Inside Hyderabad’s ‘Visa Temple’
At Chilkur Balaji, prayer offers a sense of control in a country where outcomes often feel uncertain
This piece was first published in Brown History last week, with some names changed to protect privacy.
On a Wednesday morning in Hyderabad, on the banks of the Osman Sagar reservoir, I stood inside the Chilkur Balaji Temple and watched people walking in circles. They call it the ‘Visa Temple’ — a shrine where the city’s software engineers pray for H-1Bs and students seek blessings before consulate appointments. I had expected some theatre of aspiration. But I found people moving in overlapping loops around a modest central shrine, some slowly, eyes lowered, lips murmuring, others with the brisk urgency of commuters late for work. The rhythm was simple: make eleven rounds to ask, then come back for one hundred and eight to give thanks if your wish was granted.
Many clutched small cards printed with numbers from one to one hundred and eight, crossing each square with a pen as they completed another round, occasionally pausing to check their count, to reassure themselves that nothing had been missed.
Some cards were yellow, others blue or pink or pale green, picked up from boxes at the entrance or handed out by vendors outside, many already softened by sweat and handling. They were creased, smudged with dust and fingerprints and consulted like exam schedules or fitness trackers.
Outside the main gate, before I had even entered, a small informal market had grown around the temple. Vendors sold garlands of tulsi leaves, coconuts, incense sticks, plastic idols, laminated pictures, strings of beads, trinkets of every description. One of them, a man with permanently sunburnt skin and hands scented with basil, introduced himself as Ranjan. He had been working here for nearly twenty years and was trying to sell me a sixteen-foot tulsi garland which, according to him, would expedite my wish.
“People think it’s only for visas,” he told me. “That’s just how it became famous.”
What I was seeing at Chilkur wasn’t entirely unique. Across India, a number of temples and shrines have, over time, acquired reputations for helping devotees secure visas or overseas travel. In Ahmedabad, applicants visit the Chamatkari Hanuman Temple, which has earned the nickname ‘Visa Hanuman’, and in Punjab, the Shaheed Baba Nihal Singh Gurudwara is filled with toy aeroplanes offered by those hoping to go abroad.
This kind of specificity is not new. Indian devotional practice has long accommodated highly particular, even transactional, forms of prayer — for recovery from specific illness or for success in exams or court cases — often tied to specific deities or sites believed to be especially effective. What has changed is the object of anxiety. In that sense, Chilkur is more like an update: a sacred space absorbing the pressures of globalisation, just as earlier temples absorbed the uncertainties of everyday life.
“So what else is it for, if not just visas?” I asked Ranjan.
“Life,” he said simply. “Business. Health. Marriage. Court cases. Exams. People come when life is stuck.”
“And many like this temple because it doesn’t take any donations, no fees, nothing. You can only give your effort. So people buy garlands from us instead.” He gestured at the other vendors lining the path. “We are the only ones who take money here so if you want to contribute to the temple, it should be here,” he said, as any good salesman would.
Inside, this ethic was written into the laminated notices pinned to the walls, and into the small print on the reverse of the tally cards. The text, in Telugu, instructs devotees to perform the rounds with sincerity and patience, to return in gratitude once wishes are fulfilled, to avoid haste or carelessness, to maintain humility and concentration. It emphasises that the vow is not a bargain but an act of faith, rooted in long tradition. It concludes with a short prayer asking Balaji to grant health, peace, prosperity, and freedom from obstacles.
As I stepped into the moving wave of bodies to begin my own circumambulations, a low chant rose above the shuffle of feet.
Govinda. Govinda. Govinda. It was another name of Balaji, the local incarnation of Vishnu as Venkateswara, the giver of boons, and it was repeated by devotees until it became one steady hum, synchronising breath and movement.
After completing my eleven circles, I stepped aside toward the outer edge of the courtyard, where several people were sitting quietly, watching the flow of bodies. There I noticed a man standing slightly apart from the crowd, hands folded, gaze shifting between the shrine and the moving devotees, as though deciding whether to join them.
His name, he later told me, was Taran. He worked in IT and had grown up visiting the temple with his parents. He had come here more times than he could remember.
“I always stand here first,” he said, when I asked why he lingered. “Before I start walking.” Otherwise, he explained, the ritual risked becoming mechanical, reduced to exercise rather than intention.
“When I was younger, it was very quiet,” he added, glancing at the moving crowd. “Now it’s like this every day.”
I asked him how long his family had been coming here. “My whole life,” he said. “My grandfather used to bring my mother. We never went to Tirupati like other families did,” he said, referencing the most famous of India’s Balaji temples. “We came here.” He paused, watching a group of young people move past, phones briefly checked before pockets swallowed them again. “My grandfather told me a story once, when I was maybe eight or nine. About why this place exists.”
He shifted his weight.
“There was a devotee, a long time ago, who used to make the pilgrimage to Tirupati every year. One year he fell too ill to travel. That night, Lord Venkateshwara appeared in his dream and told him not to worry, that he was already nearby, waiting in the jungle.” Taran gestured vaguely toward the grounds around us, as though we were standing in the forest of that legend. “The devotee followed the vision to a patch of forest and found a mound of earth. He started digging. His axe struck something beneath the soil and blood began to flow—pooling, spreading, staining the ground red.”
I must have looked startled because Taran smiled faintly. “That’s how my grandfather told it. Very dramatic. A voice instructed the devotee to flood the mound with cow’s milk, and when he did, the earth gave way to reveal a self-manifested idol of Balaji, flanked by his consorts Sridevi and Bhoodevi. The temple was built around that mound.”
Did he believe it?
He thought for a moment. “I believed it completely when I was eight. Now?” He shrugged. “I don’t know if it happened exactly like that. But I know this place has been here for centuries. I know my family kept coming back instead of going to Tirupati, even though Tirupati is grander and more famous. There was a reason for that.”
In the late 1990s, according to newspaper accounts, Chilkur had barely been visited, drawing only a handful of devotees each week. Its priest, C.S. Gopala Krishna, had returned from a corporate career to care for his ageing father and inherited a largely forgotten shrine.
Then Hyderabad reinvented itself as ‘Cyberabad’, courting multinational companies and building glass-fronted offices. Students from newly established technical colleges began passing through the area, many of whom were struggling to secure U.S. visas in an increasingly restrictive environment. They came to the temple with their anxieties and Gopala Krishna encouraged them to walk eleven rounds and pray. He reassured them in English. Over time, stories of successful applications circulated, the temple acquired its nickname, and by the mid-2000s, Chilkur was receiving tens of thousands of visitors each week.
When I mentioned the temple’s reputation for visas and passports, Taran laughed. “That’s just what people call it,” he said. “Balaji doesn’t have a passport office.”
Then, more thoughtfully: “When Hyderabad became tech-focused, everyone wanted to leave. So people started coming here for that. When it worked for some, the story spread.”
Did he believe the temple caused those successes?
“I think when you’re anxious,” he said, “you look for places where things have worked before. And I do believe that Balaji makes wishes come true, whatever they may be.”
Chilkur, over time, had become a repository of such stories, a database of favourable outcomes that showed that faith could grow alongside globalisation (or sometimes because of it). I had come on a Wednesday morning, which meant I missed the weekend crowds—the young IT professionals and nervous students who, by most accounts, fill the temple grounds on Saturdays and Sundays, passports sometimes tucked into bags, interview dates circled on calendars. But their presence saturates the temple’s reputation. Online forums and travel reviews overflow with testimonials. A systems analyst whose H-1B paperwork had stalled for three months reported that his visa was approved within days of visiting Chilkur. A game developer described his renewal interview as effortless: “They asked me a single question and told me my visa is approved,” he said, adding the temple had “always been a lucky charm for me.” A twenty-two-year-old woman heading to New York for her master’s degree put it more carefully: “I got the visa because of my capability of course, but I have luck of god as well.”
On one forum, amid the success stories, a parent once asked whether they could complete the rounds on behalf of a child stuck abroad. The question, to this day, remains unanswered. And given the fact that at its peak, the temple reportedly receives seventy-five thousand visitors a week, the arithmetic alone suggests that many wishes must go unfulfilled.
Yet people keep coming. And perhaps that persistence is itself the point. It is tempting, especially for urban, English-speaking observers, to read Chilkur as a parody of modern India: faith bending to neoliberal aspiration, God enlisted in the service of Silicon Valley. But that reading is too thin. What Chilkur reflects more honestly is uncertainty.
For decades, upward mobility in India has been mediated by opaque systems: competitive exams, visa lotteries, unpredictable job markets, institutional gatekeeping. Outcomes often feel arbitrary and preparation does not guarantee success. In such environments, ritual becomes a way of restoring agency. You walk, you count, you mark, and you complete. You do something.
***
Near the edge of the inner courtyard, next to a small Shiva shrine, I met two young men, Karan and Gopal, college friends. One was preparing for government exams. The other had recently started a small company. Both looked tired in the way young men do when their futures depend on systems they cannot see clearly.
“Everything depends on timing,” Karan said. “Exams, interviews, funding. You prepare for years. Then one day decides everything.”
Did prayer help?
“It helps you keep going,” Gopal replied.
“I’ll still study,” Karan said. “I’ll still apply. But here I feel… aligned.”
Aligned with what?
“With effort,” he said, after thinking. “With the idea that trying matters.”
On my way out, I stopped again at Ranjan’s stall. A young woman in her twenties stood nearby, neatly dressed, her accent suggesting she was not from Hyderabad. We spoke briefly. She worked at an electronics firm in HITEC City and had a U.S. tourist visa interview coming up — her first trip abroad, if it came through. Her friends had told her to visit Chilkur, she said, almost apologetically.
I never learned her name, but something about her stayed with me: the slight embarrassment in her voice, the way she held her tally card as though it were simultaneously precious and faintly absurd. She embodied what I had been seeing all morning: people who weren’t sure it would work, and who had come anyway.
“Did you wish for something?” Ranjan asked me, still tying garlands.
“I did,” I said.
He smiled. “Then next time you come, you’ll do one hundred and eight. Now that you’ve asked Govinda, your prayers will be fulfilled. I’ll see you then.”
As I walked back toward my car, I passed the banyan tree behind Ranjan’s stall, where I had seen some devotees earlier circling and tying threads. At its base, scattered among the roots and pressed into the earth, lay several discarded tally cards. I crouched down to look at them more closely. Their numbers were fully crossed out, their grids completed, ink smudged from repeated handling and folding. Someone had finished, someone had returned, someone had once stood where I was standing, anxious and counting, and had later come back in gratitude, crossing out the final square before leaving the card behind.
For those of us still doing eleven rounds, it was strangely reassuring to see them.
I straightened up and looked back toward the temple entrance. The young woman from Ranjan’s stall was beginning her rounds now, card in hand, joining the moving current of bodies. I watched her complete one circle, then two, then lost sight of her in the crowd. In a few weeks she would stand in a queue outside a consulate, documents in hand, and someday after that — hopefully in gratitude — she might return.