Kotilingeshwara: A Temple Built in Living Memory, Aiming at a Crore of Lingas

The mechanism is straightforward and is worth understanding, because it explains how a temple of this kind is actually built.

How it works:

• A devotee sponsors a linga, in one of several sizes, with the cost varying by size
• The linga is installed in the grounds, in the ordered rows
• The devotee's name, and often the names of family members, is inscribed on it
• Devotees return to find their own linga among the rows, and many families have several

Why people do it:

• In fulfilment of a vow, which is the commonest reason
• To mark a family event, a birth, a marriage, a recovery, a new business
• In memory of someone
• As a general act of merit

What this is, structurally. It is a modern, systematised version of something extremely old.

• Indian temples have always been built by accumulated donation, and inscriptions on ancient temples record exactly this, gifts of land, of lamps, of livestock, of money, each with the donor's name
• The name inscribed on the gift is standard practice going back two thousand years. The donors at Sanchi, at Bharhut, at Chola temples and at Hoysala temples are all named
• What Kotilingeshwara has done is take that practice and make it the entire structure of the temple rather than one part of its funding

Why this deserves to be taken seriously rather than sneered at. It is easy to be superior about a temple built like this, and the sneer usually contains an assumption worth examining.

The great ancient temples were funded by kings and wealthy donors because those were the people with resources. Their names are on the walls. Nobody thinks less of Belur for it.

A temple funded by lakhs of ordinary families, each contributing what they can and each getting their name on the result, is the same practice with a broader base. It looks different because the base is broader, not because the principle changed.

A site organised entirely around lingas is a good occasion to be clear about what the form means, since it is one of the most misunderstood objects in Indian religion.

What the word means:

• Linga means a mark, a sign, or that by which something is known
• In Shaiva thought it is the aniconic form of Shiva, deliberately not a portrait
• The full arrangement is the linga set in a yoni pitha or avudaiyar, the base with a channel for the abhishek water to drain

What the tradition says about the form:

• Shiva is understood as beyond form, and the linga is the sign of that, a shape that is not a likeness of anything
• The Lingodbhava katha makes this explicit. Brahma and Vishnu argued over who was greater. A pillar of fire appeared with no visible top or bottom. Brahma flew up and Vishnu dived down to find its ends, and neither could. Shiva then appeared from within it. The linga is that pillar
• The point of the story is that the linga stands for what cannot be measured, and the two gods failing to find its ends is the whole argument

On the sexual reading. Since visitors ask and since a good deal of colonial era writing insisted on it, it is worth stating the position plainly.

• The tradition's own understanding, in its texts and among its practitioners, is that the linga is a sign of the formless, not a phallic image
• Some tantric readings do treat the linga and pitha as male and female principles in union, and that reading is internal to the tradition, not imposed on it. In that reading it is a cosmological statement about the generation of the world, not an erotic one
• The insistent literal reading in nineteenth century European accounts says a good deal about those writers and very little about Shaiva practice

What a field of a million lingas states. If the linga is a sign rather than an image, then multiplying it is not multiplying deities. It is repeating one statement a very large number of times, which is what a mantra does, and which is what a devotee who installs one is joining.

Kotilingeshwara is one instance of something happening across India that gets very little serious attention.

What is going on:

• New temples are being built at a very large scale, funded by diaspora money, by trusts, by industrialists and by mass small donation
• Many favour enormous images, since scale is achievable now in a way it was not before, and modern materials and engineering permit it
• Existing temples are being expanded, with new gopurams, new halls and new facilities
• Temple management has professionalised, with trusts, queue systems, online booking and crowd engineering

How this compares to the past. The instinct to dismiss modern temple building as inauthentic does not survive contact with the history.

• Every great temple was new once, and was built with the best available technology and the largest available budget
• The Chola temples at Thanjavur were, in their time, an unprecedented display of scale funded by imperial revenue
• Concrete and steel are simply the current materials, as granite and soapstone were the materials then
• Objections to novelty were raised at the time about many buildings now regarded as classics

What is genuinely different:

• The speed. Belur took generations. Kotilingeshwara has been built in four decades
• The funding base, which is now very broad and involves small contributions from very large numbers
• The aesthetic, which favours scale and visibility over the density of surface ornament that older patrons paid for
• The absence of the workshop tradition that produced Hoysala carving, which cannot simply be restarted

What to make of it. A temple's significance is settled by whether people use it, over time, and not by when it was built. Kotilingeshwara receives very large numbers of devotees who are performing entirely ordinary devotional acts.

In five hundred years it will either be a major shrine with a long history or it will not, and nothing anyone writes now will decide that.

The district has a good deal that predates the temple by a very long way, and a visit should take some of it in.

Kolar town:

• The Kolaramma temple, a Devi shrine of considerable antiquity with Chola period work, and an unusual plan
• The Someshwara temple, of the Vijayanagara period, with a well carved mandapa
• The old town, which has been a settlement for a very long time

Antaragange:

• A hill outside Kolar with a spring issuing from a rock formation into a tank, and a Shiva shrine
• A cave system in the boulder fields on the hill, popular with trekkers
• The name means the Ganga within

Kolar Gold Fields:

• KGF, one of the deepest mines ever worked anywhere, operated for around a century until it closed in 2001
• The workings went to extraordinary depths, and the settlement built around them had its own distinct culture, drawn from Tamil, Telugu and Kannada speaking populations and from British management
• The site now is largely abandoned, with cyanide dumps, shaft heads and colonial era buildings standing in an ordinary looking landscape
• It is a strange and rather melancholy place to visit, and it is part of the district's history

The contrast is worth noticing. Within an hour's drive Kolar contains an ancient Devi temple, a hill spring, an abandoned deep mine that was once among the most productive in the world, and a temple built in 1980 that is aiming at ten million lingas.

That range is more typical of Indian districts than any single one of them is, and it is the reason travelling here rewards looking beyond whatever you came for.

Getting there

• Kammasandra, Kolar district, Karnataka, near Bangarpet
• Roughly 100 km from Bengaluru by road, about two and a half hours depending on traffic
• Bangarpet and Kolar are the nearest railway stations
• Buses run from Bengaluru and Kolar. Most visitors come by car

Timings

• Open through the day. Check current timings, since arrangements change
• The complex is large and open, so most of a visit is outdoors

When to go

• October to February for comfortable weather
• Mahashivratri for the temple's great occasion, when crowds are extremely heavy
• Shravan Mondays and Karthika month
• Early morning or late afternoon on any day, since the grounds are open and hot at midday

Practical notes

• Wear comfortable footwear. There is a lot of walking on open ground
• Carry water and sun protection. Shade is limited across the grounds
• If you want to sponsor a linga, arrangements are made at the temple office. Ask there rather than through intermediaries
• Photography is generally permitted in the grounds. Check for the sanctums

If you go on Mahashivratri

• Expect very large crowds and long waits
• Come early, keep your group together, keep children held
• Follow the crowd arrangements
• Consider going the day before or after if you want to see the site rather than the crowd

Combining the visit

• Kolaramma and Someshwara temples in Kolar town, both far older and worth the detour
• Antaragange hill for the spring and the caves
• Kolar Gold Fields, for anyone interested in industrial history
• Mulbagal and the Avani hill temples further east

A closing thought. It is very easy, writing about Indian temples, to only take an interest in the ones that are old. Kotilingeshwara is a reminder that all of them were new, that the impulse to build one is not historical, and that a very large number of ordinary families in Karnataka have decided in the last forty years that this particular field is where they want their name to be.