Lepakshi Temple

-  The Incomplete Kalyan Mantapa And More

By Tharangini

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Thank you for joining me from Part IV

Another place filled with drama, intrigue and designs is the incomplete Kalyan Mantapa or the marriage hall near the southwest side of the temple. 

The pillars stand all decked up in their incredible carvings, yet bare because of the missing ceiling.  Our guide dramatically narrated the macabre story behind the unfinished mandapa. 

Entrance to the kalyan mantapa

After some fact-checking and cross verification, what I got was this - some people who were not too much in favour of Virupanna went and alerted the king that money from his treasury was being ill-spent on the temple. It is not clear if they complained to King Achyutaraya or Aliya Rama Raya (Krishna Deva Raya's son-in-law) who overthrew Achyutaraya in a coup. The end result was the king getting furious with Virupanna and ordering his soldiers to blind him. 

Virupanna's eyes

Virupanna was a self-respecting man. Instead of suffering the humiliation of being blinded by the king's men, he apparently gorged out his own eyes and threw them against a wall. The spots where the eyes hit the wall and the bloodstains running down are still seen and form the base of an attention-grabbing story. 

The British are said to have got the blood stain tested and it came back confirmed as human blood. Yes, around the same time as the attempt to move the hanging pillar by the British engineer.

Gods and goddesses in the Kalyan mandapa

Parvathi's mother Myna Devi

Parvathi's father Hemavantha

The wedding of Shiva and Parvathi

Anyways, the rest of the Kalyan mantapa is really beautiful in its incomplete perfection. The gods and goddesses stand proudly in a circle arranged as per Vastu, for the wedding of Shiva and Parvathi. 

Carving of three cows in one 

Acrobats in action

Lady applying vermilion the correct way

Also seen are some interesting and riveting daily occurrences made special on the stone. Running behind our fast and enthusiastic guide gave me little time to get them all, but here are some representations. Those who have seen the 2 in 1, 3 in 1 and 4 in 1 miniature carving across Hampi will be able to recognize the similarity here. Maybe this creative carving style was in fashion in those times.

The creeper designs

Apart from that, there are pillars with creeper designs on them. There are around 280 such designs. It will be nice to go and study them all in-depth sometime. Right now it was time to catch up with our guide again. 

Piligrim resting place

Behind the Kalyan mandapa is the pilgrims' resting place, massive and divided by pillars to form sections to accommodate multiple families. They just thought of everything!

After five detailed posts about this temple, it is time to wind up here. But how can I do that without covering the most important aspect of the temple - Sita's footprint. 

Though there are pages and pages of information available on this, my post will remain incomplete without saying a few words about it.

The footprint is said to have been made when Sita stepped in to tend to the wounded Jatayu, before Ravana took off with her again. Jatayu, whose wings were chopped off by Ravana after a prolonged intense fight, lay gasping for his final breaths. Once Sita stepped near him, her footprint started oozing water, something that can be seen till date.  Jatayu stayed alive by sipping this water till Rama reached there.  After narrating the whole incident to Rama, he took his final breath. 

Sita's Footprint

Our guide told the rapt audience that even during the sizzling heat of peak summer, when the rest of the rocks would be burning up, the footprint continued to ooze water. 

The footprint is about 3 feet in length.  I've heard from grandmother's tales and more about people in those ages being much much larger. Sita was considered to be small and petite and if her footprint is so big, then we can only wonder about others. 

There are footprints of varying sizes all over India, that are said to be Rama's footprints, so it can get to be really confusing to determine which is the actual footprint and what's the size, but there is equal evidence of this kind of really large footprints in multiple places across the world too.  

The footprints on the sands of time are really mind-boggling.  

The stone plates

There are some really large-sized plates also carved nearby, possibly for the pilgrims and/or the temple workers to have their meals. These plates were much larger than what we had seen in Hampi Bhojanalaya. We saw 3, but there were supposedly 40 more inside the kitchen area and a lot more along the boundary walls.

We were almost at the end of the tour now. I'll let the rest of the pictures speak for themselves here.

As we headed back, with a sense of satisfaction and fulfilment at an afternoon well spent, the early winter evening threw its hazy golden light at us.  We stopped for a very late lunch and tried to wrap our head around the entire weave of stories that one five-acre piece of land, with its temples, held.

Oh! we never managed to have our pizza that day. Just managed to get a whole lot of food for thought. Who knows, the next time we step out for pizza, what kind of stories I can bring for you.... 

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