The mountain · Facts & history

Arunachala & Tiruvannamalai: facts & history

The hill and its town carry an extraordinary weight of history ~ from rock two billion years old, through a thousand years of temple-building by Cholas, Hoysalas and Vijayanagara kings, to sieges, the British, and the age of Ramana. The key facts and the long story, in one place.

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Most people come to Arunachala for the living present ~ the walk, the temple, the silence. But the hill and its town carry an extraordinary weight of history and fact, layered across sacred geology, Tamil literature, a thousand years of temple-building, empires and sieges, and the modern age of Ramana. For the curious visitor, knowing something of this deepens everything. Here, gathered in one place, are the key facts and the long history of Arunachala and Tiruvannamalai ~ from the age of the rock to the present day.

Arunachala & Tiruvannamalai: the key facts

The age of the rock

Long before any human story, there was the hill. Arunachala is geologically ancient ~ its rock, of the Archaean age, is often cited as being on the order of some two to three billion years old, among the older exposed rock on the planet, far predating the Himalayas. It is a mass of hard, resistant rock (charnockite and granite/gneiss) left standing as the softer land around it eroded away over unimaginable spans of time. To the tradition this antiquity is no accident but a sign: the hill is the primordial form, older than the gods, the first thing. To the geologist it is simply one of Earth’s old bones, laid bare. Both, in their way, are awed by its age.

The ancient sacred site

Arunachala’s sanctity reaches back beyond clear historical record. It is glorified across Hindu scripture ~ the Arunachala Mahatmyam of the Skanda Purana and more ~ and mentioned in ancient Tamil literature; some Tamil poets are held to have referred to the shrine as early as the first centuries BCE and CE. By the 7th century, the great Tamil Shaiva saints ~ the Nalvar, Appar and Sambandar among them ~ were singing the temple in their Tevaram hymns, which fixes it as an important, established place of worship well over 1,300 years ago. Whatever stood here then was already old and holy; the grand stone temple we see came later, built around a sanctity already ancient.

The grand stone temple was built around a sanctity already ancient ~ the hill was holy long before the first stone was laid.

A thousand years of temple-building

The Arunachaleswarar temple as it stands is the work of many dynasties across a thousand years:

• The Cholas (9th–13th centuries, c. 850–1280 CE) ~ the great Chola emperors built the core stone structure of the temple, the earliest known royal patrons of the site as a monumental temple.
• The Hoysalas (14th century) ~ King Veera Ballala III, the last Hoysala emperor, fleeing his lost capital, made Tiruvannamalai his own capital around 1328 CE, and built a gopuram (the Vallala Maharaja Gopuram); his devotion is remembered in the Arunachala Puranam.
• The Vijayanagara empire (14th–16th centuries) ~ the emperors of Vijayanagara, above all the great Krishnadevaraya, dramatically expanded the complex, adding gopurams and mandapams; the towering Rajagopuram was begun in this era and completed by the Nayaks (Sevappa Nayaka, 1572 CE).
• The Nayaks and after ~ further expansion and maintenance carried the temple through the later centuries to its present grandeur.

So the temple is not one architect’s vision but an accretion ~ a thousand years of kings adding their devotion in stone, tower upon tower, hall upon hall, around the sacred hill.

The town, and its turbulent age

The town of Tiruvannamalai grew, as such towns do, around its great temple. Its recorded history runs with the temple’s ~ Chola, Hoysala, Vijayanagara, Nayak ~ but it also saw hard times. In the 18th century the region was fought over repeatedly; Tipu Sultan of Mysore captured Tiruvannamalai in 1769 and again in 1790, and between the 1750s and 1790s the town endured repeated sieges. The great temple came through largely intact ~ but the northern walls still bear the scars of cannon fire to this day, silent witnesses to those turbulent years. Then came British rule in the 19th century, and, after independence, administration of the temple passed (from 1951) to the Tamil Nadu Hindu Religious & Charitable Endowments Department, which manages it still. In 2002 the Archaeological Survey of India declared the temple a national heritage monument.

The modern age: Ramana and the world

The most recent, and for the wider world the most transforming, chapter began quietly in 1896, when a sixteen-year-old boy who would become Ramana Maharshi arrived at the temple and never left. Over his fifty-four years at the foot of the hill, and through the devotees and writers who came to him, Arunachala was carried into the awareness of the whole world ~ so that a hill known for a millennium to Tamil Shaivism became, in the twentieth century, a global centre for seekers of every nation. Today Tiruvannamalai is at once an ancient Tamil temple town going about its immemorial devotions and an international spiritual crossroads ~ the old and the new layered, like everything here, around the one unchanging hill.

Last updated 11 February 2026. Following the documented record preserved by Sri Ramanasramam and his devotees; where an account is traditional, it is told as such.