Birla Mandir, Hyderabad
— — white marble holding the heat of the day.
Not only on a wall.
“A temple cut from white Rajasthan marble, sitting on the hill above Hussain Sagar lake. The city of Hyderabad stacks around it on three sides. By late afternoon the stone takes the colour of the sky, and by the time the lamps come on inside the sanctum the marble has gone the colour of cooled milk. The Birla Foundation finished the work in 1976.
Birla Mandir, Hyderabad, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Birla Mandir stands on Naubath Pahad, a granite outcrop in central Hyderabad that rises about 85 metres above Hussain Sagar lake. The temple is dedicated to Lord Venkateswara, the Tirupati form of Vishnu, and was opened in 1976 after roughly ten years of work commissioned by the Birla Foundation. The structure is cut from around 2,000 tonnes of white marble brought from Makrana in Rajasthan, the same quarry that supplied the Taj Mahal. Sculptors from Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan carved the panels of the Ramayana and Mahabharata that line the inner walls.
The marble is Makrana white, the same dolomitic stone used at the Taj Mahal and at the Dilwara Jain temples on Mount Abu. It is unusually dense and holds its colour against the southern Indian sun, where softer marbles yellow within decades. The Birla Foundation has built sister temples in this material at Kolkata, Jaipur, and Bhopal; the Hyderabad work is the largest of the group. No mortar runs between the carved blocks. The seams are cut so finely that water sheds without entering them.
The temple is open daily, generally from 07:00 to 12:00 and again from 15:00 to 21:00, with longer hours on festival days. Entry is free. Photography is not permitted inside the sanctum, and mobile phones are checked at the gate. Shoes come off at the foot of the hill; the walk up the granite steps takes about ten minutes. Evening aarti draws the largest crowds. The view back across Hussain Sagar to the Buddha statue on the lake island is the reason most visitors linger after the ceremony.