Dakshinamukha Nandi Tirtha Kalyani Temple
— — water no one has found the source of.
Not only on a wall.
“A small underground temple in Malleshwaram in north Bangalore, reached by a flight of stone steps below street level. A south-facing Nandi sits above a Shiva linga, and water flows continuously from the bull's mouth onto the linga in a tank below. Nobody has traced the source. The water has run for as long as the neighbourhood remembers. — from the studio
Dakshinamukha Nandi Tirtha Kalyani Temple, 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.
Dakshinamukha Nandi Tirtha Kalyani Kshetra is a small, partly subterranean Shiva temple in Malleshwaram, a planned residential neighbourhood of north Bangalore laid out in the 1890s. The shrine is rare on two counts: the Nandi bull faces south, dakshinamukha, where almost all Nandis face the sanctum, and water flows perpetually from the bull's mouth onto a Shiva linga in a stepped tank, the kalyani, below. The temple is signposted as roughly four to five centuries old; the kalyani itself was rediscovered and restored after a 1997 excavation cleared the silted tank.
The water arrives without a known source. It runs from a channel cut behind the south-facing Nandi, falls onto the linga, and pools in the kalyani tank below the temple floor. The flow has been continuous through every recorded summer, including the years of severe drought in Karnataka in 2003 and 2016, when most of Bangalore's open wells went dry. Local priests treat the source as a divine spring; civic surveys have not traced an aquifer that explains the steady, year-round volume.
The temple sits on Sampige Road in Malleshwaram, about half a kilometre from Mantri Square Mall and a short walk from the Kadu Malleshwara temple, a 17th-century Shiva shrine that anchors the neighbourhood. Doors open early morning and again in the evening, typically 6 to 12 and 5 to 8, with longer hours on Mondays and during Maha Shivaratri. Footwear is removed at the upper threshold; the descent into the shrine is narrow and unlit beyond the lamps. A small offering is customary; photography inside the sanctum is generally not permitted.