One of the loveliest temples I have ever seen is the Ramappa-Rudeshwara temple in Palampet, 70 kms from Warangal, the capital of the Kakatiya dynasty. This dynasty, formerly vassals of the mighty Chalukyas, ruled over much of central India, right up to the eastern seaboard, during the 12th-14th centuries. Palampet and its environs were the domain of the Recherla Reddys, loyal feudatories of the Kakatiyas.
Recherla Senapati Rudrayya, a general of the Kakatiya ruler Ganapatideva commissioned the temple in 1213.
I visited Ramappa recently in the delightful company of a cousin I hadn’t seen in over four decades. After sizing each other up and declaring that we would not have recognized each other had we crossed paths on a street, we got to chatting and catching up and the decades apart just melted away. There is such a unique, comforting pleasure in reminiscing about the relatives who had loomed large in one's childhood, in swapping stories and understanding their lives and decisions with adult eyes. We set out from Hyderabad early in the morning, which did not help in preventing our getting entangled in some awful traffic snarls. But once out of the city, we sped along, enjoying the greenery all around us.
Our first stop was for breakfast in Warangal. My cousin’s friend had recommended the Hotel Thousand Pillars (named, no doubt, for the famous Kakatiya-era Thousand Pillar temple nearby) which, she said, was a clean, spanking new place that she had eaten in a year back. The year that followed had not been kind to Hotel Thousand Pillars but we were there, hungry and in desperate need of coffee and a bathroom, and to be fair to it, it was clean enough. The staff were deeply reluctant to let us know what was on the menu; eventually, we managed to pry out of them that Pesarettu-Upma (a traditional Andhra-Telangana breakfast that is my new favorite) and Poori-Curry were available (the waiter was very firm that there was no potato to be had; the curry, he declared, was unsullied by any potatoes). My cousin, looking forward to the much-beloved Poori-Potato combo had to be satisfied with two gigantic pooris with a smidgen of curry on which there floated a lone pea.
Breakfast done - (Hotel Thousand Pillars was as firmly in the no-Filter Coffee camp as it was in the no-potato camp; we had to make do with a choice of Bru or Nescafe) - we carried on to Palampet, a lovely drive through green countryside, flat expanses of fields ringed by gentle rocky hills and plateaus. The final stretch to Palampet was through a single-lane road with a heavy canopy of trees overhead and lush paddy fields on either side. We drank in the beauty in silence. Rural India has an allure all its own.
In Palampet, the streets near the temple were full of little shops selling an indiscriminate assortment of things from hats to stuffed toys to religious memorabilia. The temple is now a UNESCO World Heritage site and the grounds were immaculately maintained and clean. A tree-lined path led to the temple. The trees have been pruned in a curious manner and the branches all grow straight upwards. The effect is not unpleasing; the trees form a neat, orderly row down the path.
Ramappa is a working temple, so we had to leave our footwear right outside. It was high noon, and blazing hot, and our attempt to dash across to the shaded part was hobbled by the sharp little stones underfoot. But the beauty of this temple made it all worthwhile.
I have never seen anything like this temple. Compared to soaring, sprawling behemoths like Thanjavur’s Brihadeeshwara temple or the Meenakshi Amman temple in Madurai, Ramappa is compact; the entire main shrine can be taken in at a glance. But once you see it, you cannot tear your eyes away. It sits atop a multi-pronged star-shaped platform that is 6 feet high. It is made of pink sandstone and the vimana is made of porous bricks that are supposedly so light, they float in water. A flight of steps takes you to the top of the platform, which forms a broad walkway around the main shrine of the temple. A most unusual feature of this temple is the plethora of extraordinary brackets that lean out at an angle between short sandstone columns and the ceiling, some of them of slender, life-sized dancing girls of a kind I’ve not seen before, as well as yazhi-like animals. These brackets are of black basalt or dolerite (which is a rock) but are so smooth and lustrous that they look like they are made of polished black metal. These brackets and the pillars inside the shrine hall add an unexpected and stunning contrast to the rougher-textured pink sandstone.
There are several entrances to the main mandapam (hall) and shrine off the walkway. Inside, a most extraordinary sight meets your eyes. The supporting pillars are of that same smooth black basalt and are so intricately carved as to seem filigreed. My eyes darted about here and there, not knowing where to look, there was so much beauty all around me and I wanted to drink it all in. There is a small sivalingam (to the east??). The floor of the mandapam is of granite, and was badly buckled in parts. From several places, the temple seemed slightly askew. It looked like there had been some upheaval from below that caused this buckling, and sure enough, a spot of sleuthing on Google revealed that there had been an earthquake in the area in 1819. Luckily, the pillars and the rest of the structure survived intact, and this, I found out, was because the temple was built using something called the sandbox technique: the foundation is laid over a pit of sand, lime (chunambu), and a few other things, which act as a cushion in the event of an earthquake. Fascinating.
Ramappa is named not for the deity (it is a Siva temple with a sivalingam) or its patron (the deity is Rudeshwara, after him) but, uniquely for India, for the temple’s sculptor.
Numerous sites on the Internet claim - erroneously - that Marco Polo called it the "brightest star in the galaxy of temples". But Marco only mentions Motupalli, an important port during Kakatiya times. It was Ghulam Yazdani of the Nizam’s Dept of Archaeology who described it thus.
We bid a reluctant farewell to Ramappa and headed towards the lake, also commissioned by the same Recherla Senapati Rudrayya. The lake is a short drive from the temple and is enormous. There is a massive bund on one side, with the words Ramappa Lake, made of stone, on one side. The lake stretches as far as the eye can see, and is surrounded by hilly terrain on the other three sides. We amused ourselves watching a monkey chatter away and bare its teeth at us, and then it was time to return to Hyderabad. We decided we would stop for coffee and tiffin at Hotel Thousand Pillars in Warangal, choosing the ease of familiarity over any qualms about their eccentric service standards, but this time we were told in no uncertain terms that there was no tea, coffee or tiffin to be had (even though it was prime tea-coffee-tiffin time, 5 pm). It felt uncannily like a real-life Telangana version of Monty Python's Cheese Shop Sketch. Annoyed, we left, and a few adventures and a massive rain storm later, we reached Hyderabad, at 9 pm.