At Lepakshi in Andhra Pradesh, visitors kneel on the floor of a 16th-century hall and slide a piece of cloth under a stone pillar that is holding up the roof
The trick is always the same. A visitor takes a handkerchief, or a sheet of paper, kneels on the stone floor, and pushes it into the gap at the foot of one particular pillar.
It goes straight through, and comes out on the other side.
Above that gap stands a carved granite column that is helping to hold up the ceiling of the hall. Its base does not properly rest on the floor. In Telugu it is the akasa stambha, the sky pillar.
The cloth goes in at one side of the pillar and comes out the other. Above it, the roof.
The pillar stands in the Veerabhadra temple at Lepakshi, a village in Andhra Pradesh about 120 kilometres north of Bengaluru. The temple was built in the 1530s, in the reign of Achyuta Deva Raya of Vijayanagara, by two brothers, Viranna and Virupanna, who served the empire as officials. It sits on a low rocky outcrop shaped, people say, like a tortoise, and much of it is carved from the living rock.
There are about seventy pillars in the hall. Only one hangs.
The rest of the temple would be famous even without it. On the ceiling is an enormous painting of Veerabhadra, the fierce form of Shiva, said to be the largest fresco of a single figure in India. A short walk away lies a monolithic Nandi, the bull of Shiva, carved from one block of granite, one of the biggest in the country. And there is a hall full of finished carving that simply stops, its work abandoned partway through.
The story everyone tells about the hanging pillar concerns a British engineer.
In the version passed down at Lepakshi, he came to work out how the pillar was held up. He got a lever under it and tried to shift it. He never found his answer, and when he gave up, the pillar had moved: tilted slightly out of its original alignment, taking some of the surrounding stonework with it. Guides point to the tilt today as proof.
It is a good story, and there is no contemporary record of it. No name, no date, no report. It may have happened. It may also be an explanation invented after the fact for a tilt that had some other cause.
It is a good story, and there is no contemporary record of it. No name, no date, no report.
Here the amazement needs a little honesty, because the answer is not that the laws of physics stop at the temple door.
The hall’s roof is carried by all of its pillars together, through a network of beams. A single column can be out of contact with the floor at its base and still stay firmly in place, because it is gripped at the top and the load it would have carried is shared by its neighbours. That is not a violation of engineering. It is a demonstration of it, and a very confident one, by masons who understood exactly how the weight in that hall travelled.
As for why the base is clear of the floor, there are three plausible answers, and nobody can prove which is right. It may have been deliberate, a piece of showmanship by builders who wanted to prove what they could do. It may be the result of ground movement or an earth tremor over four centuries. It may be an error, or a stone that settled differently from the rest.
The temple itself gives no clue. Nothing recorded at Lepakshi explains what the masons meant by it.
The blinded eye
There is one more thing at Lepakshi worth knowing, and it is about that unfinished hall.
Local tradition says Virupanna, the builder, was accused of spending the royal treasury on the temple without permission. Rather than wait for the king’s punishment, he blinded himself. In this telling, the name Lepakshi comes from lepa-akshi, the village of the blinded eye, and people point at marks on a wall near the unfinished hall.
The older and gentler story is different. When Rama found the great bird Jatayu dying after his fight with Ravana, he said to him: le pakshi. Rise, bird.
The gap
Both stories, the bird and the blinded eye, are traditions rather than records. So is the British engineer. What is solid, in every sense, is the pillar itself.
Nearly five hundred years after it was cut, a granite column in an Andhra village still carries part of a roof while a stranger’s handkerchief passes freely underneath it. Nobody needs a miracle to explain that. It is enough that a group of masons in the 1530s knew their craft well enough to leave the gap, and that the roof has not noticed since.
If you think you have remembered everything about this topic take this QUIZ
Why does the pillar at Lepakshi hang in the air?
While some believe it is due to the natural sinking of the ground over centuries, many experts argue it was intentionally designed as a floating counterweight to protect the massive stone temple from earthquakes.
Can you actually pass a cloth under the pillar?
Yes, the gap between the bottom of the pillar and the floor is large enough for visitors to easily slide a piece of paper, a twig, or a thin piece of cloth completely underneath it.
It was built in the sixteenth century by two brothers, Virupanna and Viranna, who were governors under the powerful Vijayanagara King Achyutaraya.
What happened when the British tried to move it?
A British engineer attempted to forcefully dislodge the pillar to study its secret, but he had to stop immediately when the entire stone ceiling and surrounding pillars began to shift and threatened to collapse.
What else is famous at the Lepakshi temple?
Besides the hanging pillar, the temple is incredibly famous for having one of the largest monolithic Nandi bull statues in India, a massive carved Naga Linga, and beautiful natural fresco paintings.
Sources & References
Navrang India, “Hanging Pillar of Lepakshi Temple, Andhra State” (June 2026) — the temple’s construction between 1530 and 1542 under Achyuta Deva Raya, its site on Kurma Saila, the load-sharing explanation and the legend of the British engineer’s lever.
IFLScience, “The Mystery of the Hanging Pillar of Veerabhadra Temple” (2024) — the suggestion that the pillar’s position results from seismic movement or a construction quirk rather than lost knowledge.
“The Hanging Pillar of Lepakshi Temple”, incindiaorgin (2021) — the seventy pillars, the ceiling fresco of Veerabhadra and the cloth passed beneath the pillar.
Archaeological Survey of India documentation for the Veerabhadra Temple, Lepakshi — the protected monument, its Vijayanagara-period fabric and inscriptions.
Paripurna Datta is the founder and editor of Curious Indian, an independent editorial publication focused on Indian history, culture, science, society, and the stories behind them. He oversees research, editorial standards, and the publication's long-term direction.
Paripurna Datta is the founder and editor of Curious Indian, an independent editorial publication focused on Indian history, culture, science, society, and the stories behind them. He oversees research, editorial standards, and the publication's long-term direction.
