Alampur stands on the left bank of the Tungabhadra a little above its confluence with the Krishna, in the Telangana district that is named after this goddess. The stotra of the eighteen names her fifth, and what makes the place unusual is not the shrine standing there now but the six centuries in which there was none. The temple was destroyed in the fourteenth century, in the long contest for the Raichur doab between the Bahmani sultanate and Vijayanagara; the damaged image was carried into the Bala Brahmeshvara temple a few steps away, one of the nine Chalukya-era shrines known collectively as the Navabrahma temples, and was worshipped there until a new Jogulamba temple was built on the old ground in 2005 and the original image installed in it. The Navabrahma group itself is seventh- to eighth-century work of the Badami Chalukyas and is among the earliest surviving stone temple architecture in the Deccan. Local tradition calls Alampur the western gateway of Srisailam, and pilgrims frequently pair the two.

Claims, and where they come from

• Alampur is one of the eighteen Shakti Peethas of the recited enumeration, named fifth, and the goddess there is Jogulamba. — Aṣṭādaśa Śakti Pīṭha Stotra (traditionally attributed to Śaṅkarācārya) — Second verse, opening half — the line names Alampur and Jogulamba and goes straight on to Srisailam. The attribution of the hymn to Shankaracharya is traditional; this corpus writes attributed to rather than composed by. The larger enumerations of 42, 51, 52 and 108 are carried on the shakti_peetha set's panel, and no source consulted here places Alampur in the fifty-one
• No limb of Sati is assigned to this site by the enumeration that names it. — The structure of the stotra itself — The eighteen carry no limb assignments; the verse gives a place and a goddess and stops. The upper teeth, given for Alampur almost everywhere, come from the separate fifty-one-peetha convention, which maps its members onto the letters of the Sanskrit alphabet and is a later and largely eastern development — and no passage from that literature naming Alampur was located from this session. The assignment is repeated nearly universally and traceable nowhere reached here, so it is reported as what circulates and not asserted
• The shrine was destroyed in the fourteenth century and the image was sheltered in the neighbouring Bala Brahmeshvara temple until a new temple was built and the image installed in 2005. — Modern historical record and the practice of the shrine — The year usually given for the destruction is 1390, during the Bahmani campaigns in the Tungabhadra–Krishna doab. This corpus carries the century as secure and the year as received: every account consulted gives 1390 and none ties it to an inscription or a scholarly treatment, which is the signature of a single upstream source repeated. The rebuilding in 2005 is recent enough to be well attested; no consecration date within that year is asserted here
• The Navabrahma temples beside the shrine are seventh- to eighth-century foundations of the Badami Chalukyas. — Modern art-historical record — Nine temples — among them Bala Brahma, Svarga Brahma and Taraka Brahma — built under the Badami Chalukyas. They stand where they were built. A separate temple, the Sangameshvara from Kudavelli, was dismantled from 1979 and reassembled at Alampur because the Srisailam reservoir submerged its original site; accounts that describe the Jogulamba shrine itself as relocated in 1979 have merged the two

Counted among

• The Shakti Peethas — Sati's body fell across the subcontinent — and the tradition has never agreed on how many pieces, or on how many shrines.

Questions to explore

• Almost every page about Alampur says the upper teeth of Sati fell here, and the verse that puts Alampur among the eighteen says nothing about teeth. Where did the limb lists come from, and should a pilgrim treat them as part of the tradition or as a later overlay?
• For six hundred years the goddess of Alampur was worshipped in a temple belonging to someone else. Was the peetha in those centuries the ground, the image, or the worship?
• Alampur is called the western gateway of Srisailam, and Srisailam holds both a jyotirlinga and one of these same eighteen. Were the two circuits ever walked as one?