What to expect
Highlights
- Temple visit at Kandiyoor Sree Mahadeva Temple
- Kerala temple architecture and rituals
- Local food, shops and pilgrim services nearby
The story
Two kilometres west of Mavelikkara, on the Haripad road, stands a temple that once told Kerala what year it was. Kandiyoor Sree Mahadeva Temple carries an epigraph dating its own origin to 823 AD, in the reign of the Chera king Rajasekhara Varman — and for a long stretch afterwards the country around it counted its years in the Kandiyoorabdam, the Kandiyoor era, reckoned from that foundation, until the Kollam era displaced it. Very few Indian temples have started a calendar. Fewer still have kept the inscriptions to prove it: the stones here have yielded a documentary record running from the ninth century to the fifteenth, and one of them, cut in 1218, is the clearest surviving evidence anywhere in this part of Kerala that the temple was run, danced in, and repaired at the instance of its devadasis.
The story of Kandiyoor Sree Mahadeva Temple
Kandiyoor stands about 2.2 km west of the centre of Mavelikkara, in the Onattukara country of eastern Alappuzha, on the road that runs down towards Haripad. The compound is large — the temple’s own reckoning is about seven and a half acres — and it is walled on all four sides, with gopurams on each, so that the first thing you meet is not the shrine but a gateway. The eastern gopuram is the one most people use, a two-storeyed block of tiled roofs and dark timber gables standing straight off the road, with the temple’s carved gable-end above it and the everyday traffic of a small town parked underneath. Inside, the ground opens out into a wide, level sand courtyard, and the noise stops.
The sreekovil is the reason to come, and it is worth walking all the way round. It is a two-tiered shrine on a black granite plinth, the lower walls of dark dressed timber panelled with carving, the roofs copper-red and pyramidal, and under the upper eave a continuous band of small pale sculpted figures — the miniature panels for which this complex is a well-known source. The plan is square. (⚠ The Malayalam article describes the lower storey as circular and the upper as square; the photographs and the CC0 description of the photo set both give a square main shrine, and a separate Commons file explicitly notes that the apsidal shrine on this site is not the main temple. We follow the photographs and record the disagreement.) The deity is Shiva as Kiratamurti, the hunter — the form he takes in the Mahabharata to fight Arjuna over a boar — installed as a lingam and facing east.
What is unusual about the complex is how crowded it is with other gods. Around the central shrine stand eleven further sanctums, built in different periods, so that between them the site reveres essentially every major strand of Hindu practice: Mahavishnu, Parvati as Annapurneshwari, Gosala Krishna, Sastha, Ganapathy in two shrines including a Moola Ganapathy, Subrahmanya, Nagaraja and Nagayakshi in their own pair, and Brahmarakshas. Five of these are themselves Shiva, brought in from other Shiva temples and re-installed here under their home names — Shankaran, Srikanthan, Mrityunjayan, Parvatheeshan and Vadakkunnathan. By the count of subsidiary deities, the Malayalam account places Kandiyoor second in the country, behind only Thiruvanchikulam.
The temple is administered today by the Travancore Devaswom Board, and its tantric rites belong to the Nedumpilly Tharananallur family of Irinjalakuda, reckoned the senior tantri lineage of Kerala. The flagstaff was raised on the fifteenth of Makaram in the Malayalam year 1103, which is about 1928, and is gold-sheathed now. There is a temple elephant; the one that carried the name Kandiyoor Srikanthan died of a snakebite, and Prem Shankar serves in his place.
The calendar’s centre of gravity is Dhanu. The annual utsavam is a ten-day festival held in Dhanu (December–January) on the Thiruvathira asterism, closing with the arattu procession. Shivaratri, on the fourteenth of the dark fortnight of Kumbham (February–March), is the other great day. Through the rest of the year the observances are the Shaiva ones you would expect and which fill a small temple week: every Monday, the pradosha at dusk, and the monthly return of Thiruvathira. Darshan follows ordinary Kerala temple hours, early morning and evening, with the nada shut in the middle of the day — festival days rearrange all of it, and the sensible course is to ask locally rather than to trust a printed time.
One custom is worth knowing before you walk round: the western door does not open. The tradition is that after the war between Odanad and Kayamkulam the defeated Kayamkulam Raja came here, surrendered his sword at the deity’s feet and left westward, and that the west nada has stayed shut ever since. Whether or not the sword is history, the closed door is real and the reason given for it is the one the temple gives.
Legend & myth
The founding legend begins with a sage looking for the best place on earth. Mrigandu Muni — the father of Markandeya, the boy who cheated death by clinging to a Shiva lingam — is said to have obtained a divine image of Kiratamurti, Shiva in the form of the hunter, and to have gone searching for ground worthy of it. He came at last to the bank of the Achankovil, saw the country there, and set the lingam down. The name is said to come out of that moment: kandathil nalla ur, “of what he saw, the good place”, worn down over centuries to Kandiyoor. It is a folk etymology and it should be read as one — it is the derivation the temple gives, not a demonstrated one — but it is the story the place tells about itself, and it is unusually gentle for a foundation legend. No war, no curse, no severed head. A man looked around and decided this would do.
A second story is not gentle at all, and it explains a different name. In this account Brahma, the creator, tried to deceive Mahavishnu — the old quarrel over which of the two was the greater, in which Brahma claimed to have found the top of Shiva’s infinite column of fire when he had not. Shiva’s answer, here, was to take off one of Brahma’s five heads with the nail of his little finger, and the tradition sets that act on this riverbank. Because the deity who did it is Srikanthan, the place became Srikanthiyur, which contracts, again, to Kandiyoor. Two legends, two etymologies, one name: the temple has never chosen between them and neither will this page.
Behind both stands the largest claim of all, and the one made about a great many Kerala temples. Parashurama, the axe-bearing avatar who is said to have raised Kerala out of the sea, is credited with performing the lingapratishtha here, and Kandiyoor is counted among the hundred and eight great Shivalayas he is said to have consecrated. The tradition is stated without elaboration in the Malayalam account, which is the honest way to carry it. It is worth adding a caution that applies across this whole site: the 108 Shivalayas and the 108 Sastha shrines are different sets, no two published lists of either agree in full, and being “one of the 108” is a statement about tradition rather than about a register anyone can check.
The myth that is enacted rather than told is the daily one. Shiva at Kandiyoor is held to show three different faces at three points of the day, and the same stone is worshipped as a different god at each. At dawn he is Dakshinamurti, the young teacher facing south under the banyan, who instructs in silence and grants knowledge. At noon he is Umamaheshwara, Shiva with Uma, the conjugal form, the god at ease with his wife. In the evening he returns to Kiratamurti, the hunter — the form Mrigandu Muni is said to have brought here, the form of the fight in the forest and of dissolution at the end of things. A worshipper who comes to Kandiyoor three times in one day is not visiting the same temple three times.
The Buddhist layer under all of this is not a myth but it lives in the same half-lit country. A Hinayana Buddhist centre is held to have stood near here, in the keeping of the Kannankara Panicker family, and to have been displaced when the Shiva temple grew; the fourteenth-century Malayalam messenger-poem Unnuneeli Sandesam is cited for the connection. A Buddha image that belonged to it survived. It was found — and here the sources part company, one saying it came out of paddy fields near this temple, another that it was recovered from the Achankovil river — and it now stands on a pedestal at the road junction in front of the Sree Krishna Swamy Temple in Mavelikkara town, which is called Buddha Junction for it. Mavelikkara is one of the places where Kerala’s Buddhist past is not an inference but an object you can walk up to, and the road it stands on runs from here.
Read the full history of Kandiyoor Sree Mahadeva Temple 980 more words
History
The single most important fact about Kandiyoor is documentary rather than architectural. As the English article puts it: “The Kandiyoor temple is the earliest temple about which there is an epigraph about its origin in A.D 823 during the reign of Rajasekhara Varman.” That is a narrow and careful claim and it is worth reading exactly as written — not the oldest temple in Kerala, but the earliest one whose own beginning is recorded in an inscription. Rajasekhara Varman was the Chera ruler of Mahodayapuram, and the ninth century is where the photographic record of the complex begins too: the CC0 description of the photo set calls it a ninth-century complex credited to Rajasekhara Varman and restored and expanded in the thirteenth. (⚠ en.wikipedia’s article on Mavelikkara gives a different figure, AD 731. No epigraph is cited for it. We follow 823, and note that the other number is in circulation.)
The foundation was consequential enough to start a clock. An era called the Kandiyoorabdam was reckoned from the temple’s establishment and used locally until the Kollam era — the Kollavarsham, which begins in 825 AD and is still in use in Kerala — took its place. The two run only two years apart at their origins, which is a coincidence worth pausing over rather than smoothing away: a regional temple era and the state’s enduring calendar were founded within living memory of each other. The 1218 inscription is dated in both systems at once, in Kollavarsham 393 and in Kandiyoorabdam, and that double dating is the evidence that the temple era was still being counted four hundred years on.
That 1218 inscription is the richest thing on the site. It was cut in vattezhuthu, the old round Malayalam-Tamil script, and read by T. A. Gopinatha Rao, the epigraphist who did more than anyone to open up Travancore’s inscriptions. It records a restoration: work begun in Thulam of Kollavarsham 392 and finished on the eighth of Medam in 393. It names the sponsors and donors. And it records that the temple was a place of Natyasastra study — dance and music taught and performed, with tevadichi, devadasi, performances. The person at the centre of it is a woman. She appears as Unni, or Unniyachi, or Unnunili depending on which account you read; she was a devadasi of this temple; she was the wife of Ravi Kerala Varma, the king of Venad; and it was at her instance that the restoration was sponsored, with her taking part in the kalasam ceremony when the work was done.
It is worth being plain about why that matters. A queen who is also a temple dancer is not an anomaly in Kerala — there are more than ten historic inscriptions recording devadasis in Kerala temples — but the Kandiyoor record is the fullest one for this region, and the Malayalam account goes further, naming a line of devadasi heirs: Cherukara Kuttathi, whom the Kandiyoor Mattam Raja of the day married, and after her Cherukara Unniyadi, Muttur Ilayachi, Unniyachaki, Karungade Unnulikkal. The fourteenth-century Sanskrit work Shivavilasam by Damodara Chakyar is cited for the temple being under devadasi control. Taken together this is documentation of women holding institutional authority over a major temple, by name, across generations — the kind of thing that is usually inferred and here is written down. The dance traditions attached to it are compared with the Nangyar, Kuttachi and related lineages.
The politics of the place are Odanad’s. Kandiyoor was once the capital of Odanad, the medieval principality of this stretch of coast, and the temple was its state shrine; the 1218 restoration was carried out under Rama Kotha Varma of Odanad, and a second inscription in Sanskrit and grantha script, set before the srikovil, commemorates a Kothavarman of the same house. Odanad was later absorbed by Kayamkulam, and Kayamkulam in turn was annexed by Marthanda Varma in the great Travancore expansion of the eighteenth century. The closed western door belongs to that sequence: the story is that the beaten Kayamkulam Raja laid his sword before the deity here and went out to the west, and the door has not been opened since. The temple that had been the centre of a kingdom ended as one shrine among many under the Travancore Devaswom Board, which administers it still.
Why visit
For the epigraph, which is a genuinely rare thing. This is the earliest Kerala temple whose own origin is recorded in an inscription — 823 AD, in the reign of Rajasekhara Varman — and the stones here have gone on producing inscriptions from the ninth century to the fifteenth. You are standing in a building that is also an archive.
For the Kandiyoorabdam. A temple foundation important enough that the country round it counted its years from that date, and went on doing so for four centuries afterwards, is not something you meet often. The 1218 inscription is dated in the temple’s own era and in the Kollam era at the same time.
For the devadasi record. The 1218 stone names a devadasi of this temple who was also the wife of the king of Venad, and records that the restoration happened at her instance and that she took part in the consecration. The Malayalam account names five more women after her. It is the clearest documentation of devadasi authority in this part of Kerala.
For the sreekovil and the little figures. A two-tiered square shrine on a black granite plinth, dark carved timber, and a band of miniature sculpted panels under the upper eave, with eleven further shrines around it — by one reckoning the second-largest set of subsidiary deities of any temple in India.
For the three faces. Dakshinamurti at dawn, Umamaheshwara at noon, Kiratamurti in the evening. If you have the day to spare, come at all three and see whether the difference is in the temple or in you.
