The ‘suspended’ village and its temple

The gopura at the temple entrance, with intricate columns and slabs.

Monuments along the trek towards the Gangadhareshwara temple.

Monuments along the trek towards the Gangadhareshwara temple.

Monuments found on the old trekking path, en route Therahalli.

Monuments found on the old trekking path, en route Therahalli.

Ongoing restoration work.

During one of my treks towards Kolar, I ventured to explore the Antharagange hills, also known as Dakshina Kashi Kshetra. Climbing high above the Antharagange temple and a few watery caves, as I reached the top, I spotted some cattle grazing on relatively less steep slopes. Trekking ahead, I found large open tracts, with some human settlements and a dargah on another hill. Moving further, I spotted a small, dilapidated gopura nestled between huge boulders, igniting my curiosity to explore this route.

With a new serpentine motorable road and a KSRTC bus plying up and down from the bus stand in Kolar to Hosahalli with a stop here, most locals no longer use the centuries-old path I trekked. This less-travelled route led me to numerous ancient mantapas, shelter points with beautifully-carved pillars and roof slabs.

The pathway winds around several peaks with bewitching views of the surrounding hills and of the town, highways, lakes and fields below. Granitic hills of varying altitudes form a conspicuous feature of the landscape.

Eventually, on this trail, there appeared a huge gateway, the mukhamantapa. I had reached the Gangadhareshwara temple that crowns Therahalli, the ancient village at the peak of the Antharagange hills in Kolar district.

The temples

Teruhalli or Therahalli means ‘a village that is suspended or hanging’.

Various rulers, starting with the Western Gangas, had made Kolar (then Kuvalalapura) their capital when they were ruling the regions of Mysore, Coimbatore, Salem and Travancore between 350 to 550 CE. It was also chosen as a capital by dynasties ruling from Tumakuru, Chitradurga, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra. Kolar was later ruled by the Hoysalas and the Vijayanagara empire. The area served as a famous battlefield for warrior kings.

The rulers built hundreds of temples, which hold inscriptions in the prevailing scripts of Tamil, Grantha, Telugu and Kannada. Epigraphica Carnatica records the inscriptions in Tamil and Grantha scripts on the base of the temple at Therahalli.

The region later came under the administration of the Marathas, Nawabs and Nizams, Hyder Ali, the British and finally, the Mysore rulers.

Today, the main temple of Gangadhareshwara is hardly visible from the base of the hill or even from a distance of 20 m due to dense vegetation and uneven, hilly slopes. A majority of the smaller temples in the complex are in a dire state, with many sculptures, statues, mantapas, and pillars scattered all around. Though locals visit to worship on auspicious days, renovation work has only recently begun, and a new path is being constructed.

The geology

For geologists too, these hills are of great interest, as affirmed by the authors of Geology of Karnataka, B P Radhakrishna and R Vaidyanadhan.

The Kolar area is a patchwork of different terrane elements which have been brought and welded together around 2.55 billion years ago.

The Kolar schist belt, a medium-grained metamorphic rock belt, is the easternmost of its kind in Karnataka, extending 80 km in the North-South direction, with an average width of six km. This belt has been famous for gold mining activities for more than a hundred years.

The routes

For trekkers, there are two different routes: One is to climb uphill beyond the Antharagange temple, follow the path traced by cattle, walk in the direction of the dargah, and take a left turn once you hit the road. Following this, you must climb down through various boulders, following the road between the hills till Therahalli village is reached.

The second route starts from a narrow motorable road near the Bangalore-Kolar bypass, called Therahalli Main Road. From here, walk along the road till you find small stone pillars and beam-like structures. Trek along, crisscrossing the serpentine road at several points, and climb past a small lake with a mantapa at one end. Walk past the Hanuman temple and finally, you will reach the main gate of the Gangadhareshwara temple with its majestic gopura.