Kadu Malleshwara Temple
— — the lane the neighbourhood grew out of.
Not only on a wall.
“A small Dravidian-style Shiva temple raised by Venkoji of Tanjore in the late seventeenth century, on what was then forested ground at the northern edge of the village of Bengaluru. The forest is gone; the neighbourhood that grew around the temple took its name from it. The temple still sits at the head of the lane, the lamps still lit by hand at dusk.
Kadu Malleshwara 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.
The Kadu Malleshwara Temple stands in the Malleshwaram neighbourhood of north Bengaluru, Karnataka. The temple was raised around 1669 by Venkoji, also known as Ekoji, a younger half-brother of the Maratha emperor Shivaji and the founder of the Maratha line at Tanjore. The site was then forested land north of the small village of Bengaluru — the Kannada word kadu means forest, and the temple's name reads simply as forest temple of Malleshwara, a form of Shiva. The settlement that later grew around it inherited the name.
The temple is built in a small-scale Dravidian style, with a single vimana over the sanctum, a pillared mukha-mantapa, and a low compound wall. The principal deity is Mallikarjuna, the Shiva of the jasmine flower, named for the Mallikarjuna jyotirlinga at Srisailam in Andhra Pradesh. A second shrine in the compound is dedicated to a swayambhu — a self-manifested — Ganesha, uncovered during construction work on the grounds in the late 1990s several metres below the surface; the deity is now kept in situ behind a glass-walled cell.
Malleshwaram was laid out as a planned residential extension of Bengaluru in 1889, in the wake of a plague outbreak that pushed the city north. The new neighbourhood was named for the temple, then more than two centuries old. The grid of numbered cross-streets and main roads — the same grid still used today — was drawn around the existing lane that approached the sanctum. The temple's daily lamp-lighting at dusk continues, much as it has since Venkoji's foundation in the late seventeenth century.