Meenakshi Sundareswarar Temple

Deity

Meenakshi and Sundareswarar

Where

Madurai, Tamil Nadu · 9.92N 78.12E

Usual hours

5.30 am – 12.30 pm, 4 pm – 9 pm — hours change with festivals and the season; check before travelling. Were these right when you went?

Grahas

Sukran Chandran

Visited for

The Amman comes first here, and the temple is a wedding: the Chithirai Thiruvizha re-enacts the Meenakshi Thirukalyanam every year. Friday and Panguni Uthiram are its days; the first temple named for a delayed marriage.

The sthala purana has it that the Pandya king Malayadhwaja and his queen, having no child, performed a sacrifice, and that a girl of three rose from the fire with three breasts. A voice is said to have told them to raise her as a son, and that the third breast would disappear when she met the man she was to marry.

She ruled as Meenakshi and went out to conquer the eight directions. At Kailasam she met Sivan, the third breast vanished, and the marriage was fixed. It was held at Madurai, and her brother — Vishnu, worshipped at Alagar Koil — set out to give her away but was delayed and reached only the Vaigai. The Chithirai festival keeps both halves of that story every year.

The sixty-four Thiruvilaiyadal, the sports of Sivan at Madurai, are the wider sthala purana of the city, and most of them are told in this temple.

Madurai is a Tevaram Paadal Petra Sthalam and a very old temple site. The building standing today is almost entirely a Nayak-period rebuilding: an earlier temple was destroyed during the Delhi Sultanate raids on the south in the fourteenth century, and the present complex was raised afterwards, most of it under the Nayaks of Madurai.

The temple is unusual among great Saiva temples in that the Amman is the principal deity in practice — her shrine draws the queue, and her name is the temple’s name.

Fourteen gopurams, four of them very tall on the outer walls, all of them covered in painted stucco figures. The golden vimanas over the two sanctums are visible from inside the courts.

The Potramarai Kulam, the golden lotus tank, is in the middle of the complex with a painted corridor round it. The Ashta Shakthi and Kilikoontu mandapams lead in from the east.

The Thousand Pillar Hall in the north-east is now a museum; the pillars just outside it ring at different pitches when struck. The painted ceilings and the carved pillars of the corridors are the reason a walk round takes hours.

The Chithirai Thiruvizha is the festival of the year: the Meenakshi Thirukalyanam, then the car festival, then Kallazhagar riding down from his hill and entering the Vaigai. The city stops for it.

Navaratri, Aavani Moolam, Thai Poosam and the Friday evenings at the Amman shrine are the other days. The nightly palliarai procession, when Sundareswarar is carried to Meenakshi’s chamber, is kept all year.

Also called

Meenakshi Amman Kovil, Thiruaalavai

Period

Rebuilt in the Nayak period, mainly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, over a much older temple

Reaching it

The temple is in the centre of Madurai, about 1.5 km from Madurai Junction railway station and a short ride from the airport. The streets around it are pedestrianised in part, so most visitors walk the last stretch.

• Thirupparamkunram Subramanya Swamy Temple 7.1 km · Murugan
• Kalamegha Perumal Temple, Thirumogur 10.2 km · Vaishnava
• Kallazhagar Temple, Alagar Koil 20.3 km · Vaishnava
• Pazhamudircholai Murugan Temple 20.9 km · Murugan
• Sowmya Narayana Perumal Temple, Thirukoshtiyur 45 km · Vaishnava
• Bhuminathar Temple, Thiruchuli 46.6 km · Saiva

Been to this temple? The things that change — whether the hours on this page were right, whether the sannidhi was open, how long the queue was on a Saturday — are exactly what no printed source keeps current, and what the next person travelling here needs.

• Were the hours right when you went?
• Is anything on this page wrong or out of date?
• A photograph of the gopuram, the tank, or the notice board

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