Four Names for One Pond: Where “Ernakulam” Comes From

A city of two and a half million people is named after a pond, and nobody can agree which pond, or why.

The pond in question is beside Ernakulathappan Temple, the presiding Shiva shrine of mainland Kochi. Every derivation of the name Ernakulam ends in <em>kulam</em>, which is simply Malayalam for a pond or tank. It is everything in front of that syllable that is contested — and there are four candidates, not the two that most accounts, ours included until now, bother to mention.

One: the serpent-sage

The temple’s own story, and by far the most repeated. A devotee — Devala, in some tellings — was cursed to carry the body of a serpent. Dragging himself through the forest that then covered this shore, he found a Shiva lingam sunk in the mud and settled there, half-snake, in penance. Villagers who caught sight of him called him Rishi Nagam, the saint-serpent.

Shiva and Parvati appeared and told him to bathe in the pond beside the lingam. He immersed himself, the curse lifted, and the place became <em>Rishinagakulam</em> — the pond of the serpent-sage — from which, worn down over centuries of speech, Ernakulam is said to descend. The deity was accordingly Rishinagakulathappan before he was Ernakulathappan.

Two: a Tamil word for Shiva

The second reading gives <em>Erayanarkulam</em> — the pond of Erayanar, Erayanar being a name for Shiva. That looks tidy, but there is a wrinkle in it worth noticing: Erayanar is a Tamil address, used in Chennai rather than in Kerala.

If that derivation is right, the name of Kerala’s commercial capital is a Tamil import that travelled up the coast and stuck. For a port that has been absorbing Tamil, Kannada, Arab, Jewish, Portuguese and Dutch arrivals for two thousand years, that is not implausible — it may be the least surprising thing on this list.

Three and four: mud, and water that stays

Now the two nobody puts on a signboard.

Komattil Achutha Menon derived the name from <em>erangiyal</em>, a type of mud. On a shore that was still swamp within living memory of the temple’s own reconstruction, that is not a frivolous suggestion.

And the fourth gives <em>Eere Naal Kulam</em>, the pond that always has water — a plain description of a tank that does not dry out through the hot months.

What the shape of the list tells you

Look at the four together. Two of them are miracles and two of them are descriptions of wet ground.

Place-names, in general, are the second kind. Settlements get named for what is physically there — the ford, the hill, the pond that does not fail in March — because those are the names that are useful to say. Sacred etymologies tend to arrive later, when the original word has worn past recognition and somebody needs to explain what it must have meant.

That is not a debunking, and we would not tell you the serpent-sage is wrong. It is a caution about the direction of travel. A pond that always holds water is exactly the sort of thing a town on a swampy shore names itself after, and the legend is exactly the sort of thing that grows on top of a name nobody can parse any more. Both may be true in sequence.

The temple says its best image is not its oldest

While you are unpicking things: the shrine contains a second, quieter claim that almost no visitor account repeats.

Inside the compound stands a Kirathamoorthy shrine — Shiva as the Kirata, the tribal hunter who fought Arjuna during his forest penance in the Mahabharata — and the lingam there is held by tradition to be the one Arjuna himself worshipped. Which would make it older than the presiding deity in the main sanctum.

Temples do not usually volunteer that their headline image is the junior one. It is unsignposted, and you will have to ask. Like the name stories, it is tradition rather than record, and we tell it as such.

And the building is younger than any of it

One firm date, to anchor a page full of soft ones. The Cochin Diwan Edakkunni Sankara Warrier found the temple dilapidated and began rebuilding it in 1842; the new complex opened for worship in 1846, with two gopura mandapams in traditional Kerala style, and the same patronage raised it to the rank of a royal temple of the Kochi kingdom.

So the fabric a visitor walks into is a Victorian-era reconstruction, whatever the age of the site beneath it. Do not read antiquity into the timber.

One last thing to notice while you are in there, because nothing labels it: alongside the Kerala-style shrines the enclosure holds a Murugan temple built in the Tamil manner and a Hanuman temple in the Kannada manner, with a banyan of some two hundred years beside the latter. A port drew in Tamil and Kannada communities, they wanted their gods in their own idiom, and the city’s principal temple made room inside its own wall. The etymology argument about whether Ernakulam is a Tamil word or a Malayalam one is, in a sense, settled physically in that courtyard.