A Garden That Acquired Animals: Thiruvananthapuram Zoo

Walk through the gate at Thiruvananthapuram Zoo and the first thing you notice is not an animal. It is the canopy — vast, buttressed, epiphyte-hung trees dropping shade across paths that wander rather than circulate. That is not an accident of neglect. It is the founding decision, still legible a hundred and sixty-odd years later.

The order of events

This place was laid out as a botanical garden and public park, as an adjunct to a museum, with an animal collection placed into it. It was not an animal facility that later planted some trees. Every good thing about the grounds follows from that sequence: the specimen planting, the lake sitting low with the paths curving round rather than across it, the sense that the enclosures are set inside the garden’s logic instead of the garden filling the gaps between enclosures.

And the date everyone gives is probably wrong

1857 is the year in almost every account. The Kerala Department of Museums and Zoos, which runs the site, says the zoo was established in 1859. Lay the sequence out and you can see how the error formed: a committee was constituted in 1855 with the Maharaja of Travancore as patron, the British Resident General Cullen as president, the Elaya Raja as vice-president and a Mr Allen Brown as secretary; the museum opened in September 1857; the zoo and park followed in 1859. The museum’s opening year got borrowed for the zoo, and has been copied ever since.

The founder is misattributed too, and in a way that is becoming familiar in this city. Many accounts credit the zoo to Swathi Thirunal. He died in 1846 — over a decade before any claimed founding date. The ruler in whose reign it was made was his successor Uthram Thirunal Marthanda Varma, with General Cullen and that committee. The same impossible credit is attached to Kanakakunnu Palace a few hundred metres away. Swathi Thirunal is the Travancore ruler with a reputation outside Kerala, and famous names attract other people’s work.

Older than the building everyone photographs

Here is the fact worth carrying round the compound. The Napier Museum next door is the most photographed building in Thiruvananthapuram, and it is easy to assume the grounds were landscaped around it. They were not. Robert Chisholm’s museum building opened in 1880; the zoo and its park had been here since 1859. The museum was inserted into an existing institutional landscape, not the other way round — which is why the trees around it are older than it is.

How big is it, exactly?

Fifty-five acres, says nearly everyone, twenty-two hectares. Thirty acres, says the department. Both figures are published by people who ought to know, and the likeliest reconciliation is that the larger covers the whole walled compound — museum, art gallery and zoo together — while the smaller is the zoo proper. We have not found a source that states that explicitly, so the honest thing is to give both and let you notice that heritage sites are frequently measured twice and reported once.

What is in the collection now, and the harder question of how it is housed, is in Cages, Moats and the Unfinished Rebuild. Practical detail — timings, the Monday closure, tickets — is on the zoo page.