Dashavataram and Raya Gopuram

From the Varaha Cave, continue walking southwards, up the hill for another 50m. To your left is a monument called the Raya Gopuram. Play the next story there.

This unfinished structure is called the Raya Gopuram. A gopuram is the towering entrance to a south Indian Hindu temple. Ordinarily, a finished gopuram is a multi-storied structure that is heavily decorated with figures and figurines. These entrance towers spoke volumes about the power of a king. The mightier the king, the taller the gopuram.

The earliest gopurams built by the Pallavas were quite unassuming like the one at the Shore Temple on the beach. This particular unfinished gopuram in front of you was built around the 16th century CE., much after the Pallava period. That’s when the Vijayanagara kings ruled over most of south India. They were great temple builders and also rebuilt or renovated many temples across south India. Here, they started building gopurams on either side of the Sthalasayana Perumal temple you see below. Both were left incomplete, for reasons unknown to us.

In this gopuram, the columns on either side depict the dashavataram – literally meaning the ten avatars of Vishnu. Apocalypse, or the idea of the world coming to an end has always fascinated man. And the panel you see before you has something to do with that belief. Hindus also believe in apocalypse, but don’t really obsess about it. For many, that destruction is a necessary part of a lifecycle, just like the belief that death is a necessary part of life. So the world WILL come to an end. AND it will be recreated over and over again. But the world doesn’t just end one fine day, out of the blue. Every time there is too much evil on earth, Vishnu the God of protection, comes down to set things right. Each time he takes on a different avatar that is most suitable for that context – a lion, a boar or even a fish. He goes through ten such avatars, each time battling a different form of evil. But by the tenth Avatar, there is so much evil on earth, that everything has to come to an end and a brand new universe is created. And then the cycle starts all over again.

Hindus believe that so far Vishnu has appeared 9 out of ten times already in the current cycle. The tenth avatar, Kalki is yet to come and is due in the present cycle of time.