Virupaksha Temple, Hampi
ವಿರೂಪಾಕ್ಷ ದೇವಾಲಯ, ಹಂಪೆ
Why this temple matters
On the boulder-strewn banks of the Tungabhadra, where the Vijayanagara emperors once ruled the richest kingdom in the south, the Virupaksha temple still keeps its lamps lit — a shrine older than the vanished city around it, and the one great temple of Hampi where worship has never stopped.
History
Virupaksha is older than the empire that made it famous. A shrine to Shiva as Pampapati stood on this bend of the Tungabhadra by at least the 7th century, long before Hampi became a capital. Its greatness came with the Vijayanagara empire, founded in the 14th century, whose kings took Virupaksha as their tutelary deity and signed their royal grants in his name. Under the emperors — above all Krishnadevaraya, whose reign began in 1509 — the modest shrine grew into a vast complex, its towering eastern gateway and pillared halls raised to match the ambition of a court that ruled almost the whole of South India. In 1565 the city fell to the armies of the Deccan sultanates and was abandoned to ruin; its palaces and markets are today the deserted stones that spread for miles. Yet Virupaksha alone was never forsaken. Worship continued through the centuries of desolation, and the temple remains a living shrine at the heart of a World Heritage landscape, inscribed by UNESCO in 1986 as part of the Group of Monuments at Hampi.
Architecture
The temple announces itself from far off by its great eastern gopuram, a nine-storeyed tower rising close to fifty metres above the bazaar street that runs toward it. Passing beneath it, the pilgrim crosses successive courtyards to inner gateways and at last to the sanctum of Virupaksha. The most admired addition is the ranga mandapa, the great pillared hall built by Krishnadevaraya around 1510 to mark his coronation, its columns carved with rearing yalis and its ceiling painted with scenes of the gods and of the sage Vidyaranya borne in procession. A celebrated curiosity survives in a chamber behind the sanctum: through a small opening, the tall gopuram casts an inverted image of itself upon the inner wall — a pinhole-camera effect that has drawn wonder for centuries. Around the temple, the Vijayanagara manner shows everywhere in the composite pillars, the animal brackets, and the ordered progression from bright outer court to dark, ancient shrine.
Legends
The temple's story is bound to the goddess Pampa, an ancient local river-deity identified with Parvati, from whom the Tungabhadra's older name Pampa and the very name Hampi derive. Devotion holds that Pampa performed austerities on this spot to win Shiva, who as Virupaksha — the lord 'of the many forms' or 'the oblique-eyed' — took her as his bride; the temple thus marks a divine marriage still celebrated here each year. The place is woven, too, into the world of the Ramayana: the surrounding country is identified with Kishkindha, the realm of the monkey king Sugriva and of Hanuman, and pilgrims point to nearby hills and the Pampa Sarovar as sites of that epic. When Vijayanagara's founders sought to build their capital, tradition credits the sage Vidyaranya with guiding them — and it is his festival image that the painted ceiling of the great hall still honours.
Festivals
As a living temple, Virupaksha keeps a full Shaiva calendar, and its festivals fill the long bazaar street with crowds as they must have in imperial days. The greatest is the annual car festival, when Virupaksha and Pampa are drawn through the town in a towering wooden chariot to the pull of thousands of hands. The divine marriage of the god and goddess is celebrated with special splendour each spring, and Maha Shivaratri brings night-long worship. The temple elephant, long a beloved fixture of the courtyard, blesses pilgrims at the gate. Through every festival the sense persists that this is not a monument revived for visitors but a shrine whose worship has simply never been interrupted.
The Experience
Hampi is one of the most extraordinary landscapes in India — a sea of golden granite boulders along a green river, scattered for miles with the ruins of a lost imperial city — and Virupaksha is its living heart. Walk up the old bazaar street toward the great tower at dawn, when the light is soft and the temple elephant is being bathed at the river ghats below. Within, the courts are cool and worn smooth by centuries of feet; seek out the chamber where the gopuram hangs upside down on the wall. Then give the rest of a day, or several, to the ruins around it — the Vittala temple with its stone chariot, the royal enclosure, the riverside shrines — for Virupaksha is best understood as the one flame still burning in a city the world let go.