Dharmanath Jain Temple

The story of Dharmanath Jain Temple

The temple is a deliberate piece of Gujarat set down in Kerala. The interior is faced throughout in white marble, with carved pillars and Tirthankara figures, in an idiom borrowed straight from the Jain temples of Gujarat and with essentially nothing in common with Kerala's own temple architecture of laterite, timber and copper roofing. That contrast is the point of the building: it was made to look like home by people a very long way from it.

The mulnayak — the principal image — is Dharmanatha, the fifteenth of the twenty-four Tirthankaras, and the idol is held by the community to be well over a thousand years old, which would make it older than the building around it by a wide margin. A second shrine inside the complex holds Chandraprabhu, installed by Sheth Popatlal Govardhan Lalan, and a Shantinath image here has a local reputation for answering petitions. The eight-day Paryushana observance, the most important fast in the Jain year, is kept here annually.

The community that built it came for business. Jain families from Kutch and Saurashtra had traded into Cochin, Kozhikode and Alappuzha for generations, and Mattancherry's spice godowns were the reason they were here at all. What is unusual is who actually built it: not a merchant house or a trade association, but one woman, Hirubai, endowing a temple as a memorial to her husband Jivraj Dhanji. Kochi has a great many buildings put up by men who wanted to be remembered. This is one put up by a woman who wanted someone else to be.

The pigeons are what most visitors come for, and it is worth timing your visit for them rather than treating them as a bonus. Shortly after noon a member of the temple strikes a steel plate and calls chalo — come — and the birds arrive in a mass off the surrounding roofs. They make three circuits of the dome, which devotees read as pradakshina, the clockwise circumambulation a worshipper performs; prayers are recited; and only then is the grain put down. Whatever you make of the birds' intentions, the sequence is real and you can watch it happen.

The practice is not a spectacle laid on for tourists. Jiva daya — active compassion towards living beings — is a working principle of Jain life rather than an abstraction, and feeding birds and animals is one of its most ordinary expressions. What the temple has added is scale and discipline: a purpose-built birdhouse stands in the compound, a tower of roughly thirty metres divided into some three hundred separate nesting compartments, which is a considerable amount of masonry to devote to pigeons.

Outside the temple, the surrounding streets still read as a distinct quarter, with Gujarati shopfronts and names among the Malayalam ones. But that community has thinned badly as the spice trade contracted and families left, which is the same story Bazaar Road tells a few minutes away. The temple is now, in effect, the community's most durable structure in the city — better attended by birds, on most days, than by the descendants of the people who paid for it.

Practically, it is a small visit and an easy one — twenty to thirty minutes, or forty-five if you wait for the birds — and it fits neatly between the palace and Bazaar Road on a Mattancherry morning. Footwear comes off, leather is generally left outside, and modest dress is expected; scarves and dhotis are usually available at the entrance if you need one.

Legend & myth

The strangest thing about this temple is that almost everything written about it, including this page until now, gives the wrong century. You will read again and again that the Dharmanath Jain Temple was built in 1960. It was not. It was built in 1904. The temple's own dating is Vikram Samvat 1960 — the Vikram era runs about fifty-seven years ahead of the Gregorian one — and at some point a number that meant 1904 was copied out of a Jain record into an English one, lost its era, and became a year in living memory. A building that predates the First World War is routinely described as post-independence. It is a small mistake and it has been repeated for decades, and we published it ourselves until we went looking.

It matters more than a pedant's correction, because the two dates tell opposite stories. A temple of 1960 is the confident act of a community at its commercial height, a few years before the spice trade turned. A temple of 1904 is the act of a community still establishing itself, at the start of the long migration from Kutch and Saurashtra that the sources place in the early twentieth century. Move the date and the building stops being a monument to arrival and becomes part of the arriving.

The pigeons carry a legend of their own, and it is worth telling as legend. The tradition told at the temple is that the fixed feeding hour was not the community's idea at all — that a visiting monk instructed that the birds be fed at one appointed time each day rather than whenever anyone felt charitable, so that discipline would be taught to the birds and to the people together. Whether a particular monk said this, and when, is not something we can source. What is documented is the result: a punctual, unvarying midday ritual that both species now keep.

Around that has grown the claim visitors most often repeat — that the pigeons circle three times because they are performing pradakshina, and that they will not touch the grain until the prayers are finished. The circling and the waiting are observable; the reverence is an interpretation, and the temple is more careful about the distinction than most retellings are. Birds fed at a fixed time by a fixed signal learn the signal. That is not less remarkable for having an ordinary explanation, and it is not the same claim as the one on the postcard.

The 1904 correction has still not travelled, which is worth saying plainly. Kerala Tourism's own pages continue to date the building to 1960, and so do most travel listings; the encyclopaedia entry gives 1904 CE with VS 1960 alongside it, which is the reading that actually resolves the contradiction. If you are told 1960 at the door, that is not somebody being careless in front of you. It is a fifty-six-year error that has been reprinted so many times it now has more sources behind it than the truth does.

There is a second, quieter misreading built into the founder's name, and it explains why you will sometimes see this temple credited to a merchant. The record gives the builder as Hirubai Jivraj Dhanji — which is the ordinary Gujarati form, a woman's own given name followed by her husband's. Read quickly by anyone unfamiliar with it, the whole string looks like one man's name, and the temple duly gets attributed to a male trader. The same source that supplies the name says exactly what happened: she built it in memory of her husband, Jivraj Dhanji. The bai is the whole point of the sentence and it is the part that keeps getting dropped.