The Cochin Thirumala Devaswom Was Emptied Twice, and the Second Time Lasted 61 Years

A temple that needs three consecrations in three centuries is a temple that keeps being emptied. The Cochin Thirumala Devaswom at Gosripuram was consecrated in 1599, again in 1719 and again in 1881, and the gaps between those dates are filled with two expulsions, a fire, a flight and a sixty-one-year absence.

2 March 1662: the Portuguese

The Konkani community of Cochin had backed the Dutch against the Portuguese in the long contest for the port, on the reasonable calculation that a Protestant trading company would be less interested in converting them than the power that had driven them out of Goa in the first place. When the Portuguese retaliated, they did so thoroughly: on 2 March 1662 the community’s houses, markets and this temple were plundered and burned.

The Konkanis fled Cochin for Udayamperur and remained there roughly ten months. It was during that exile — homeless, with the deity displaced for the second time in a century — that the community took the pledge that would eventually give the kingdoms of Cochin and Travancore sixteen Tirumala Devaswoms. Faced with the loss of their only temple, they resolved to build fifteen more.

The Dutch defeated the Portuguese on 6 January 1663, and the temple was reconstructed with their assistance. Hold that next to the Paradesi Synagogue a few streets away, burned by the Portuguese in the same reprisal and also restored under the Dutch. Two refugee communities, arrived from opposite ends of the map, lost their houses of worship in the same year and rebuilt them in the same change of regime.

12 October 1791: the longer wound

The 1662 fire is the episode every account mentions. The one almost nobody tells is what happened a hundred and thirty years later. On 12 October 1791 the temple was plundered under Sakthan Thampuran, and the Konkani community fled Cochin again — this time to Alappuzha, taking the deity with them.

The idol did not come back. Not for a year, not for a decade. It returned to Cochin on 7 February 1853, in the reign of Kerala Varma IV: a gap of sixty-one years in which the central institution of Kerala’s Gowda Saraswats physically existed in another town. Two full generations of Konkani Kochi grew up with their principal deity somewhere else.

That is the longest interruption in the temple’s history by a very wide margin, and it is the least discussed. The 1662 burning fits the tidy narrative of colonial religious violence and gets retold; the 1791 plunder was carried out under a Malayali ruler and does not, so it drops out of the story.

What three consecrations mean

A pratishtha is not redecoration. It is the ritual installation that makes a building a temple, and needing it three times means the sanctity was three times interrupted. The first was performed in 1599 by Swami Sudhindra Tirtha of the Kumbakonam Math, in the lunar month of Chaithra, on the full-moon day, with the moon in conjunction with the Chitra star — a level of precision the community has kept in its records for four hundred years.

The second, in 1719, was conducted by Swami Devendra Tirtha and Swami Madhavendra Tirtha of Sri Kashi Math. The third, in 1881, by Swami Bhuvanendra Tirtha and Swami Varadendra Tirtha — a generation after the deity came home from Alappuzha. The eight-day Aarat festival still commemorates the first of the three.

Why it is worth knowing before you go

Because Mattancherry is sold as the quarter where everybody got along, and the density of it — synagogue, palace, Jain temple, Konkani temple and spice godowns inside a few hundred metres — genuinely is remarkable. But the density was produced by displacement, and the peace had gaps in it that are recorded to the day.

Standing at the Gosripuram gate with the dates in your head, the compound stops being a pretty temple in a back street and becomes what it is: a building that has been burned once, emptied twice, reconsecrated three times, and is still, every morning, open.