Sacred Ground: A Spiritual Journey Through India's Living Temples

Meenakshi Amman Temple in Madurai was not built inside a city. The city grew around it. The four gopurams, the tallest rising to nearly 52 metres, are covered in thousands of painted stucco figures, each one a story from the Shaiva and Shakta traditions, stacked so densely that the eye cannot settle. Inside, the corridors are cool and dark, the stone floors worn smooth by generations of bare feet. The presiding deity is Meenakshi, the fish-eyed goddess, a form of Parvati who is said to have ruled Madurai as a queen before Shiva came to her as a husband. The temple still runs as a living institution: six daily rituals, a procession every Friday night in which the deities are carried through the streets on a palanquin, a calendar of festivals that has not lapsed. Come before dawn for the first ritual, when the priests open the inner sanctum and the sound of the nadaswaram fills the corridor before the city wakes.

No one knows when Varanasi became a sacred city. It predates most written records. Mark Twain called it older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend. The Kashi Vishwanath temple at its centre is dedicated to Shiva as lord of the universe, and the city itself is understood in Hindu cosmology as Shiva's own ground, to die here is to be granted moksha, liberation from the cycle of rebirth, because Shiva himself whispers the Taraka mantra into the ear of the dying. The ghats along the Ganga are where this theology becomes visible. At Manikarnika and Harishchandra, cremations continue around the clock, the pyres lit day and night. This is not morbid tourism. It is the city being honest about what it is. The best time to arrive at the ghats is before sunrise, when the river is still dark and the first boats are pushing out through the mist.


The Venkateswara temple at Tirumala, above the town of Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh, receives more pilgrims than almost any religious site on earth, on peak days, the number exceeds a hundred thousand. The deity, Venkateswara, a form of Vishnu, is believed to be present here in a particularly direct way, not as a symbol but as a living presence, and the offerings the temple receives reflect that belief: gold, jewellery, the hair of devotees shaved at the temple's own tonsuring halls. The queue to enter the inner sanctum can run to hours. This is not incidental to the experience. The walk up the hill on foot, along the ancient path called the Srivari Mettu, is itself a practice, pilgrims chant as they climb, and the chant carries across the forest. The darshan, when it comes, lasts only seconds. That is the point. The glimpse is enough because the journey prepared you for it.


The Somnath temple on the Gujarat coast stands at the edge of the Arabian Sea, and its history is a record of destruction and return. It was sacked by Mahmud of Ghazni in 1025, rebuilt, sacked again, rebuilt again, seven times by most accounts, the last reconstruction completed in 1951 after Indian independence, when Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel oversaw the project as a deliberate act of national and cultural restoration. The temple is dedicated to Shiva as the lord of the moon, and the legend holds that the moon god, Chandra, built the original structure in gold after Shiva cured him of a wasting curse. Stand on the ocean-facing terrace at dusk. The sign there reads: there is no land between this point and the South Pole. The sea makes that easy to believe.


Hampi in Karnataka is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the remains of Vijayanagara, once one of the largest cities in the world. The Virupaksha temple at its centre has been in continuous worship since at least the seventh century, through the empire's rise, through its destruction by the Deccan Sultanates in 1565, through the centuries when the rest of the city became rubble and jungle. The presiding deity is Virupaksha, a form of Shiva, and the temple elephant, Lakshmi, still blesses visitors at the entrance each morning, pressing her trunk to the top of a bowed head. The landscape around the temple is unlike anything else in India: enormous granite boulders balanced on each other across miles of flat plain, the Tungabhadra river cutting through it, the ruins of a royal city scattered among the rocks. Hire a local guide, not a printed map. The stories embedded in these stones are not in any brochure.