Palampet · Telugu History

Ramappa (Rudreswara) Temple at Palampet, a sandstone Kakatiya temple on a raised platform with a tall stepped tower, under a pale sky. · Rangan Datta (opens in a new tab) · CC BY-SA 4.0 (opens in a new tab)

Setting

Palampet is a small village in the Mulug taluk of the old Warangal district. In 1900 Henry Cousens placed it about 30 miles north-east of Hanamkonda.¹² G. Yazdani visited in December 1916, and he described a ring of wooded hills around a lake of about eight square miles. A massive Kakatiya embankment (bund) closes the lake on its northern side.¹³ He found the place hard to reach, malarial and thinly peopled.¹

The lake, called Ramappa Cheruvu, is a Kakatiya irrigation tank.⁴ P. V. Parabrahma Sastry gives its embankment as about 2,000 feet long and 56 feet high.⁵ It irrigates about 4,350 acres through four channels.⁵ He links its building with Recherla Rudra, the general of Ganapatideva, in 1213, the year of the temple inscription.⁵

Temples

The great temple of Rudreshvara, popularly called the Ramappa temple, was founded by Recherla Rudra. His pillar inscription records a gift of villages to the god on 31 March 1213.³⁶ The inscription was published in 1919.³ The Nizam’s government then noted that its verses on a new city and temple “apparently refer to the old city of Palampet and the temple there”.³

The inscription describes that city as full of palaces, music and learning.⁶ Beside it was a pond that the poet compares to the ocean.⁶

Within the temple enclosure Yazdani recorded three smaller buildings. In the countryside around he described four more temples, “each a gem of this style”.⁷⁸ Two of them stand at either end of the lake embankment.⁷⁸ Cousens thought these temples were of the same age and by the same builders as the great temple at Hanamkonda.²

Conservation

The Archaeological Department of Hyderabad State carried out special repairs to the great temple in 1927–28.⁹ Seeping water was damaging it.⁹ The temple was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2021 as the Kakatiya Rudreshwara (Ramappa) Temple.¹⁰

G. Yazdani, The Temples at Palampet, Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of India 6 (1922), p. 174. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Henry Cousens, Lists of Antiquarian Remains in His Highness the Nizam’s Territories (1900), p. 49. ↩ ↩²
L. D. Barnett (ed.), Inscriptions at Palampet and Uparpalli (1919), p. v (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Parabrahma Sastry, The Kakatiyas of Warangal (1978), p. 301. ↩
P. V. Parabrahma Sastry, The Kakatiyas of Warangal (1978), p. 205. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Barnett, Inscriptions at Palampet and Uparpalli (1919), pp. 10–11 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³
Yazdani, The Temples at Palampet (1922), pp. 178–179. ↩ ↩²
Yazdani, The Temples at Palampet (1922), pp. 179–180. ↩ ↩²
Annual Report of the Archaeological Department of H.E.H. the Nizam’s Dominions, 1927-28 (1929), p. 13 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩²
UNESCO World Heritage Committee, Decision 44 COM 8B.12 (2021) (whc.unesco.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩