Lepakshi

Most of the tourists and travel photographers visiting India rarely come across information about attractive historic monuments / temples of Andhrapradesh. Most of them limit their trips to the so called golden Triangle - Delhi, Agra and Jaipur. Even those making it to Southern India, do not know about great locations of Andhra Pradesh. Until recently, AP government did a very poor job of promoting the tourist potential of the state. Now, due to the improvements in state highways, and the overall increase in the income levels of Indian urban middle class, locals are constantly in search of interesting locations for a day trip from major cities like Bangalore and Hyderabad etc. As a result of that, many individuals are exploring the state and sharing that in blogs.

I wanted to see Lepakshi from a long time. This time I googled as much as I could before leaving states and had some idea of how to get there. Since this is our first visit to India with our 1 year old daughter, Aparna and baby decided not to join me for this trip. Suresh and me took Shatabdi to Bangalore and from there Ram drove us to Lepakshi.

We started from Bangalore around 10 in the morning and reached Lepakshi without trouble by 3 pm. There are two attractions in Lepakshi, one is the popular Nandi, the other one is the VeeraBhadra temple. We went there with plan to spend one sunset and sunrise to take advantage of side lighting to take pictures. The tourism centres guest house is next to Nandi. We visited the place and decided to stay in Hindupur, which is only about 10 km from Lepakshi. Ram and Suresh liked the food that was served in the road side stall next to the temple. I could not eat anything for the next three days due to digestive problems I got by drinking non bottled water in Banglore. I took the advice to drink from bottle only very lightly, that was a great mistake.

The temple outer wall and steps seems to have been constructed recently. Temple itself was built in 16th century. The architecture inside the temple was amazing. Those sculptures, after centuries of neglect and abuse, still give us an idea about those artists passion. There is so much detail carved into each and every rock and every corner. It was probably an effort of several hundreds of artists, we have no record of how many years they worked. The mandapam outside the temple was either incomplete or was destroyed.

The paintings of Lepakshi are a wonderful resource to study period social attire and life of Vijayanagara times. Later, when I saw a book on Michelangelo, I tried to find if there was any reference on his work being an influence to this type of paining on the ceilings, but could not find any. What ever technique they used to prepare those colours definitely gave a wonderful result. Some parts of the ceilings the paintings look very impressive. Most of the places due to rain and poor maintenance, they are in very bad shape. Here are few paintings.

For anyone interested in art / architecture of Vijayanagara period Lepakshi is must to go place. Even for a casual traveler to get a day out of cityscape it is a good destination.