Bhimeswara Swamy Temple (Manikyamba Devi Shakti Peetha)

Draksharamam, a village in the Godavari delta once known by the older names Dakshatapovana or Dakshavatika, is home to one of Andhra Pradesh’s most significant temple complexes: the Bhimeswara Swamy Shiva temple, one of the five Pancharama Kshetras, ringed by eight subsidiary lingas placed in the eight cardinal and intercardinal directions and known collectively as the Ashta Someswaras. Within the same precinct stands the shrine of Manikyamba Devi, counted among the eighteen Maha Shakti Peethas of pan-Indian Shakta tradition, where Sati’s navel is said to have fallen after her body was cut apart — making Draksharamam, like Pithapuram nearby, a site where a major Shaiva pilgrimage center and a Shakti Peetha occupy the same ground rather than separate locations. Distinctively, this Peetha’s associated Bhairava is remembered simply as Bhimeswara — the resident Shiva form himself — rather than as a separately named Bhairava figure, a detail that reflects just how tightly the Shiva and Shakti cults are fused at this site.

Popular tradition credits the temple’s founding to the Eastern Chalukya king Bhima I, who reigned in the late 9th and early 10th centuries, but the historical record does not fully bear this out: no inscription naming him as builder has been confirmed, and the earliest dated inscriptions actually found at the site belong to 982 CE and to 1081 CE, a generation or more after his reign. A separate 10th-century inscription from the time of the Chalukya king Amma II records a court official, Kuppanarya, constructing a different Shiva shrine at Draksharamam called Kuppesvara, which no longer survives — evidence that the village was already an active center of temple building in that century, even if the precise founder of the present Bhimeswara sanctum cannot be pinned down. What is clear is that Draksharamam has functioned continuously as a major pilgrimage destination since at least the 10th century, with Maha Shivaratri today drawing its largest crowds to the Shiva sanctum and Navaratri drawing devotees specifically to the Manikyamba shrine.