TEMPLES REVIVAL

The two days activities at vengadu involved unearthing all the pillars and stones with the help of JCB.

Day1 :-

Saturday activity started after the old man of the village offered pooja to the lingam. According to him, he has seen the temple with a mandapam on the southern side. Even during his yester years, people were hesitant to go inside the temple due to those thorny trees that housed lots of snakes. Also he said per his ancestors there are some copper plates beneath the lingam which describes the history and other facts about the temple.Couple of centuries back the temple should have been in glory with a chariot and the villagers adoring the god. The bells belonging to the chariot were supposedly still found in the other bigger lake of the village.The poor economic conditions of the gurukala and temple trustees drove them out of the village, who sold their lands to some reddiars and went to other places for living. Looks like from then on, nobody cared about the temple.

Thats a piece of history as heard from the old man. Coming back to the activity, it all started with uprooting the trees outside the pragaram on the southern side. Since the mandapam had been on the southern side, concentration of the debris were also more on the same side.JCB then started unearthing all the pillars from that side.The pillars that were unearthed were then placed outside the outer pragaram. By the fag end of the day we did manage to clear a lot of those stones and also tried to dig almost for a feet/two near the wall of the temple, just in case to check if there are any inscriptions.Unfortunately we couldn't find any.

Day 2 :-

To our surprise there were two JCB's and so with one we managed to clean the other parts of the temple while the other one removed the fallen stones from the mandapam. The garbha graham as you can see from the pic is pretty small to be cleaned using the machine and so was cleaned manually.

Since Prabhakar and I had some work we couldn't stay for the full day on sunday.

I have attached some of the pics that show the temple and its state as on sunday afternoon with Chandru taking care of the proceedings from then on.
He should be able to provide the other details about the activities.
I do hope that the cleaning was completed by the end of that day.
===============================

Further to what Srivatsan reported above, Chandru reproted as:-

The findings and the level of work tobe done furhter is not a day's job, rather a month's task. Another old man reported to Chandru, that there had been 4 Shivalingas here once upon a time, but those were robbed off by plunderers.

So, we decided to call it a day and inform Dr.Subramanian of LDSF to call ASI and have proper security posted in this site, as this project turned out to be too big for our level of membership and strength.

We had informed ex-Superidendent Dr.Satyamurthy on this.