Sri Mushnam Bhuvarahaswamy

The story of Srimushnam is the story of the Varaha avatar itself. In the age of the world's making, the demon Hiranyaksha, the golden-eyed, brother of Hiranyakashipu, grew so mighty in his war against the gods that he seized the earth goddess Bhudevi and dragged her down beneath the waters of the cosmic ocean, hiding her in the deep so that the world of living things had no ground to stand upon.

To save the earth Vishnu took a form never seen before, the form of a great boar, Varaha, and plunged into the ocean. In the depths he found the demon and the hidden earth, and there followed a duel of enormous length, boar against titan in the dark water, until Varaha slew Hiranyaksha. Then, setting his tusk beneath the sunken goddess, he lifted Bhudevi from the depths and bore her up to the surface, restoring the earth to her place, and the gods rained flowers upon the boar who had carried the world upon his tusk.

At Srimushnam the tradition holds that this Varaha, the earth-bearer, chose to appear of his own will, unmade by any hand, so that the place is one of the swayamvyakta kshetras, the self-manifest abodes, and here the Lord is worshipped forever in the form in which he saved the earth, with Bhudevi, the goddess he lifted, honoured at his side as Ambujavalli. The whole shrine is thus a standing image of the earth's rescue, the boar and the goddess together at its heart.

Srimushnam is one of the eight swayamvyakta kshetras, the self-manifest abodes of Vishnu, and one of the foremost Varaha temples in India, sacred to the Lord as Bhu Varaha Swamy, the boar avatar who lifted the earth goddess Bhudevi from the cosmic ocean. Its sanctity as a Varaha kshetra is told in its Sthala Purana and honoured in the Srivaishnava tradition, which counts it not among the 108 Divya Desams sung by the Alvars but among the Abhimana Sthalams, the shrines dear to the Lord and his devotees outside that canon.

While the sanctity of the site is held to be ancient, the temple that stands today is chiefly a monument of the sixteenth century. Under the Nayakas of Gingee, who ruled this country as governors of the Vijayanagara empire and then in their own right, the temple was built and greatly enlarged; tradition and the temple's inscriptions associate its construction above all with Krishnappa Nayaka, under whom its walls, gopuram and great sculptured halls took shape. The temple thus belongs to the last flowering of Dravidian temple architecture, when the Vijayanagara and Nayaka builders raised pillared mandapas of extraordinary richness across the Tamil country.

Srimushnam is famous for the beauty of its stone. Its mandapas carry pillars cut with the avatars of Vishnu, with gods, riders and Puranic scenes, and among them stands a set of musical pillars that sound clear notes when struck, a feature that places it with a small number of southern temples celebrated for this art. About the shrine lies the Nithya Pushkarani, the ever-auspicious temple tank also called Nithya Kalyani, central to the worship and to the great festivals.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as Gingee and the surrounding country passed under Bijapur, the Marathas and then the wider struggles of the Carnatic, the temple continued to receive patronage, and it is remembered in the records of the Maratha period. The temple's endowments, its festivals and its worship were carried on through these changes, and it remained the chief shrine of its country.

Under later administration and in the modern era the temple has been maintained as a living centre of worship and recognised for its architectural importance. It draws its greatest crowds at the Masi Magam festival in the Tamil month of Masi, when vast numbers gather for the sacred bathing and the procession of the Lord, and observes the annual Brahmotsavam, Varaha Jayanti and Vaikuntha Ekadasi with the full round of Srivaishnava celebration. Srimushnam remains what it has long been: the great temple of the boar, where the tradition holds that the earth itself was saved.