Meenakshi Amman Temple

The ordinary arrangement in a South Indian Shaiva temple is that Shiva holds the principal shrine and the goddess a subsidiary one. At Madurai it is the other way round, and the reversal runs through everything.

The order of precedence

Meenakshi, the fish-eyed one, holds the principal shrine. Sundareswarar, a form of Shiva, holds the secondary one. Pilgrims visit her first. Her shrine is the one with the gilded tower over it.

Properly speaking this is a Shakta temple with a Shaiva shrine attached rather than a Shaiva temple with a goddess in it, and describing it as simply a Shiva temple gets the theology backwards.

The story that supports it

Meenakshi is born to the Pandya king as a daughter with three breasts, and an oracle says the third will vanish when she meets the man she is to marry. She grows up as a warrior and conquers in every direction, reaching Kailasa, where she meets Shiva, and it does.

The reading offered within the tradition is not that she is domesticated by the marriage. It is that Madurai's sovereign is the goddess, and Shiva marries into the city.

Vishnu gives her away

Vishnu appears as Meenakshi's brother and performs the giving-away at the wedding. A Vaishnava deity therefore has a necessary role in the central rite of a Shakta-Shaiva temple.

This is the useful thing about Madurai: the sectarian divisions that look rigid in doctrinal literature are, in the actual practice of a major temple, arranged into a family.

The marriage as the city's festival

The Chithirai festival re-enacts the wedding over about fifteen days and is the largest event in the region, drawing very large crowds. The deities are processed, the marriage performed, and Vishnu's arrival from Alagar Koyil is a set piece in its own right, he arrives late, which is part of the story.

The building

The oldest surviving masonry belongs to the reign of Sadayavarman Kulasekaran in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century. Malik Kafur's raid of 1311 destroyed and looted the temple, and rebuilding followed Vijayanagara's capture of Madurai in 1378.

Almost everything a visitor sees is Nayak work of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the great halls, the gopurams with their thousands of painted figures, and the gilding over the goddess's shrine, raised under Vishwanatha Nayak and his minister Ariyanatha Mudaliar.

Meenakshi's temple complex is covered in more than thirty thousand painted sculptures, and by tradition the whole surface is meant to be repainted roughly once a decade rather than left to age in place.

Towers built to be climbed with the eyes

The temple's fourteen gopurams, towering gateway structures at its entrances, are covered from base to summit in thousands of brightly painted stucco figures depicting gods, demons and mythological scenes, densely enough that a single tower can carry over a thousand individual sculpted figures. Temple tradition calls for periodic repainting and restoration of this surface, typically at roughly twelve-year intervals, treating the towers' colour as something actively maintained rather than a fixed historical finish.

Older in reputation than in current stone

The temple appears in references within Sangam era Tamil literature, indicating a shrine existed at the site many centuries before the present structure was built, largely under the Nayak dynasty from the sixteenth century onward after earlier temple buildings were damaged or destroyed during earlier invasions of the region.

A tank for a specific kind of judgement

The temple's Porthamarai Kulam, or Golden Lotus Tank, is associated in local legend with a traditional test of literary merit, in which manuscripts were said to float or sink in its waters depending on their quality, a legend tied to Madurai's historical reputation as a centre of Tamil literary academies.