Mantralayam is a small pilgrim town in Andhra Pradesh's Kurnool district, sitting right on the Tungabhadra River near the border with Karnataka — and it exists, in large part, because of one 17th-century saint who chose to stay here forever.

The town's centre of gravity is the Sri Raghavendra Swamy Mutt, built around the Brindavana — the sacred tomb — of Raghavendra Tirtha, a Dvaita Vedanta scholar who served as pontiff of the Kumbakonam mutt before settling at Mantralayam. In 1671, he entered jeeva samadhi here, a state in which, according to devotee tradition, he continues to meditate and respond to prayers from within the Brindavana even today. His scholarly output — commentaries on Madhva, Jayatirtha and Vyasatirtha, interpretations of the Upanishads, and a treatise on Purva Mimamsa — made him one of the most influential Dvaita philosophers of his era; he was also a skilled veena player who composed under the pen name Venu Gopala.

Daily rituals at the mutt — morning and evening aarti, and a steady stream of darshan — draw pilgrims year-round, but the town is busiest during the annual Aradhana festival, held over several days to mark the saint's samadhi anniversary, when the crowd swells into the hundreds of thousands.

A short distance away, across the river in Karnataka, is Panchamukhi Kshetra, a cave temple housing a five-faced (panchamukhi) idol of Hanuman, closely associated with Raghavendra Swamy's own spiritual practice and often visited as an extension to a Mantralayam trip.