Pithapuram is a small town in the Godavari delta of coastal Andhra, and the stotra names it tenth — in the same line as Ujjain, which is a thousand kilometres inland. The goddess stands in the north-east corner of the Kukkuteswara temple, a Shiva compound with a tank inside it, and her own shrine faces south. Two things make the place unusually dense for its size. The first is that Pithapuram is the southern point of the Gaya triad: the tradition holds that the demon Gayasura's body fell in three pieces, the head at Gaya in Bihar, the navel at Jajpur in Odisha and the feet here, so the town is Pada Gaya and its tank the Pada Gaya Sarovaram, where the rites for ancestors are performed that most people associate only with Bihar. The second is that the same town is the birthplace claimed for Sripada Srivallabha in the Dattatreya tradition, which brings a second and quite separate stream of pilgrims through the same streets. A reader planning a visit should know that Jajpur — the navel of that same triad — is the eleventh of these eighteen and the next name in the hymn.

Claims, and where they come from

• Pithapuram is one of the eighteen Shakti Peethas of the recited enumeration, named tenth, and the goddess there is Puruhutika. — Aṣṭādaśa Śakti Pīṭha Stotra (traditionally attributed to Śaṅkarācārya) — Third verse, closing half of the opening line — ujjayinyāṁ mahākālī, pīṭhikāyāṁ puruhūtikā. The verse calls the place Pithika, which the circuit reads as Pithapuram; unlike the Pradyumna of member 3 this equation is not contested in anything reached from this session. The attribution of the hymn to Shankaracharya is traditional; this corpus writes attributed to rather than composed by
• 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. What circulates for Pithapuram from the separate fifty-one-peetha convention is not even consistent with itself — the seat, the back and the left hand all appear in different retellings — and no passage from that literature naming Pithapuram was located from this session. Reported as what circulates, and the disagreement reported with it
• The town is called Pada Gaya, the foot of the Gaya triad, whose head is Gaya in Bihar and whose navel is Jajpur in Odisha, and ancestral rites are performed at its tank on that basis. — Sthala tradition of the Kukkuteswara compound and living practice — Carried as tradition and as observable practice, not as a verse this corpus can cite: the Gayasura story appears in Puranic material, but no passage naming all three towns as the three parts was reached from this session. Two of the three points are members of this same eighteen — Pithapuram tenth, Jajpur eleventh — which is a structural coincidence between two different enumerations and is left as that
• The goddess's shrine stands in the north-east of the Kukkuteswara compound and faces south. — The fabric of the temple itself — An observable arrangement rather than a textual claim. It is worth recording because the pairing is the point: at Pithapuram the peetha is not a temple of its own but a shrine inside a Shiva compound, which is also true at Srisailam and at Draksharamam, the twelfth of these eighteen

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

• Pithapuram is the foot, Jajpur the navel and Gaya the head of one demon, and two of those three are consecutive names in this hymn. Are the two lists related, or did they arrive at the same towns independently?
• The peetha here is a shrine inside a Shiva temple rather than a temple of her own, as it is at Srisailam and Draksharamam too. Is that arrangement telling us something about how these seats were absorbed?
• Different accounts put a different part of Sati at Pithapuram. When the limb lists disagree with each other, what is actually being remembered?