A Hill Absent from 2,396 Inscriptions

The four volumes of Epigraphia Telanganica compile 2,396 inscriptions. They are a compilation of earlier editions rather than a fresh survey, which has two consequences worth holding onto. One stone often appears two to four times across the volumes, so a count of headers is not a count of stones — about ninety-nine headers read "Kolanupaka" without there being ninety-nine Kolanupaka inscriptions. And the corpus is selective: it carries what has been published, not what exists.

Citations below take the form volume, dynastic section, number, because volume one restarts its numbering with each dynasty.

Four patterns come out of it. The early centre is Kolanupaka, seat of the Kollipaka-7000 province under Rashtrakuta feudatories and then the Kalyana Chalukyas, roughly 907 to 1125, with governors rotating fast. Bhuvanagiri itself first appears in 1106 as a royal fort, and from 1108 its officers are dandanayakas — forts were governed by dandanayakas while capitals like Kollipaka had Mahamandalesvaras. The temples are overwhelmingly Shaiva and Jain, with a genuine Vaishnava stratum running through them. And the Kakatiya layer is Shaiva and Jain again, with no Reddi, Vijayanagara, dated Bahmani or Qutb Shahi record for the taluk at all — which reflects what these volumes compile rather than what happened.

No record in these volumes names Yadagiri, Yadagirigutta, Yadadri, Raigiri or Rayagiri. The single hit for "Yadadri" is a modern district label printed on a 1318 record about a lamp gift at Bhuvanagiri. There is no Narasimha-deity record anywhere in Bhuvanagiri taluk.

That is not because Narasimha is absent from the district. He is well represented a little further off: a gift of 1251 to three deities including Nrisimha at Kottapalli; a pillar of 1259 at Anantaram carved with Narasimha as the main deity of a trikuta temple; a fourteenth-century reference to the "Ahobala of Mattapalli"; grants to Narasimha Swami at Vadapalli between 1608 and 1619. Mattapalli and Vadapalli appear in the corpus. Yadagiri does not.

The limits of that negative have to be stated as plainly as the negative itself. The corpus is selective. It cannot exclude unpublished, lost or post-1500 records at the hill. Telugu-script spellings or OCR damage could hide a match from a search run in English. The absence of evidence here is suggestive and it is not proof.

Popular accounts assert a good deal that these volumes do not support. No record states who founded Bhuvanagiri fort, or when, and none explains the names Bhuvanagiri, Tribhuvanagiri or Bhongir. Vikramaditya VI's titles in these records are Tribhuvanamalla and "Chalukya-Rama", and nothing says the fort was named after him; the form "Tribhuvanagiri" appears only in records of 1369, some 260 years after the first fort record. The popular account is consistent with the 1106 fort, but the records do not state it, and nothing in them links the fort to the shrine on the hill.

The state tourism page says Krishnadevaraya mentioned the temple in his autobiography and visited before his wars. One Telugu outlet asserts inscriptions naming Krishnadevaraya and Tribhuvana Malla, songs of Annamacharya, and about three hundred years of regular worship. Neither gives a reference for any of it. Another regional site is more careful, calling such visits traditional accounts not verified epigraphically, and records that a "1148 CE" claim once presented as an inscription was dropped for lack of primary-source verification.

The round numbers travel the same way. One outlet calls the shrine "1,000-year-old" with no source; the standard reference work's source for that figure is a news item. A national daily says only "centuries-old".

The contrast with the comparable shrines is the point. Krishnadevaraya's visit to Ahobilam is recorded, and his victory pillar at Simhachalam stands. Simhachalam's earliest inscription is of 1087, with another of 1293 and Tuluva inscriptions of 1516 to 1519. Ahobilam has a ninth-century reference in the Periyatirumoli of Thirumangai Alvar, Kakatiya and Reddi inscriptions, Vijayanagara patronage and a recorded raid of 1579. For Yadagirigutta, nothing in the four volumes or any inscription we found supports a royal visit, a Kakatiya, Reddy, Vijayanagara or Qutb Shahi grant, or an age beyond tradition.

The names and the literature are late too. Yadadri, Yadagirigutta, Pancha Narasimha Kshetram and Rishi Aradhana Kshetram are attested only in modern sources. "Raigiri" survives only as the railway station that was later renamed Yadadri. The Yadagiri Narasimha satakam tradition begins, in the earliest dated item we found, with a work from after 1700, and another was printed in 1940. We found no Potana, Tallapaka or Ramadasu mention, and no Annamacharya song.

Two items precede the modern press, and both are thin.

A historian records that annual grants were sanctioned under Mir Osman Ali Khan for the temples at Gowlipura, Madannapet, Yadgirigutta and Golnaka, giving no amounts and no years. A separate page gives a figure of Rs 82,825 for this temple, citing Andhra Pradesh Archives files, beside Rs 5,000 for Sri Rambagh, Rs 50,000 for Bhadrachalam and Rs 8,000 for Balaji Tirupati — with no year and no file number. Read it as reported and undated.

The second is a photograph. In a 2019 newspaper feature, an image credited to that paper's archive is captioned as Dr. Rajendra Prasad, President of India, inside the cave temple on 10 July 1958. No second source, gazette or official release corroborates the visit, and the whole of the shrine's pre-modern documentary life, as far as we can establish it, is that grant and that caption.

For the pilgrimage before the rebuild the evidence is anecdotal and the figures conflict: daily footfall is given variously as about 5,000, as 10,000 to 15,000, and as 5,000 to 8,000. They agree on several thousand and not on more than that. A blog of 2010 describes Saturday-afternoon family visits from Secunderabad, and the 2019 feature recalls Hyderabad visitors coming on Saturdays and festival days, returning the same day, and meeting hardly any queue.

On 26 February 2015 the chief minister pledged Rs 100 crore a year. On 6 March 2015, after a helicopter survey, Chinna Jeeyar Swami renamed the temple Yadadri at his request and said the plan was in tune with Agama Shastra — adding that the garbhagudi and the inner entrance gate should not be altered. The old shrine closed on 21 April 2016 and rites moved to a temporary Balalayam. The Maha Kumbha Samprokshana was held on 28 March 2022, with a homam series from about 21 March and 108 priests.

What was built is reported in detail and the details do not agree with each other. The original cave and the Hanuman rock carving were not touched. Granite came to 2.5 lakh tonnes from Gurjepally in Prakasam. The main gopuram's gold plating is given as 2 mm thick and about 700 kg by one paper and as 125 kg by two others, which may be measuring different things. The workforce is about 1,500 including some 500 sculptors in one account and over 2,000 sculptors in another. Costs run from about Rs 1,200 crore to about Rs 2,000 crore depending on the source; land acquired runs from 770 hectares to 2,157 acres; the old precinct is given as 1.5 acres, half an acre and about 2,500 square yards. Five craftsmen lost their sight in a cutter accident.

No official accounts were available to settle any of it. But the shape is unmistakable, and it is the reason this entry exists: a shrine with no documented history to speak of acquired, in six years, more documentation than most temples accumulate in six centuries.

Holding those two facts together — the silence before and the flood after — is the honest way to read this hill. The stories are told here, and they are worth having. They are simply not the same kind of thing as a charter cut into stone.

The dated inscriptions in this entry are reckoned in Saka years and tithis, not in the calendar they are printed beside here. Saka 1240 is 1318 CE because somebody did that conversion.

Our panchang app, Navashi, computes that layer for any date and any place: tithi, nakshatra, yoga and karana, the day’s muhurats, choghadiya and hora, and the festival calendar with start and end timings rather than a single date. It carries eight traditions, not one.

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