Place · Vaishnava temple town · India
Melkote / Thirunārāyanapuram
Also known as Cheluvanarayana, Cheluvanarayana / Tirunarayana, Cheluvanarayana / Tirunarayana, Melkote, Mandya, Melkote, Melkote Cheluvanarayana, Melkote, Mandya, Melukote, Thirunarayanapuram, Tirunarayana
Ramanuja lived here about twelve years after leaving Srirangam, consecrated the Cheluvanarayana temple under Hoysala patronage, and opened temple entry to communities he named Thirukulattar. Called 'Dakshina Badri' — a southern re-siting of Badrinath.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 12.661, 76.649
Connections (5)
- Named afterBadrīnāth
Melkote is called Dakshina Badri, the southern Badrinath, and the name is doing real work: it gives a Hoysala-period Srivaishnava foundation in Karnataka the standing of the Himalayan dham without anyone having to travel there. The same device produced Gupta Kashi in Garhwal, the five Prayags of the Alaknanda and a dozen southern Kashis. Ramanuja spent about twelve years at Melkote after leaving Srirangam and consecrated the Cheluvanarayana temple, so the claim rests on a real institutional history as well as a name.
- Life routeRamanujacharya
Rāmānuja fled Chola persecution at Srirangam for Melukote in Karnataka, stayed about twelve years and returned. The exile is why Karnataka has a major Śrīvaishnava centre at all, and he is credited with opening the Cheluvanārāyana temple's festival to Dalits, whom he called Tirukulattār, the people of the sacred lineage.
- Teaching lineageKālaḍi
Kaladi and Melkote are the origin points of the two great southern Vedanta institutional networks, three hundred years apart: Shankara's four directional mathas narrated as radiating from a Kerala village, and Ramanuja's Srivaishnava temple order consolidated at a Karnataka hill town under Hoysala patronage. Both are villages that became the addresses of pan-Indian institutions.
- Traditional linkDelhi
The historically-remembered journey of Melkote's utsava-mūrti to Delhi and back. In 1310-11 the Delhi sultan Alauddin Khilji sent his general Malik Kāfūr on two Deccan campaigns which sacked the Hoysala and Yadava capitals and carried their temple treasuries — including the processional bronze image of Cheluvanārāyana from Melkote — back to Delhi. The Śrīvaishnava tradition, written down in Rāmānuja's hagiographies, says the Lord's devotees travelled to the Delhi sultan's household to recover the icon and found that the sultan's young daughter had taken it as her playmate and refused to be parted. The devotees sang to the icon; it rose and followed them south on foot; the princess, inconsolable, followed too. She reached Melkote and died there (or merged into the image), and is enshrined inside the Cheluvanārāyana temple compound as the Lord's third consort under the names Bibi Nancharamma or Thulukka Nāchiyār (literally 'the Turkic lady'), where she still receives chapati-rotis and non-brahmanical offerings every day. The story is the memory, in devotional form, of the real medieval shock of the 1310-11 raids and the subsequent diplomatic recovery of the Deccan temple icons.
- Shared site withTirupati
The two major Vaishnava hill-temples of south India each enshrine a Muslim consort of the Lord — Bibi Nancharamma — in the memory of the same medieval episode. At Melkote in Karnataka the sultan's daughter who followed the Cheluvanārāyana icon back from Delhi (see the Melkote → Delhi edge) is Thulukka Nāchiyār, with her own shrine inside the Cheluvanārāyana temple compound. At Tirumala-Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh the same figure is called Bibi Nancharamma and is worshipped as Venkateśvara's Muslim consort alongside the Lord's two Hindu consorts Śrī Dēvī (Lakshmi) and Bhū Dēvī. At Tirumala she has her own sannidhi, is offered chapati-rotis daily rather than the standard rice naivedyam, and the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams keeps her festival as part of the annual Brahmotsavam calendar. The two temples are 350 kilometres apart but their shared Bibi Nancharamma tradition is one episode: the medieval Vaiṣṇava community's answer to the 1310-11 sultanate raids, converting a historical wound into a permanent place for a Muslim figure inside the Hindu temple's divine household.
On these journeys
Sources
Melkote heritage accounts; Ramanuja.org; Hoysala Vishnuvardhana patronage
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