Ramanathaswamy Temple, Rameswaram

Rameswaram is where the two great streams of Hindu devotion meet without either giving way, and the arrangement is stated in the temple's founding story.

A Vaishnava reason for a Shaiva temple

The Ramayana supplies the account: Rama, having killed Ravana, incurs the guilt of killing a Brahmin, and worships Shiva here to expiate it. He sends Hanuman to fetch a linga from Kailasa; Hanuman is delayed, and Sita fashions one from sand so the rite can proceed at the auspicious moment. Both lingas are said to be in the temple, and the sand one is worshipped first, by Rama's instruction.

The result is that one of the twelve jyotirlingas, the principal shrines of Shiva, exists because the avatar of Vishnu needed to worship there. The story is doing deliberate work: it makes the two traditions dependent on each other rather than rivals, and it is why Rameswaram appears both among the jyotirlingas and among the four Char Dham.

The corridor

The temple's architectural fame rests on its corridors, which run to something over a kilometre in total, the longest in India, lined with more than a thousand carved pillars, each different, receding in a perspective that has been photographed since photography reached India.

They were built late: by the Sethupathi rulers of Ramnad between 1763 and 1795. The great corridor is younger than the United States.

The twenty-two wells

Pilgrims bathe at twenty-two tirthas within the precinct before darshan, each said to correspond to an arrow in Rama's quiver. The water is drawn and poured over the pilgrim at each in turn, and the circuit is a soaking, cheerful, thoroughly physical business that takes a good while.

Who paid for it

The patronage is unusually varied for a South Indian temple. Parts may go back to the eleventh or twelfth century. Kings of Jaffna in Sri Lanka renovated the sanctum around 1400, and earlier Sri Lankan rulers contributed, which is worth noting given that the temple commemorates a war against Lanka. The island visible across the strait is the one Rama is said to have invaded, and its rulers helped rebuild the shrine.

The Tamil Nadu endowments department administers it now.

Rameswaram sits at one end of a legendary land bridge and hosts a bathing ritual that requires visiting twenty-two separate wells in a set order.

Twenty-two wells, in sequence

The temple complex contains twenty-two theerthams, sacred wells, and pilgrims traditionally bathe in each in a prescribed order as an act of purification, a ritual sequence unusual in its scale compared to the single sacred tank or river bathing typical of most other major Hindu temples.

One of four, at the edge of the map

Rameswaram is one of the Char Dham, the four principal pilgrimage sites of Hindu tradition alongside Badrinath, Dwarka and Puri, and its location near Adam's Bridge, a chain of shoals and small islands popularly identified with the legendary land bridge described in the Ramayana as built to reach Lanka, gives the site a specific geographic tie to the epic beyond its temple architecture alone.

A corridor built to be walked

The temple's outer corridor, generally cited as the longest temple corridor in India, runs for a considerable distance around the complex lined with sculpted pillars, and completing a full circuit of it on foot is itself treated by pilgrims as part of the devotional practice expected during a visit, not merely as an architectural feature to admire in passing.