Kottankulangara Devi Temple

The story of Kottankulangara Devi Temple

The temple is a working neighbourhood Devi shrine in Chavara, on the belt of land between the sea and the backwater north of Kollam. The goddess is Durga Bhagavathy, addressed also as Aadi Shakthi, the supreme mother of power. On an ordinary day it is a quiet compound: a tile-roofed shrine with timber-slatted walls, its gable clad in beaten metal worked into scrollwork and figures, brass at the base, marigold garlands strung along the eaves, a small gilded subsidiary shrine in the forecourt.

For two nights a year it is something else entirely.

Chamayavilakku falls on the tenth and eleventh of the Malayalam month of Meenam, which puts it in March or early April. On those nights men and boys — from the neighbourhood, from across Kerala, and now from outside the state — put on women's clothes, take up a traditional lamp, and go in procession to the Devi. The attire is not a costume issued by anybody; accounts describe the set sari, the pattu sari, the half sari, and dance costumes, chosen by the person wearing it. Then the lamps are lit and carried through the dark.

The name says what it is. Chamayam is adornment — being dressed and made up — and vilakku is the lamp. The festival is the adorned lamp-bearer, and the two halves of the word are the two halves of the ritual.

It is worth being plain about how to understand this, because it is exactly the sort of thing that gets written up badly. This is not a carnival, an inversion-for-a-night, or a spectacle staged for onlookers. It is a vow made to a goddess and discharged in the form she is said to have asked for. Men who do it are generally fulfilling a specific promise, and the dressing is the offering. The right posture for a visitor is the one you would bring to any other act of devotion.

Which brings us to why the form is what it is, and here the temple's own account is far better than the one in general circulation.

In the temple's telling, this place began with boys. A group of cowherds, at play, used to act as shy girls and offer flowers and a kottan — a coconut dish — to a stone. It is a children's game: dressing up, playing at being someone else, making pretend offerings. And then, in the story, the game was answered. One of the boys received a divine response from the Devi. A temple without an outer wall was raised over the stone, and the ritual of men dressed as women offering prayers to the goddess began there and has not stopped.

Read the festival back through that and it stops being strange. The men in saris are not doing something transgressive on a holy night. They are doing exactly what the boys were doing when the goddess first answered. The ritual is a re-enactment of the moment of the temple's founding, and the costume is not incidental to the worship — it is the worship, in the only form this deity is said to have accepted.

The other founding story you will meet does not do any of that work. In it, cowherds struck a coconut against a stone to husk it and found blood dripping from the stone; an astrologer pronounced the stone to hold supernatural power, and a shrine was built. It is a perfectly good sacred-stone legend, of a kind Kerala has many of, and it explains the shrine. It contains no boys playing at being girls and it explains nothing whatever about the festival. When two legends are in circulation and only one accounts for the practice, that is worth noticing rather than smoothing over.

The temple keeps other rituals that point the same way. A Kuruthola Pandal is put up annually — a model of the ancient temple, built in the old manner from poles and the tender leaves of the coconut palm. A shrine that reconstructs its own first, temporary form once a year, in leaves, is a shrine unusually conscious of how it began. There is also Jeevatha Ezhunnallathu, a step-dance procession in traditional dress.

Go on a normal day and you will see a well-kept Kerala shrine and very little to explain any of this. Go on the tenth or eleventh of Meenam and you will see several thousand men in saris carrying lamps through the dark to a goddess who, they hold, asked for precisely that.

Plan a Chamayavilakku visit around the temple’s confirmed programme, rather than a reusable Gregorian date. Kerala Tourism places the principal lamp observances on the tenth and eleventh of Meenam and explicitly asks visitors to reconfirm festival dates with the local authorities. An ordinary temple visit and a night of lamp-bearing require different transport plans: arrange where your driver will wait and how you will leave before joining the crowd.

The lamps and the people carrying them are the focus of worship. If you want a portrait, ask the participant directly and accept a refusal without interrupting their progress. For a quieter look at the shrine’s architecture, make a separate daytime visit; a photograph of a festival procession does not describe what you will find on every day of the year.

Legend & myth

The first correction is a claim we would have repeated ourselves if we had not opened the photographs, and it is comprehensively wrong. You will read — very widely — that Kottankulangara is unique in Kerala for having no roof over its sanctum. It fails three separate ways.

It fails on the pictures. The principal shrine in the available photographs carries a substantial tiled hipped roof with a gilded finial, over timber-slatted walls; another frame is a close study of a metal-clad gable end with the tiles running away behind it. Whatever else is true of this temple, its shrine is roofed, and you can see that it is.

It fails on the temple's own words. The temple's website does not say the sanctum has no roof. It says the shrine raised over the stone was a temple without an outer wall. That is a different architectural claim about a different part of the building, and the widely circulated version looks like a garbling of it — a wall becoming a roof somewhere in the retelling.

And the word only fails regardless, on evidence already published on this site. The Oachira Parabrahma temple, about twenty kilometres up the same coast, is famous precisely for having no idol, no image and no roofed sanctum. At Thirumandhamkunnu in Malappuram the Sreemoolasthanam, the original sanctum, by custom stands open to the sky without a roof. And Poruvazhy Peruviruthy Malanada, in this same district, has no sanctum at all — only a raised platform under an open mandapam. Two of those three are in Kollam district. A claim of uniqueness that our own pages refute twice over is not a claim we are going to print.

The second correction is the numbers, and the gap is large enough that we will not pick between them. Chamayavilakku is routinely described with attendance figures upward of twenty-five thousand. The temple's own website, describing its 2011 festival, says around four thousand people participated. That is a difference of about six times. Some of it is probably the difference between participants — men who dress and carry a lamp — and the far larger crowd that comes to watch, and some of it is probably the ordinary inflation of festival numbers. We give both figures with their sources and neither as the answer.

The third is a date, and it is the same discipline we applied elsewhere in this district. Chamayavilakku falls on the tenth and eleventh of the Malayalam month of Meenam, which lands in March or early April. We do not print a Gregorian date, because a specific date captured once and left in place goes stale within a year and is then copied for a decade. Check the year you are travelling in against a current Malayalam calendar, or ask at the shrine.

The fourth is about the two origin legends, and rather than choose we would point out what distinguishes them. The temple's own account has cowherd boys at play acting as shy girls and offering flowers and a kottan to a stone, one of them receiving a divine response, and the ritual of men dressing as women beginning from that. The other widely repeated account has cowherds striking a coconut on a stone to husk it and blood dripping out, with an astrologer pronouncing the stone powerful. Only the first explains the festival. A legend that accounts for the practice and a legend that does not are not equally serviceable, whatever their relative age.

The fifth is a matter of framing rather than fact, and we think it matters more than any of the above. Chamayavilakku is a devotional vow, not a spectacle and not a carnival of inversion. The men taking part are generally discharging a specific promise to the goddess, in the form the tradition holds she accepted. Writing it up as Kerala's festival where men dress as women, with the emphasis on the oddity, misses that the costume is the offering — and that, on the temple's own account, it is a re-enactment of how the place was founded.

The sixth is practical and image-related. There is no photograph of Chamayavilakku on this page and there will not be one until a properly licensed image exists. The only festival photograph we could find anywhere carries a non-commercial licence we cannot use. Every image here is of the temple on an ordinary day, and none of them should be read as showing the festival.