetics, priests, musicians and souvenir shops; even vehicles ply the streets within the temple precinct.
At the fourth wall, the entrance to the temple proper, visitors remove footwear before passing through a high gateway, topped by a magnificent gopura and lined with small shrines to teachers, hymn-singers and sages. In earlier days, this fourthprakara would have formed the outermost limit of the temple, and was the closest members of the lowest castes could get to the sanctuary. It contains some of the finest and oldest buildings of the complex, including a temple to the goddess Ranganayaki in the northwest corner where devotees worship before approaching Vishnu's shrine. On the eastern side of the prakara, the heavily carved "thousand pillared" kalyan mandapa, or hall, was constructed in the late Chola period. The pillars of the outstanding Sheshagiriraya Mandapa, south of the kalyan mandapa, are decorated with rearing steeds and hunters, representing the triumph of good over evil.