The Prasna Marga was written in this village in 1649

The oldest layer at Thottada is a name. **Edakkad** is read as a Malayalam contraction of the Sanskrit *madhya-adavi* — *eda*, middle; *kadu*, forest — and the village was known by that Sanskrit form before it was known by its present one. Administratively it belonged to Randattara, also called Poynad, before the British reorganisation folded it into Chirakkal taluk of Malabar District, where it was one of forty-three amshams alongside Kannur, Taliparamba, Anjarakandy and Payyanur.

One contribution to world scholarship

It was written here in **1649**. Narayanan Nambutiri of the Panakkattu illam, whose dates are given as 1624 to 1694, composed the **Prasna Marga** in Sanskrit sloka at Edakkad — the most comprehensive classical exposition of horary astrology in the Indian tradition, and still the standard reference for Kerala prasna practice.

He wrote his own commentary on it, the *Durgamartha Prakasini*, and the text reached English readers through the commentary of Punnasseri Nambi Neelakantha Sarma. Locally the village is remembered as **Prashnamargapuram** for it.

The 1790s were the rupture

As Tipu Sultan’s campaign moved through Malabar, the administrators of Oorpazhachi Kavu evacuated the idols and the temple’s valuables and took them to the **Akkaraveettil Tharavad at Thalassery**, where they were sheltered. The deities were brought back and re-consecrated only after Tipu withdrew from Malabar, and the Akkaraveettil family afterwards gifted their worship house to the temple in acknowledgement of what had happened. The shrine was substantially rebuilt over the second half of the nineteenth century, in works dated between 1845 and 1899.

The same campaign is what moved the Kadalayi Sree Krishna image off this coast for good — a story regularly attached to this shore that does not belong to it, and which we set out where it does belong.

Then cloth, then a college, then guests

Kannur’s weaving was built by the **Saliya** community, brought from the Tamil country by the Chirakkal rajas to make cloth for the royal household and settled on granted land near the temples. Their settlements became the weaving *theruvus* — literally “streets” — scattered across the district, and Edakkad has one of them. The industry is generally dated to the sixteenth century in the district, became a mass livelihood only in the nineteenth, and was reorganised into cooperative societies around Independence.

Modern Thottada was then built by institutions before it was built by tourism. **Government Polytechnic College, Kannur** opened at Thottada in **1958**. The **Institute of Handloom and Textile Technology** followed at Kizhunna P.O. within the same village — the state’s nodal institution for taking science and technology to the traditional handloom and textile industry — tying the place formally to the craft its weavers already practised. Beach tourism came last, from the 1990s, and came as homestays rather than hotels.

The result is the odd modern Thottada: a working village with a technical college, a weaving street, a five-acre sacred grove and, at the end of the lane, some of the emptiest sand in North Kerala. Almost none of it is signposted.