Lepakshi's Veerabhadra Temple Has Vijayanagara Ceiling Paintings in Panels Almost 23 Metres Long, a 27-Foot Granite Nandi and Inscribed Gifts Dated 1531 to 1539

The ceilings of the Veerabhadra temple at Lepakshi carry a set of paintings that the art historian Anna Dallapiccola calls “the most extensive and best-preserved examples of pictorial art in southern India under Vijayanagara”. The temple stands in Lepakshi village in Andhra Pradesh, in the district that UNESCO’s dossier names Anantapuramu and that a 2025 newspaper report calls Sri Sathya Sai.

India submitted the temple, together with a monolithic bull carved from granite nearby, to UNESCO’s Tentative List on 17 February 2022. In the dossier’s comparison section it sits beside Pattadakal, the Kakatiya Ramappa temple and the Virupaksha temple at Hampi. The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) lists two protected monuments at Lepakshi: the Veerabhadra temple and, separately, a Basavannah temple, which appears to be the Nandi, known locally as Basavanna.

Ceiling panels from five metres to almost 23 metres long

Dallapiccola, writing in an excerpt from her book on Lepakshi with Brigitte Khan Majlis and George Michell, says the paintings cover the ceilings of many parts of the temple and the walls of the Veerabhadra shrine. Most compositions lie on long panels that follow the columned bays of the halls, verandahs and corridors. The panels run from about 5 metres to almost 23 metres in length and from 1.0 to 1.8 metres in height. An encyclopedia entry that draws on the same excerpt gives the longest strip as 25 metres.

The ceiling of the natya-mandapa, the dance hall, keeps an almost complete set of paintings in Dallapiccola’s account, apart from the corbelled dome over its central hall. The subjects there, taken from her panel captions and the other sources, include Arjuna winning Draupadi’s hand, Arjuna’s penance and his contest with Shiva (the Kiratarjuniya), the wedding of Shiva and Parvati, and the justice of the Chola king Manunidi Cholan. Virupanna and his brothers worshipping Veerabhadra appear too, according to UNESCO’s dossier, and Puratattva counts fifteen forms of Shiva on one panel. The ceiling of the maha-mandapa, the main hall, holds the biggest composition at Lepakshi: a colossal Veerabhadra, flanked by the temple donor, identified as Virapanna, and his wife, with the ram-headed Daksha at the god’s feet. Possibly the largest mural in Asia, says Incredible India, which gives no measurement.

Dallapiccola describes the method, drawing on a 1982 study by Kameswara Rao. The granite ceiling slabs were rubbed smooth and plastered to about 3 millimetres with sandy clay from river beds, red ochre and lime powder, ground fine and mixed with honey or liquid molasses, then polished with a trowel. The artists sketched in red ochre, added colour from a palette of earth-red, black, green, yellow-ochre, whites and greys, and finished with black outlines. The dossier calls the technique fresco-secco, painting on plaster. Because the pigments went on after the plaster had dried, Dallapiccola notes, the work is not true fresco.

According to the dossier, the temple holds the only surviving fresco paintings of the mid-Vijayanagara period, and its technique became a base for later painting in south India. Her own context is wider: virtually all other painting from the period has vanished, including that in the royal and religious buildings at the capital, or has decayed badly, as on the ceilings of the Chenna-keshava temple at Somapalem and the Chintala Venkataramana temple at Tadapatri. She says no precise dating of the Lepakshi paintings is possible, and that those in the maha-mandapa and the surrounding verandah were probably finished before those in the natya-mandapa.

A temple on a tortoise-shaped hill

The complex stands on a low granite hill that the dossier calls Kurmasaila, the tortoise hill. It is built at three levels, each group enclosed by an inner, a middle and an outer wall (prakara), put up in three phases. The temple is trikuta, meaning three-shrined: Veerabhadra and Papanaseswara share a platform and a pillared maha-mandapa, and a third shrine for Raghunatha was added on the west. A huge granite boulder is built into the enclosure wall. The dossier says it is believed that seven enclosure walls once stood, as at Hampi. Three exist today, and Puratattva finds no evidence of seven.

A sorting of the complex’s development in the dossier gives three broad phases between 1100 and 1800 CE. The first, from 1100 to 1350, shows late Chola, Pandya and Hoysala features. The second, from 1350 to 1600, is the main building period of mature Vijayanagara architecture, when shrines and pillared halls were added. In the third, from 1600 to 1800, nothing significant was built except minor shrines. The same text adds that the temple developed gradually in the reign of Achyutaraya and that Krishnadevaraya and Achyutaraya both supported the art seen here. It gives Achyutaraya’s reign as 1529 to 1542 in one passage and 1539 to 1542 in another.

The natya-mandapa is the most ornate part, according to both the dossier and Incredible India. Its pillars carry figures, the dossier says, of musicians, gods, goddesses and dancers. Elsewhere in the complex it lists a Nagalinga, a Shiva linga canopied by a seven-hooded serpent carved as one piece on a granite boulder, a monolithic Ganesha, a linga worshipped by a spider and an elephant, a stone footprint that devotees believe is Sita’s, and a deep water cistern cut into the rock in the western enclosure, with a similar one at Hampi.

The best-known feature is a hanging pillar. The Tribune says the dance hall has 70 stone pillars and that one corner pillar does not touch the floor, so that a sheet of paper or a piece of cloth can be passed beneath it. Incredible India says locals like to demonstrate this to visitors. Both sources mention a tale of a British engineer who tried to move it. Incredible India labels it a legend and The Tribune calls it hearsay; none of the sources opened for this article documents it.

The granite Nandi

The bull is cut from one granite rock, the dossier says, and faces west toward the Nagalinga. It lies in a couchant (resting) posture a little away from the temple, in the description of The Federal. Its size is 15 feet high and 27 feet long, about 4.6 by 8.2 metres, according to Incredible India, and Puratattva gives 15 feet high and 27 feet wide. A carved necklace and a garland of bells adorn it, Incredible India adds.

Incredible India calls it the largest monolithic Nandi in India. Puratattva says only that it is among the largest and names others at the Bull Temple in Bengaluru, on Chamundi Hill at Mysuru and at the Brihadisvara temple in Thanjavur. The Incredible India page also states the height as 70 feet in its introduction, which its own later paragraph contradicts, so the 15 by 27 feet figure is the one used here.

What the stone records say about the builders

The ASI’s South Indian Inscriptions, Volume IX, Part II, edited by R. Shama Sastry and published in 1941, prints the temple’s inscriptions under the heading of Kannada inscriptions from the Madras Presidency. Incredible India links the Kannada inscriptions to the temple’s closeness to the Karnataka border. About 20 inscriptions on the enclosure walls, most from Achyutaraya’s reign, are counted in the dossier.

The dated records in the volume that sit on the temple’s walls and floors run from 1531 to January 1539. In No. 535, Saka 1453, which the editors convert to 6 August 1531, the king gives the village of Chelavindla, surnamed Achyutendrapura, at the request of Virapanna, son of Nandi-Lakkisetti and Muddamamba, for the service of the gods Virabhadra, Raghunatha and Papavinasa of Lepakshi. Other records, from 1537 and 1538, show Virapanna of Penugonde buying villages and land or income grants (vrittis) from Brahmans and giving them to the temple. No. 587 and No. 588, both of 19 August 1538, record gifts of the village of Chikkanandichervu and of half of Sadasivapura, bought for 108 varahas (coins). No. 590, of 8 December 1538, names his brother Virana as a co-donor of land.

A record from a temple at Gorrepalli, No. 583, dated 5 March 1538, says Virana-Nayaka built a canal named Nutana-Tungabhadra from a spring and gave the land under it to the goddess Mahalakshmi, and No. 579 calls him the brother of Virapanna and a son of Lepakshi Nandi-Lakkisetti. Dallapiccola says the brothers Virupanna and Viranna built the temple under Achyutaraya and calls them governors. To Incredible India, Virupanna was an officer of the king, and he and his brother were most likely responsible for the construction.

The sources differ on the earliest record. Puratattva reports an inscription of Saka 1415 (1493 CE) on a natural granite rock beside the rangamandapa, in the reign of Saluva Immadi Narasimha, naming a gift to Papanaseswara alone. That record is not among those printed in the 1941 volume that were read for this article. The earliest date, by Incredible India’s page, is 1583, which falls after Achyutaraya’s reign, so the two figures cannot be reconciled from these pages. On the temple’s early history, the dossier says the inscriptions give no information.

Local folklore adds a story of Virupanna and Veeranna spending state funds, being condemned by the emperor and blinded. Incredible India introduces the story as local folklore and ties it to the unfinished Kalyana Mandapa, the hall where the wedding of Shiva and Parvati is held to have taken place. Puratattva says direct evidence about the temple’s beginning is practically nil, and the inscriptions read here mention neither the blinding nor the hall.

Where the name comes from

Devotees hold that Jatayu, wounded by Ravana as he carried Sita away, fell at this spot, and that Rama said “Le Pakshi”, Telugu for “Arise, bird”. This is the place’s link to the Ramayana, as the dossier records it (for the epic itself see what the Ramayana is). The dossier also offers a second reading, lepa and akshi, an embalmed or painted eye, and says the several stories make the origin hard to fix. A record in the 1941 volume calls Virapanna’s father Lepakshi Nandi-Lakisetti, and Puratattva reads that as showing the place carried its name before the temple was built.

Incredible India and Puratattva both report that the Skanda Purana mentions the place as Lepakshya-Papanasanah, among 108 Shaiva sacred sites, and Puratattva adds the local tradition that the sage Agastya stayed in a cave on the hill and built a small shrine to Papanasheshvara. On 16 January 2024 the Prime Minister’s website reported that the Prime Minister performed darshan and puja at the temple, heard verses of the Ranganatha Ramayana in Telugu and watched the Jatayu story performed in Tholu Bommalata, the shadow-puppet tradition of Andhra Pradesh.

Protection, condition and visiting

Dallapiccola says the ASI began cleaning moss, lichen and algae from the sculptures and outer walls in 1979, cleaned the ceilings until 1983, and carried out a conservation phase from 1983 to 1986, with some sections now lit by electricity. She describes the paintings as comparatively well restored after years of neglect, and adds that comparing the descriptions of those years with the paintings today shows many details, and some whole scenes, are lost.

The Federal reported on 18 April 2025 that many panels have deteriorated for lack of maintenance. It quotes the Anantapur historian MyNaa Swamy as saying that artists who came after his 2022 letter to the then Union Tourism Minister restored only the Veerabhadra mural, and that the ASI had not decided on restoring the rest. The UNESCO dossier itself records damage to the paintings from long neglect and warns that unmanaged tourist numbers could threaten the property.

Incredible India lists the temple’s opening hours as 6 am to 6 pm and says the Lepakshi Utsavam is usually held around March. As of 5 November 2026 UNESCO’s page lists the property as Tentative List entry 6607, submitted by India’s Permanent Delegation on 17 February 2022.