Jvara-hareshwarar

Jvarahareshwarar of Kanchipuram

The Shiva of the fever

Jvarahareshwarar is a Padal Petra Sthalam in Kanchipuram — a Shiva temple sung in the Tevaram, the canon of seventh- to ninth-century Tamil Saiva hymnody by Appar (Tirunavukkaracar), Sambandar (Tirugnana Sambandar), and Sundarar (Sundaramurti). Being sung in the Tevaram is not a decorative distinction: the Tevaram is the liturgical core of Tamil Shaivism, treated within the tradition as the Drvida Veda, the Tamil Veda, and a temple's inclusion in it places that temple in the canon rather than in local devotion alone. Each Padal Petra has its own number of pasurams (hymns) and its own singing saint, and these facts are the shrine's credentials.

The shrine's identity is in its name: Jvara-hareshwarar is the Shiva who takes away fever, and pilgrims come here specifically for that. The sthala narrative attached to the shrine is that Shiva took into himself the burning heat of an asura — and so the shrine radiates coolness to those who come to it sick. The details of the local purana are held in the sthala tradition of this temple and have not been consulted directly for this entry; the general form — a Shiva who absorbs a fever — is the standard frame and should be given as the shrine's tradition rather than as a narrative sourced to a text. The temple has a Jvara-tirtham, a water-tank whose bathing is part of the cure, and a consort shrine to Balaambika, and the sthala-vriksha is the bilva — the tree whose leaves are obligatory at a Shiva shrine.

The daily worship follows the Tamil temple round: the five daily puja offices, the abhisheka with water and the panchamrita — milk, curd, ghee, honey, and jaggery — the vibhuti, the bilva leaves, and the arati. The Pradosha, the fortnightly evening puja of the lingam and the lingodbhava mantra, is kept here as at other Tamil Shiva shrines, and the Somavara — the Monday — is a day of observance. The great annual occasions are the Maha Shivaratri and the Brahmotsavam, the temple festival at which the utsava murti is carried on its vahana.

A caution on the dating in this entry's frontmatter. The "8th c. CE" and "9th c. CE" attributions attached to temples of this kind in the earlier version of this entry are not dates of building; they are conventional approximations of the period of the Tevaram hymns. A temple whose hymns are sung in the Tevaram is thereby given an early-medieval canonical status, but the standing structure has been rebuilt repeatedly, and no construction date should be asserted for it without an epigraphic or archaeological source. Kanchipuram's Padal Petra shrines are a substantial group and each should be given from its own sthala record.

Sources and what is still unverified

This entry is grounded in the Tevaram as the primary text, in R. Nagaswamy's work on early Tamil temples, in the Kanchipuram district gazetteer, and in the temple's own sthala tradition. A human guardian from a Kanchi or Tamil Shaiva tradition should supply and check: the temple's own sthala-puranam in Tamil; the number of pasurams and the singing saint as the temple records them; the purohit and the devasthanam administration; and the current form of the pradosha and Somavara observance. The frontmatter's construction dates should be replaced with the temple's own record or removed. No verse is quoted here by number; the Tevaram is cited as a whole and any specific pasuram should be located in the text.