A crocodile lived in the lake around the Ananthapura temple. It was called Babiya, it was fed on temple offerings, and in decades at the shrine it is not recorded as having harmed anyone. It died on 9 October 2022, at a reported age of about 75. That much was reported nationally and is about as documented as this story gets.
What happened next
In November 2023, thirteen months after Babiya’s death, devotees spotted a crocodile in a cave along the lake. It is described as noticeably smaller than Babiya, and as having settled quickly into the same behaviour. According to the temple’s own account this is the third crocodile the shrine has known, and the temple states the pattern plainly: when one passes away, another appears in the lake.
It is worth being careful about what that sentence is. It is a claim made by the institution about its own history, and it is a religious claim about succession as much as a zoological observation. We report it as the temple’s position because it is a matter of record that the temple holds it, not because we can verify a lineage.
The parts that are strange without needing any belief at all
Documented, contested and believed — kept apart
| Claim | Standing |
|---|---|
| Babiya lived in the temple lake and died on 9 October 2022 | Widely reported at the time, including by mainstream Kerala news. |
| She was around 75 years old | Reported; an estimate, and old for a crocodile but not implausible. |
| She did not harm devotees who came near | Consistently reported over a long period. Remarkable, and the most robust part of the story. |
| She ate only temple prasadam and was “vegetarian” | This is how it is described by the temple and the press. What a crocodile does unobserved in a lake at night is not something anyone can attest to. |
| A new crocodile appeared in November 2023 | Reported. That it is the successor in a divinely ordered sequence is the temple’s belief. |
| How the crocodiles get into a closed lake | Unexplained in every source we have read. Nobody offers a mechanism, and nobody rules one out. |
That last row is the interesting one, and the honest one. The lake is described as spring-fed and rectangular, with a single footbridge; the temple sits in the middle of it. How a large reptile arrives in it is a question with a mundane answer available — crocodiles travel overland between water bodies, and a mugger crocodile in coastal Kerala is not an exotic animal — and no source we have found actually asks it. Both the devotional and the sceptical accounts skip straight past the logistics.
- There is no guarantee of a sighting. The crocodile is an animal in a lake, not an exhibit.
- Do not go looking for it, do not approach the water’s edge to find it, and do not feed anything. Whatever the tradition says about temperament, this is a wild crocodile.
- The feeding, when it happens, is a temple observance. Watch it as one.
- The temple has its own conventions on dress and conduct, as Kerala temples do. Ask at the entrance rather than assuming.
Why the story travelled so far
Because it sits exactly on a fault line people enjoy. To a devotee it is evidence: an animal that should be dangerous is not, in a place where the god is present. To a sceptic it is a well-fed captive reptile with a good publicist. Both readings can be held without contradicting a single reported fact, which is why the story has run in the international press repeatedly and why it never resolves.
What we would rather leave you with is the smaller thing. For decades, at a shrine in a lake in a village in Kasaragod, people walked past a crocodile to pray, and it did not attack them, and when it died the state mourned it by name. Whatever explains that, it is a genuinely unusual thing to have happened.