The Divya Desams of Tamil Nadu: The 108 Abodes of Vishnu

Between roughly the 6th and 9th centuries, twelve Tamil poet-saints known as the Alvars travelled the south singing hymns to Vishnu. The temples they praised in verse became fixed, by later tradition, at a count of 108, and those 108 shrines are the Divya Desams, the 'divine abodes.' They are not a random list. They form a sacred geography, sung into place a thousand years before the word 'pilgrimage circuit' existed, and most of them, commonly counted as 84, stand in what is now Tamil Nadu. The foremost of them all, Srirangam, is a temple-town in its own right.

The Alvars and the 4,000 verses

The Alvars, whose name means 'those immersed' in god, were devotional poets who ranged in background from a king and a Brahmin scholar to Andal, the one woman among the twelve, and Thiruppaan, born outside the caste system. Their Tamil hymns to Vishnu were gathered in the 9th to 10th centuries by the theologian Nathamuni into a single anthology, the Nalayira Divya Prabandham, literally the 'Collection of Four Thousand Verses.' A temple counts as a Divya Desam only if it is named in that canon. This is the precise, verifiable test that separates the 108 from the thousands of other Vishnu shrines in the south. The verses are still chanted daily in these temples, which is why the tradition calls the Prabandham the 'Tamil Veda.'

The 108 are not evenly spread. They cluster tightly along the old kingdoms and river valleys the Alvars knew: the Kaveri delta of the Cholas, the temple-city of Kanchipuram in the Pallava heartland of Thondai Nadu, and the Vaigai and Thamirabarani basins of the Pandyas. Reading the map region by region is the only sane way to approach them, and it is also the way the tradition itself is organised.

Chola Nadu: the Kaveri delta and Srirangam

The single largest concentration, 40 Divya Desams, lies in Chola Nadu along the Kaveri. At its centre is the Ranganathaswamy Temple at Srirangam, on an island in the river near Tiruchirappalli. It is the first and greatest of the 108, where Vishnu reclines as Ranganatha on the serpent Adishesha. The complex is enormous by any measure: about 156 acres enclosed within seven concentric walls, pierced by 21 gopurams. The southern Rajagopuram, completed only in 1987, rises about 72 metres (roughly 236 feet), among the tallest temple towers in Asia. It is one of the largest functioning Hindu temple complexes in the world, and the reason Srirangam is called Bhoologa Vaikundam, Vaikuntha brought down to earth.

Within a short drive of Srirangam sit several more of the delta's abodes: Uthamar Kovil at Thirukkarambanur, unusual for housing Vishnu, Shiva and Brahma in one complex, and the Appakkudathaan Perumal Temple at Koviladi. Downstream, the town of Kumbakonam holds two of the best-loved: the Sarangapani Temple, whose chariot-shaped sanctum is the third-largest Vaishnava shrine after Srirangam and Tirupati, and the nearby Oppiliappan Temple at Thirunageswaram, where by long custom the deity is offered food cooked entirely without salt. Further east, near Sirkazhi, the eleven Divya Desams of Thirunangur stand within a few kilometres of one another, a garland of shrines that can be covered in a single day.

Thondai Nadu: Vishnu Kanchi, the 14 of Kanchipuram

Kanchipuram is the densest cluster of all. The old city is split by tradition into 'Shiva Kanchi' and 'Vishnu Kanchi,' and the Vishnu half alone holds 14 Divya Desams, more than any other single town. Presiding over them is the Varadharaja Perumal Temple, one of the three great Vaishnava temples of the region, set on the elephant-hill of Hastagiri. Around it lie shrines whose names encode their legends: Yathothkari Perumal, known as Sonna Vannam Seitha Perumal, 'the lord who did exactly as was told'; Ashtabhujakaram, where Vishnu is shown with eight arms; and the Deepaprakasar Temple at Thooppul, 'the light of the lamp,' beside the birthplace of the philosopher Vedanta Desika.

The rest of the Kanchi 14 are within walking or cycling distance of each other: the Vaikunta Perumal Temple, an 8th-century Pallava structure whose cloister carries carved panels of dynastic history; the Ulagalantha Perumal Temple, where a towering Trivikrama strides to measure the universe; the Pandava Thoothar Perumal Temple, recalling Krishna's embassy to the Kauravas; the small Nilathingal Thundam Perumal Temple, which shares a compound with the Ekambareswarar Shiva temple; and Pavalavannar, 'the coral-hued lord.' A short way south, the Sundaravarada Perumal temple at Uthiramerur is itself a Divya Desam whose walls carry the famous 10th-century village-election inscriptions, told in The Village That Voted.

Pandya Nadu: Nava Tirupati, Madurai and the far south

The Pandya country holds 18 Divya Desams, threaded along the Vaigai and the Thamirabarani. The most striking group is the Nava Tirupati, nine temples strung along the Thamirabarani around Srivaikuntam in Thoothukudi district, each linked to one of the nine planets of Indian astronomy and traditionally worshipped in a single circuit. To their west, near Nanguneri, stand two more: the Vanamamalai Perumal Temple, famous for the fragrant sandal-paste bath of its deity, and the Vaishnava Nambi Temple at Thirukkurungudi, which honours Vishnu in standing, sitting and reclining forms across its shrines.

Madurai, the Pandya capital, has two Divya Desams of its own. The Koodal Azhagar Temple sits inside the city, its central shrine stacking three forms of Vishnu, seated, standing and reclining, in a single vertical sanctum. On the hills to the north-east stands Azhagar Kovil, the temple of Kallazhagar, whose deity crosses the Vaigai each year in the great Chithirai festival that binds the Vishnu and Meenakshi traditions of Madurai together. North toward Sivaganga lies Thirukoshtiyur, the Sowmya Narayana Perumal temple where, tradition holds, the teacher Ramanuja climbed the gopuram to proclaim a secret mantra to everyone below, defying his own guru's instruction to keep it private. It is labelled as tradition, not record, but it is the story every pilgrim there is told.

How to travel the 108

No one visits all 108 in one trip, and the tradition never expected them to. Two of the abodes, Thiruparkadal (the Ocean of Milk) and Paramapadam (Vaikuntha itself), are celestial and cannot be reached at all; a handful more lie far to the north, at Ayodhya, Mathura, Dwaraka, Badrinath and Naimisaranyam, and one is at Muktinath in Nepal. Thiruvananthapuram's Padmanabhaswamy temple, another famous reclining-Vishnu Divya Desam, sits across the border in Kerala. The practical approach is to take Tamil Nadu one cluster at a time: Srirangam with Kumbakonam and the delta as a base in the centre; Kanchipuram as a two-day walking circuit near Chennai; and Tirunelveli-Thoothukudi with Madurai as the southern leg. Grouped this way, the Divya Desams stop being an impossible list of 108 and become four or five very doable journeys, each following the same river valleys the Alvars sang.