Koodal-Aḻagar — see main

Kōḍālāzhagar — Vishnu with Śiva's mark, at Madurai

A shrine that will not be classified

The Kōḍālāzhagar temple at Madurai is a Divya Desam of the Vaiṣṇava tradition and one of the few temples in the corpus whose central theological claim is that it belongs to two communities at once. Āzhagar is Vishnu; the temple's story says that a Vaiṣṇava king established the image of Vishnu and that when the image was later dug up, a Śiva lingam was found beneath it. The two marks are held together in the name — Kōḍāl, or Śrīnivāsa, the original image; āzhagar, the Vaishnava epithet — and the shrine is called śrī koḍālāzhagar, sometimes Kallāḻagar.

That shared claim is institutional as well as doctrinal. In the Kallāḻagar countryside south of Madurai, the temple is adhinam — the umbrella shrine, the one that owns the region — and the deity is carried out on procession to the neighbouring villages, notably to the Kallāḻagar koṭaṉ where the tiru-kalyāṇam is celebrated. A Vaiṣṇava deity on an annual marriage procession through a landscape with its own Śaiva and Amman shrines is the ordinary social fact of this part of Tamil Nadu, and the record should say so plainly rather than resolving it.

The temple is also among the largest Divya Desams by area and precinct, with a substantial and older core than the nineteenth- and twentieth-century additions suggest. Its festival calendar runs on the Tamil lunar months, with the annual tirukkalyāṇam procession as the central event; the Adi Vaishnava and then the Sri Vaishnava commentarial traditions both claim an interest in this region, which is a further reason the entry should not be filed under a single sect.

Sources and what is still unverified

The Nalayira Divya Prabandham, Nilakanta Sastri, Majumdar, the Madurai gazetteer.

For a named guardian, ideally a Tamil speaker from the Kallāḻagar region: the temple's own foundation inscription and its dating, which differ from the popular story's chronology; the exact sequence and destination of the tirukkalyāṇam procession; and the present relationship between the temple's administrators and the neighbouring village shrines, which is a live question in that landscape.