Thirteen temples on a wall

Inside Thrichittatt Maha Vishnu Temple, screwed to a wall under a timber eave, there is a blue board headed MALANATTU VAISHNAVA THIRUPPATHIKAL. It has three columns — the deity, the place, and the distance from the nearest railway station — and thirteen rows. It is, without much competition, the most useful piece of travel writing about this circuit that exists.

What the thirteen are

The 108 Divya Desams are the abodes of Vishnu praised in the hymns of the Alvars, the Tamil saint-poets, and they are scattered across India with one, Muktinath, in Nepal. Thirteen of them lie in the Malayalam country, and those thirteen are what this board lists. Reading down it: Thirunavaya, Thirumittacode, Thrikkakkara, Thirumoolikulam, Thiruvalla, Thrikkodithanam, Thricchittattu, Thripuliyoor, Thiruvaranmula, Thiruvanvandoor, Thiruvananthapuram, Thiruvattar and Thiruppathisaram.

Two things jump out of that list. The first is that it runs the whole length of the old Malayalam-speaking country and out of modern Kerala at the southern end — Thiruvattar and Thiruppathisaram are given as 5 km from Kulithurai and 5 km from Nagercoil, which is Tamil Nadu today. The second is that one of the thirteen is the Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple at Thiruvananthapuram, listed as Sri Anantha Padmanabhan, 1 km from TVM Central. The best-known temple in Kerala and this small quiet one near Chengannur are members of the same set.

Why the distances are the good part

Anyone who has tried to plan a temple circuit in Kerala knows the problem: the sources give you legends in abundance and logistics not at all. This board gives logistics, from the temple’s own wall, in the only unit that matters in a state where the railway is the spine — distance from the nearest station.

And it makes the shape of the Pancha Pandava cluster obvious at a glance. Four of the five are hung off one station: Thricchittattu 1 km from Chengannur, Thripuliyoor 5 km from Chengannur, Thiruvanvandoor 6 km from Chengannur, Thiruvaranmula — Aranmula — 11 km from Chengannur. The fifth, Thrikkodithanam, is given as 3 km from Changanacherry. Five temples, three districts, and effectively two railway stations. That is a comfortable day by car and a long but perfectly possible one by bus and auto.

The sixth stop the board does not have

The Malayalam tradition adds something the board does not: Pandavarkavu, near Muthukulam, where Kunti — the mother of the five — is said to have worshipped. Doing all six in a single day, the five sons and the mother, is held to be the complete circuit and the meritorious version of it. It is the sort of detail that lives in the local language and vanishes on the way into English, and it is a good argument for reading the Malayalam before you decide you know what a place is.

A note on trusting a sign

We have taken every inter-temple distance on our Thrichittatt pages from this board rather than from travel sites, and it is worth saying why, because it is not simply that boards are charming. A distance on a travel page has usually been copied from another travel page, and errors in that chain are invisible and permanent. A board on a temple wall was put there by somebody with a reason to get it right for the people standing in front of it — in this case, by the look of its own footer, by a devotee: it credits S. Devee, Lakshmi Narayani Nivas, Pathanamthitta.

That does not make it infallible, and we have not independently measured the thirteen. It makes it a better-sourced starting point than the alternatives, and it is honest about where it came from — which is more than most of what is written about this circuit can say.