The goddess of this temple wears Venetian ducats. Somewhere in the gold heaped on her are coins struck in a Mediterranean republic, stamped with a standing figure of Christ on one side and the Doge of Venice kneeling before St Mark on the other, threaded onto her necklaces by devotees who had no particular idea what they were and simply gave the best gold they had. That is Sringeri in one detail: a hill town of a few thousand people at the end of a long ghat road, which for six hundred years has had the wealth of an empire posted to it.
The story of Sharadamba Temple, Sringeri
Almost everything written about this temple gets its age wrong, and the mistake is worth clearing up before you stand in front of it, because it changes what you are looking at. You will read that it is an eighth-century temple. The institution is old — the Sringeri Sharada Peetham is, by its own tradition, the first of the four mathas Adi Shankara established, and the southern one. The building is not. The granite temple you walk into was raised by the 33rd Jagadguru, Sacchidananda Shivabhinava Nrisimha Bharati, and consecrated by his successor Chandrasekhara Bharati in May 1916. When the Mysore Gazetteer was compiled in the nineteen-twenties its author described it, accurately, as "the newly built temple of Sarada".
So there are three ages stacked inside one sanctum, and they are worth separating. Underneath everything is a Sri Chakra — a geometric diagram of interlocking triangles used in the worship of the goddess — which the math holds that Adi Shankara carved onto a rock on this spot. Over that, in the beginning, stood a plain image of Sharada made of sandalwood, standing upright. The math's own account of its early years is disarmingly modest about the setting: an unpretentious shrine, and later a temple in the Kerala style with timber walls and a tiled roof, which is what a wealthy building in this rain-drenched country looked like before granite.
In the fourteenth century the sandalwood image was replaced with the one that is there now, and everything about that swap tells you what had happened to Sringeri. The new image is gold, and it is seated, not standing. The math credits the substitution to Sri Bharati Krishna Tirtha, working in the same generation that saw Vidyaranya and the founding of the Vijayanagara empire down on the Tungabhadra. A community that could commission a solid gold image had stopped being a forest hermitage and become the spiritual establishment of a state. The sandalwood original was not discarded; by the math's account it is kept in the Vidyashankara temple, fifty metres away.
The goddess sits on the Sri Chakra itself — enshrined, in one description, seated on the Sri Chakra Peetham, holding a japa mala, with a parrot perched on her hand. And here the 1930 Gazetteer offers a detail no guidebook carries. Cataloguing the two well-known fourteenth-century images in this temple, of Sarada and of Sarasvati, it records that each is a seated figure with four hands, three of them holding a rosary, a vessel of nectar and a book, the fourth raised in the abhaya pose with the chin-mudra — the gesture of teaching. Then it makes the point that matters: those attributes "appear to be peculiar to the image of Sarasvati at Sringeri", because everywhere else in south India this goddess is shown with a noose and an elephant goad in two of her hands. Sringeri's Saraswati is iconographically her own.
The wealth around her is documented in the same volume, and it is not decorous about it. The jewels are of solid gold set with diamonds, rubies and other precious stones, with numerous pearl necklaces. Elsewhere in the math: figures of Venugopala and Srinivasa with their consorts made of rubies; a Nandi carved from a single large pearl; an emerald mantapa with a golden linga inside it; a gold drinking vessel set with diamonds; a gold spoon whose bowl is a single big ruby, scooped out. Most of it, the Gazetteer notes, is no older than Krishna Raja Wodeyar III — nineteenth century — which is to say the giving never stopped.
And then the coins. Among the goddess's ornaments are puttali saras, necklaces strung with gold coins, and the compiler looked closely enough to identify what was on them: foreign gold, some Belgian, mostly Venetian, and the Venetian pieces are ducats. He describes the design — Christ standing on the obverse, the Doge kneeling to receive a banner from St Mark on the reverse. Venetian ducats circulated across the Indian Ocean trade for centuries and turned up in south India as bullion, so their presence is explicable; what is striking is where they ended up. Someone walked up a ghat road into the Western Ghats and hung the money of Christian Europe around the neck of a Hindu goddess of learning, and nobody thought it worth remarking on until a government compiler wrote it down.
The last thing to know is that the temple is not the whole visit and was never meant to be. The Gazetteer of 1930 counted some 120 temples in this small town, one of them a Jain basti, and noted that many Brahmin houses had a shrine in the yard behind with the householder as its priest. Outside this temple, a little to the south, stands a lamp-pillar about thirty-five feet high with a figure on its south face, hands folded — often mistaken, the compiler says, for a Buddha. Below it all runs the Tunga, whose fish have been fed rather than caught for as long as anyone has written about the place. You come for a gold image in a granite room and you find that the town around it is the older thing.
Legend & myth
Two different stories explain why Adi Shankara stopped here, they are not compatible, and both are worth hearing. The famous one is the cobra and the frog. Walking the bank of the Tunga, Shankara is said to have seen a cobra with its hood spread wide — not to strike, but to shade a frog that was in labour on the hot rock. Reading it as a sign that ground where natural enemies suspend their instincts must be holy, he stayed twelve years and founded his first matha here. That is the story on every signboard in the district, and it is hagiography rather than history.
The second is older in print and almost nobody tells it. The Mysore Gazetteer of 1930 records that Shankaracharya settled at Sringeri "as directed by the image of Sarad-amma or Sarasvati, which he had brought from KASHMIR" — carrying the goddess south with him from the far north, and stopping where she indicated. It is no more verifiable than the cobra, but it is a different claim with a different meaning: in this version the goddess chose the site and Shankara merely obeyed, and Sringeri is the terminus of a journey the length of India. The link to Kashmir is not casual either; the Sharada tradition has one of its great historic seats there, and the throne of learning at Sringeri carries the name.
The town's name is a legend before it is a place name. Sringeri is properly Rishyashringa-giri, the hill of Rishyashringa — the horned sage of the Ramayana, born to Vibhandaka and raised in the forest without ever having seen a woman. The kingdom of Anga lay under drought, and its king was advised that only the untouched Rishyashringa could break it. The 1930 Gazetteer retells the rest with visible enjoyment: a party of young women was sent, made its first halt at Narve a few miles from Sringeri, waited for the formidable father to be away, and drew the boy out by degrees until curiosity carried him off to Anga, where the rain followed him. He later became priest to King Dasharatha and performed the sacrifice that produced Rama. The hill is shown; nothing dates any of it.
A fourth story is about the succession itself, and it is the one historians pick at hardest. The math's own list of pontiffs runs unbroken from Shankara in the eighth century to the present day. Paul Hacker noticed a problem with the early stretch of it: before the fifteenth century the recorded terms of Sringeri's heads run to sixty years, eighty, in one case a hundred and five — and then, abruptly after 1386, they become the ordinary lifespans of ordinary men. That does not prove the early list invented, but it does mark the point where the record becomes the kind of thing that can be checked, and it is the same century as everything else solid here.
Read the full history of Sharadamba Temple, Sringeri 1196 more words
History
The earliest evidence for religion at Sringeri does not point to this goddess at all, and we say so rather than skip it. Hermann Kulke records that the earliest historical evidence for Sringeri, from the twelfth century, shows a centre of Jainism; Paul Dundas puts it more bluntly, that Sringeri "was originally a Jain centre that was taken over by Hindus in the fourteenth century". The math's own tradition traces its foundation to Adi Shankara in the eighth. The two accounts have never been reconciled, and the 1930 Gazetteer's own count of the town's temples still included a Jain basti among them.
The fourteenth century is where the documents begin, and they begin with money. A Sringeri stone inscription dated Saka 1268 — 1346 CE — records an endowment by Harihara I, first king of Vijayanagara, together with his four brothers Kampanna, Bukanna, Marappa and Muddappa, his son-in-law Ballappa Dannayaka and the latter's son Savanna. It is one of the earliest Vijayanagara grants known, and it professes to celebrate Harihara's victory over all the country from the eastern to the western ocean. Ten years later, in 1356, Bukka I came in person to pay homage to Vidyatirtha and endowed the math again. Over thirty inscriptions record grants made by or under the gurus of Sringeri, ranging in date from 1392 to 1758.
It is in this same fourteenth century that the sandalwood image was replaced by the seated golden one that is worshipped today, and that Bharati Krishna Tirtha and Vidyaranya had a temple built here in the Kerala style, timber-walled and tile-roofed. The two 14th-century images the Gazetteer catalogues in this temple — Sarada and Sarasvati — belong to this moment of sudden royal wealth.
What Vijayanagara gave, its collapse took away. When the empire was broken by the confederacy of the Deccan sultanates in 1565 and its kings withdrew east, the math's influence went with it. The Gazetteer is direct about the consequence: the establishment "seems to have been ruined, and the lands which formed its endowments were appropriated by any one who could seize them". Recovery came from the Keladi Nayakas of the north-west. In 1621 Venkatappa Nayaka claimed to have re-established Sringeri; in 1652, on the representation of the then guru Sachchidananda Bharati, who travelled to Bednur to make the case in person, Sivappa Nayaka held an inquiry, recovered the math's lands from those who had taken them, and restored them.
The worst day in this temple's history was in 1791, and unlike the general sack of the complex it is specific to this shrine. After the Third Anglo–Mysore War a body of Maratha irregulars under Parasuram Bhao passed through Sringeri. By the Gazetteer's account, drawn from letters that survive, the raiders "not only plundered the matha of all its valuable property worth Rs. 60 lakhs but also committed the sacrilege of displacing the image of the goddess Sarada". They lifted her off her seat. What makes the episode famous is the response: Tipu Sultan, the Muslim ruler of Mysore, wrote to the Sringeri Jagadguru offering protection, sent money and gifts for the restoration, and in one letter asked him to perform rites for good rain and crops. Historians read the politics of those letters differently — Leela Prasad as evidence of genuine tolerance and of irregulars acting outside orders, A. K. Shastri emphasising the reconciliation that followed, with the pontiff protesting by fasting on the bank of the Tunga and the Peshwa ordering the stolen goods recovered — while Prasad notes that no culprit was ever identified and no record of compensation being paid survives. The letters themselves are not in dispute.
The Mysore state took the math under its protection after Haidar Ali absorbed the Keladi kingdom in 1763, and by 1930 the establishment was drawing an annual revenue of about ₹50,000 from its jagir — twenty-four villages and some 9,264 people — together with a grant of ₹1,000 a month from the state. That land settlement, which had funded Sringeri since the Vijayanagara grants, ended with Indian land reform in the 1960s and 1970s.
The present building belongs to the twentieth century. Sacchidananda Shivabhinava Nrisimha Bharati, the 33rd Jagadguru, raised the temple in granite with polished granite walling around the sanctum, and his successor Chandrasekhara Bharati consecrated it in May 1916 — the same pair, in the same years, who built and consecrated the small gopuram at the Vidyashankara temple next door. The stone pillars were carved with deities following the shilpa sastra tradition practised in Tamil Nadu, which is why the detailing here looks less like the Hoysala work of the district and more like the temple architecture of the plains. Enrichment has continued since: in 1999 the present Jagadguru, Bharati Tirtha, dedicated a golden chariot costing about ₹1 crore, and gold-covered doors, the covering alone valued at some ₹24 lakh, were installed at the entrance to the sanctum.
Why visit
Go for the image, and go knowing what you are looking at. A seated goddess of solid gold, fourteenth-century, on a Sri Chakra the math holds was cut by Adi Shankara himself, with a japa mala in one hand and a parrot at her shoulder — and an iconography that a government compiler in 1930 found to be unlike this goddess anywhere else in the region. You will not photograph her and should not try. Stand still for a minute instead.
Go for the setting, which is doing more work than the building. The temple sits on the north bank of the Tunga at about 645 m, with the river running below the steps and the Western Ghats closing in on every side. The town has been a place of learning for six hundred years and still feels like one: Sanskrit school, students, a routine of worship that runs to a timetable and does not care whether you are watching.
Go for the fish. The stretch of the Tunga below the temple is a fish sanctuary in everything but legal designation — around 38 species, roughly half of them the endangered mahseer Tor khudree that people here call bilimeenu, protected simply by the math's own watch-and-ward and by the fact that nobody will fish them. Feeding them puffed rice from the steps is the tradition, recorded in the same words in 1930. They are large, and they are entirely unafraid of you.
Go because you can watch the institution work, not just the monument. The Jagadguru gives darshan daily, generally between 10:30 and 11:30 in the morning, and performs the Chandramoulishwara puja late in the evening. Free meals are served to everyone at the Bharathi Theertha Prasada hall, as they have been for centuries — the 1930 Gazetteer notes that on festival days all classes were fed at the math's expense, with cloth distributed to the women and money to the men.
And go because it is fifty metres from the Vidyashankara temple, which is the finer building and which most pilgrims walk straight past. Do the two together. The gold image and the apsidal stone calendar are one visit, and the four or five hours of ghat road it takes to get here are worth spending only once.
