From 27th February to 3rd March a Workshop will be held in Pondicherry with the theme “Narratives on the Yathoktakārī Perumāḷ Temple” as part of the newly launched project “Hindu Temple Legends in South India”, a collaboration between the Heidelberg Academy of the Sciences and Humantities and the École française d’Extrême-Orient, whose Pondicherry Centre furnishes the South Indian office of the project. The workshop will focus on different versions of the origin story of the Yathoktakārī Perumāḷ (also known as Coṉṉavaṇṇam Ceyta Perumāḷ or Tiruveḵkā) temple, one of the major Viṣṇu temples in Kanchipuram. During the first three days in Pondicherry, we will read and compare different versions of this narrative that are transmitted in Kanchipuram’s sthalamāhātmyas and talapurāṇamsin Sanskrit and Tamil. This will be followed by a two-day excursion to Kanchipuram, during which we will visit the Yathoktakārī Perumāḷ temple and other related sites to see how the textual narratives are represented on-site. The workshop will thus demonstrate the usefulness of creating a dialogue between different texts as well as between the texts and the actual temples that they describe.

 workshops