Painkuni, Alpashy & the Arattu: the festivals of Padmanabhaswamy

For most of the year the Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple keeps to its own grave rhythm — the reclining Vishnu behind the great teak doors, glimpsed only in three parts through three separate doorways, the Dravidian gopuram rising over the old East Fort of Thiruvananthapuram. But twice each year the temple turns itself outward. Its deities are carried out of the sanctum, down through the streets of the fort and all the way to the Arabian Sea for a ceremonial bath, and the whole city seems to fall in behind them. These are the Painkuni and Alpashy utsavams, and their closing rite — the Arattu — is one of the most striking spectacles in Kerala.

Two ten-day festivals, twice a year

The temple holds two great festivals every year, each running for ten days and each following almost the same shape. The first falls in the Malayalam month of Meenam (March–April) and is called Painkuni; the second falls in Thulam (October–November) and is called Alpashy, after the older Malayalam name for the month. Both begin with the ceremonial hoisting of the temple flag (kodiyettam) and build, day by day, through special poojas and evening processions inside the temple walls before spilling out into the streets on the tenth day.

Painkuni is the more visually distinctive of the two. During the festival, towering figures of the five Pandava brothers and Draupadi — the heroes of the Mahabharata — are installed at the eastern entrance of the temple, a scene unique to Thiruvananthapuram. Because the deity here is Ananthasayana Vishnu, reclining on the serpent Ananta, the festival carries the atmosphere of a household honouring its supreme guest rather than a loud public fair. Alpashy, in the cooler post-monsoon season, mirrors the same sequence of rituals and ends with its own Arattu.

The Arattu: a procession to the sea

The climax of each festival is the Arattu, the ceremonial immersion of the processional deities in the sea. On the tenth evening the utsava murtis of Padmanabha, Narasimha and Krishna are brought out of the temple and set out on a long walk to the coast. The procession moves through the fort, along the old royal route, and — in a detail found nowhere else — crosses the runway of Thiruvananthapuram International Airport, which suspends flights for several hours so the deities may pass. It ends at the Arattu Mandapam beside Shanghumugham (Shanmugham) Beach, where the deities are given their holy sea-bath before being carried back to the temple by torchlight, reaching the sanctum well after midnight.

The procession is a slow river of pageantry: caparisoned elephants, nagaswaram and drums, mounted police, columns of the armed reserve, and thousands of devotees lining the route. Yet for all the grandeur it stays devotional rather than carnival — this is a god being escorted to the sea, and the crowds walk in a kind of hushed excitement rather than revelry. Seeing the deities disappear towards the darkening beach, and then return as a chain of lamps moving back through the fort, is the memory most visitors carry away.

The Maharaja as Padmanabha Dasa

What sets this procession apart from almost any other in India is who walks at its head. The rulers of Travancore surrendered their kingdom to the deity in 1750, when Maharaja Marthanda Varma dedicated the state to Sree Padmanabha and declared himself and his successors ‘Padmanabha Dasa’ — servant of Padmanabha. From that day the royal family governed not as kings in their own right but as stewards on the deity’s behalf.

That relationship is enacted, not merely remembered, during the festival. On the ninth day the senior male of the Travancore royal family performs the Pallivetta, a symbolic royal hunt, near the Vettakkorumakan shrine in the fort — an old ritual in which the king rides out to vanquish evil on the deity’s behalf. And during the Arattu itself the head of the family walks the entire route on foot, barefoot, sword in hand, escorting the deities to the sea and back. He does not ride ahead of the god; he follows as a servant. For a family that once ruled one of India’s princely states, walking the long road to Shanghumugham as Padmanabha Dasa is a public statement of exactly where authority is understood to lie.

Laksha Deepam: a lakh of lamps, once in six years

Rarer still, and unmissable if your visit happens to coincide with it, is the Laksha Deepam — the ‘hundred thousand lamps’. Held only once every six years, it lights the entire temple with a lakh of oil lamps, earthen and brass, ranged along every wall, gateway, gopuram and corridor, with slow-revolving lamp-wheels at each entrance turning the whole shrine into a single body of flame.

The illumination is the culmination of the Murajapam, a fifty-six-day cycle of continuous Vedic chanting held in seven sessions of eight days each, in which mantras from the Rig, Sama and Yajur Vedas are recited without break. Like so much here, the observance was instituted by Marthanda Varma in the mid-eighteenth century — the first Laksha Deepam was celebrated in 1750, and it has been kept every sixth year since. Because it is so infrequent, the lighting draws devotees from across the state and beyond; if the dates fall within your trip, plan around it (indicative — confirm locally, as the six-year cycle and the Makaram-month timing are fixed but crowd management changes each occasion).

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