The Water Lord of Vellore Fort: The Story of the Jalakandeswarar Temple

Few temples in Tamil Nadu keep such unlikely company as the Jalakandeswarar temple. It stands not on an open street but inside the granite walls of Vellore Fort, ringed by a wide water moat, sharing its ground with a colonial church, an old garrison mosque and a museum. Raised by the Vijayanagara rulers in the sixteenth century, it is a jewel-box of carved stone that survived war, abandonment and a long stretch of years in which no lamp was lit before its deity — until, one March morning in 1981, the god came home.

A lingam in the water

The temple takes its name from water. Jalakandeswarar means roughly ‘the lord who dwells in water’, for the Shiva lingam in the sanctum was once ringed by a pool fed by springs and rain. Local tradition adds a founding legend: the Vijayanagara chieftain Chinna Bommi Nayak is said to have dreamed of a lingam hidden beneath an anthill on this marshy spot, cleared it and built the shrine around it in about 1550. Whatever the truth of the dream, the temple is firmly a work of the Vijayanagara age, and it sits inside the Vellore Fort whose granite ramparts went up a little later, around 1566.

The carved hall of the Vijayanagara masons

The temple’s glory is its stonework. A tall gopuram, rising well over thirty metres and crowded with sculpted figures, marks the entrance, but the finest carving waits inside at the kalyana mandapam, the pillared marriage hall. Here the granite has been cut into rearing yalis — mythical lion-like beasts — and horses with riders, each hewn from a single block so that the animals seem to burst out of their pillars. Elsewhere the masons left dragons, swans and a curious two-in-one sculpture that reads as a bull from one angle and an elephant from another. The work is close kin to the great mandapams of Hampi, the Vijayanagara capital, and shows the same restless energy in stone.

Exile and homecoming

The temple’s history has not been peaceful. As the fort changed hands through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the shrine fell into neglect, and at some point its main deity was carried out for safekeeping and installed at the Jalakanda Vinayakar temple in Sathuvachari, a short way off. For a long stretch the sanctum inside the fort stood empty and worship lapsed. That ended on 16 March 1981, when the deity was brought back — accounts describe it being moved quietly into the fort and reinstalled in the early hours — and regular worship resumed the following year, in 1982. The temple has been a living shrine again ever since, looked after by the state’s Hindu religious endowments department.

A fort of many rulers

The temple’s fortunes were tied to the fort around it, and few forts in the south have seen so much. Built by the Vijayanagara Nayaks, Vellore passed in turn to the Bijapur sultans, the Marathas, the Mughals and the Nawabs of Arcot before the British took it in 1799. That same year, after the fall of Srirangapatna and the death of Tipu Sultan, the East India Company imprisoned Tipu’s widows, sons and daughters within these walls. Seven years later the fort earned its place in the history books: on 10 July 1806 Indian sepoys of the Company’s own army rose in revolt — the Vellore Mutiny — angered by new regulations on turbans, beards and caste marks that they read as an attack on their faith. They seized the fort and killed around a hundred and thirty Europeans before the rising was crushed within a day. It came half a century before the great uprising of 1857, and is often called the first major sepoy mutiny against British rule.

Visiting

The temple and fort sit together in the middle of Vellore, so a single visit covers both. Come early to walk the moat and the ramparts before the heat builds, then step into the cool of the mandapam to trace the carvings. Entry is free, though the inner sanctum keeps to morning and evening worship hours, and as at most working temples the innermost shrine is open to Hindus only while the halls are open to all. Dress modestly, cover shoulders and knees, and expect to leave your shoes at the entrance. The same fort holds a government museum and an old colonial church, so you can fill a half-day without leaving the walls. For a wider route through the town and its gilded modern temple, read /india/tamil-nadu/guides/vellore-golden-temple-and-fort-story, and to set this stronghold alongside the rest, see /india/tamil-nadu/guides/forts-of-tamil-nadu.