Srikurmam (' Holy tortoise ')

Select Language Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Basque Belarusian Bulgarian Bengali Catalan Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician Georgian German Greek Gujarati Haitian Creole Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Khmer Korean Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Malay Maltese Marathi Nepali Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swahili Swedish Tamil Telugu Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Vietnamese Welsh Yiddish

This article has been extracted from THE IMPERIAL GAZETTEER OF INDIA , 1908. OXFORD, AT THE CLARENDON PRESS.

Note: National, provincial and district boundaries have changed considerably since 1908. Typically, old states, ‘divisions’ and districts have been broken into smaller units, and many tahsils upgraded to districts. Some units have since been renamed. Therefore, this article is being posted mainly for its historical value.

Srikurmam (' Holy tortoise ')

Place of pilgrimage in the Chica- cole taluk of Ganjam District, Madras, situated in 18° 16' N. and 84° 1' E., 9 miles south-east of Chicacole. Population (1901), 6,510. The temple is dedicated to the Tortoise incarnation of Vishnu. It was formerly a Saiva shrine, but is said to have been changed into a Vaish- nav place of worship by the celebrated Hindu reformer Ramanuj- acharya. The gateways and pillars of the granite verandas round the temple are of great architectural beauty ; and it contains many old inscriptions in Telugu and Devanagari characters, which cover a period of 800 years from the eleventh century and afford unique material regarding the history of various early dynasties, such as the Gangas, INIatsyas, Silas, and Chalukyas. The most important festival at Sri- kurmam is the Dolotsavam, held annually in March, at which about 20,000 pilgrims are present.