The city of the goddess Meenakshi under the Nayaka kings: the double temple at the centre inside concentric walls, four towering gopuras on the axes, square rings of streets named for the festival months with the temple cars drawn round the outermost, rows of houses between them, and the fort wall of seventy-two bastions round all.
The Mayamata and the Mānasāra describe a temple set within as many as five walled enclosures, each with gateways on the axes, and they name the gateways from the innermost outward. In the great temples of the Tamil country this became the pattern of a whole city. At Madurai, Meenakshi’s and Sundareswarar’s shrines stand within their own walls; round them runs the outer prākāra with its four gopuras, and round that the city itself is drawn in concentric squares: the Adi streets inside the temple wall, the Chithirai, Avani-moola and Masi streets outside it, each named for the month of the festival whose procession it carries. The god leaves his sanctum and circles his city; the city is his outermost enclosure.
The widest ring, the Masi streets, is for the temple cars: towering wooden chariots drawn by thousands at the Chithirai festival. Between the rings stand rows of narrow houses, the brahmin agrahārams nearest the temple, merchants and craftsmen further out. The king’s palace, built by Tirumalai Nayaka in 1636, lies outside the car streets; Vishvanatha Nayaka’s fort wall with its seventy-two bastions (pulled down in the 1840s, when the Veli streets were laid on its line) enclosed the whole.
Local tradition says the city was first laid out like a lotus round the temple; the Nayakas rebuilt it on its present squares in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. North of the fort runs the Vaigai, a broad bed of sand with a stream in it for most of the year; round the walls lie coconut palms and rice paddies. The temple’s inner plan is simplified here. Click a building to see its rule.