Navabrahma Temples (Alampur)

At the confluence of the Tungabhadra and Krishna rivers in Jogulamba Gadwal district stands a cluster of nine sandstone temples built under the Badami Chalukyas across roughly the 7th to 9th centuries CE — one of them, the Svarga Brahma temple, can be dated more precisely to around 681-696 CE. Despite their age, and a location somewhat off the main Telangana pilgrimage circuit, the group is often ranked among the finest surviving examples of Early Chalukyan temple architecture in the region, closely related in style to the better-known sites of Aihole and Pattadakal in neighboring Karnataka: each shrine is built around a square sanctum wrapped in a covered circumambulatory passage and topped by a curvilinear, northern-influenced (nagara) tower, a form that stands apart from the Dravidian idiom that later came to dominate Deccan temple-building. Curiously, all nine shrines — Taraka Brahma, Svarga Brahma, Padma Brahma, Bala Brahma, Garuda Brahma, Kumara Brahma, Arka Brahma, Veera Brahma and Vishva Brahma — are dedicated to Shiva even though their names invoke Brahma; the reasoning behind this naming has not survived in any documented form and remains an open question. Their carved friezes range across an unusually wide set of Puranic subjects, including Vishnu’s Vamana-Trivikrama legend, scenes from the Ramayana, Panchatantra fables, and Shakta imagery such as the Saptamatrikas and Mahishasuramardini.

Alampur is also counted among the Shakti Peethas, the network of sites where, according to the legend of Daksha’s yajna, a part of the dismembered body of Sati is said to have fallen; tradition holds that her upper teeth landed here, giving rise to the resident goddess Jogulamba, depicted seated upon a corpse with a scorpion, frog and lizard in her hair. The original 7th-century Jogulamba shrine did not survive the medieval period intact — it was destroyed in a raid by the Bahmani Sultanate in 1390 CE, after which the goddess’s icon was moved into the nearby Bala Brahma temple for safekeeping and worshipped there for centuries. Only in 2005 was a freestanding Jogulamba temple rebuilt at its original location and the murti reinstalled, restoring Alampur’s character as a combined Shaiva-Shakta pilgrimage site.