Mallikeswarar Temple Tank (Waterbodies of Chennai - 24)

Mally Carjun's Old Pagoda - that's how the English records of the 1650s referred to this temple in Lingi Chetti Street of George Town locality in Chennai. It is evident that this temple of Mallikeswarar is much older than the British period. In the 1800s and the early 1900s, there were so many renovations and extensions done by the Chettiar community.

The magnificent temple has a small tank occupying an area of about 0.2 acres, which is supposed to be beautiful, but unfortunately, it is not. From the olden days, the water management system has played an important role in temple architecture. You cannot find a temple with a tank. Besides serving spiritual needs, the tanks helped the villages or towns maintain groundwater tables. In the name of urbanization and due to mere negligence, the network of inlets and outlets of such tanks are blocked, and over time, the tanks become a barren land. I don't want to comment anything about this temple tank. Check the photograph, and you can understand the case very well. 

Click here to learn more about this temple. 

Happy travelling.

Note: As per a report, there were about 650+ waterbodies in the Chennai region till the 1980s. Today, only a fraction of them exist. And most of those surviving waterbodies hardly have water, and even some of them that have water have been poorly shrunk. In Chennai, there are tank roads without tanks nearby and lake-view roads without lakes. There is a high possibility that even the few waterbodies we have today might vanish soon. I decided to visit the currently surviving waterbodies of Chennai and its suburbs and write about them in my blog as a series.

Visit my site, krishnakumartk.com, to know more about the travel guides and other books that I have written.