Kottarakkara Sree Mahaganapathi Temple

The story of Kottarakkara Sree Mahaganapathi Temple

The first thing to get straight is the dedication, because the name of the place actively misleads. This is a Shiva temple. The main sanctum holds Shiva; the Ganapathi shrine is a sub-shrine. And yet nobody, including the temple's own signage in practice, calls it anything but the Kottarakkara Ganapathi temple — the Sree Mahaganapathi Kshethram — because the sub-shrine is what draws the crowds and what the town is known for across Kerala.

What is unusual is that the tradition here does not treat that as an embarrassment to be explained away. It treats it as prophecy fulfilled. The story attached to the founding of the Ganapathi shrine has the chief priest telling the sculptor, at the moment the idol was installed, that although the father is the main deity, the son will be the more famous one in this temple. Three hundred years or so later, that is simply a description of the situation. A temple whose own origin legend predicts that its principal deity will be upstaged is a rare thing, and it is the most interesting fact about the place.

The sculptor in the story is Perumthachan — the legendary master carpenter of Kerala tradition, to whom an enormous number of the peninsula's finest timber structures are attributed, generally without evidence and often across spans of time no single craftsman could have covered. Perumthachan is to Kerala building what a handful of names are to European cathedrals: a way of saying this is very good work, of the old kind. We record the attribution as tradition and leave it there.

It is Perumthachan, in the same tradition, who is said to have offered unniyappam to the Ganapathi here — and unniyappam is what you will be handed today. It is a small, dark, round sweet fried in ghee, made from rice with jaggery and banana, cardamom and coconut pieces, and it is prepared at this temple in volume. Of all the offerings in Kerala's temples this is one of the very few that has become a regional food in its own right; a great many Malayalis know the words Kottarakkara and unniyappam as a pair before they know anything else about the town.

Then there is the second story, the one that gets Kottarakkara into every account of Indian classical dance. In the seventeenth century a ruler of Kottarakkara — Veera Kerala Varma, remembered simply as the Kottarakkara Thampuran, with dates given as 1653 to 1694 — composed Ramanattam, a cycle of eight plays on the life of Rama. Ramanattam is very widely held to be the immediate ancestor of Kathakali.

The eight are named and they read as a syllabus: puthrakameshti, seetha swayamvaram, vicchinnabhishekam, kharavadham, balivadham, thoranayudham, sethubandhanam and yudham — the war. Taken together they are the Ramayana staged as a sequence, which was itself the innovation: not one episode performed as ritual, but a narrative arc built to be watched over successive nights.

Why he wrote it is where the story becomes a story. The standard telling is that the Zamorin of Calicut had composed Krishnanattam, a cycle on the life of Krishna, dated to 1657; that the Kottarakkara ruler asked to borrow the Zamorin's performers for an occasion of his own; and that the Zamorin refused, with a remark to the effect that the Kottarakkara court would not be capable of appreciating them. So Kottarakkara wrote his own cycle, on Rama rather than Krishna, and in the language of the people rather than in Sanskrit.

Our own page on Kathakali already says what needs saying about that: the elements are real — Krishnanattam and Ramanattam both existed, and Kathakali plainly descends from that milieu — but the snub itself is the kind of neat causal insult that oral tradition is extremely good at manufacturing, and the evidence for the exchange is thin. Political rivalry between chieftains turning into artistic rivalry makes a better anecdote than it does a citation. Take the rivalry as the frame the tradition chose for itself.

What the town can show you is more solid than the anecdote. Kottarakkara has a Kottarakkara Thampuran Memorial Museum of Classical Arts — a real institution, in the town, mapped and photographed, holding exhibits on the performing traditions the Thampuran is remembered for. If you have come for the Kathakali connection, that is the address for it, rather than a tree.

Because there is a tree in the story too. Tradition says the Thampuran wrote Ramanattam sitting beneath a banyan near the temple. It is a lovely image and we are not going to certify it. What we will say is that it is doing something specific: it is attaching a court's literary project to a temple's ground, and those are two different claims. That the Kottarakkara Thampuran composed Ramanattam is widely held. That he composed it at this temple is tradition, and it should be enjoyed as one.

As a building the temple is straightforwardly, satisfyingly Kerala. Long ranges of tiled roof with gabled dormers and carved ends; walls of close-set timber slats above laterite; a tall gold-clad dhwajastambham standing in the forecourt; footwear left in rows outside the gate, because it is left outside the gate rather than at the sanctum door. Seen from across the tank at dusk the whole complex is a low red-roofed line with its own reflection under it, laterite retaining walls dropping straight into the water and lily pads across the surface. The tank is not scenery attached to the temple. In this part of Kerala it is part of the institution.

Legend & myth

The first correction is the dedication, and it is the one that actually changes what you look at when you arrive. This is a Shiva temple with a famous Ganapathi sub-shrine, not a Ganapathi temple. Kerala Tourism's own page says it plainly: the main deity is Lord Shiva, with a sub-shrine dedicated to Lord Ganesha. Almost everything else written about the place, including its common name, inverts that. The inversion is not a mistake exactly — the sub-shrine really is the reason people come — but if you go in expecting the elephant-headed god in the main sanctum you will misread the whole layout.

The second is about the Kathakali claim, and we want to be careful in both directions because it is easy to overstate and easy to dismiss. What is widely held, and what our own Kathakali page already carries, is that a seventeenth-century ruler of Kottarakkara composed Ramanattam, and that Kathakali descends from it. What is tradition rather than record is the story of why: the Zamorin's refusal and the insult about the Kottarakkara court's inability to appreciate Krishnanattam. Our page on Kathakali calls that the kind of neat causal insult oral tradition manufactures, and we are not going to say something different here just because we are standing closer to it.

The third correction sits underneath the second and matters more than it looks. "Kathakali was born here" runs two separate claims together. One is that the Kottarakkara Thampuran composed Ramanattam — a claim about a person and a court. The other is that he did it at this temple, beneath a banyan tree in its grounds — a claim about a place. The first is widely held. The second is tradition only, and the two are frequently printed as though the second followed from the first. It does not. A raja's literary project belongs to his court before it belongs to his temple.

The fourth is a sourcing note that we would normally keep to ourselves, except that it changes how much weight the claim can carry. We had expected to find the Kathakali connection asserted on the Kerala Tourism page for this temple. It is not there. That page mentions the Shiva dedication, the Ganesha sub-shrine, the unniyappam and the location, and says nothing whatever about Kathakali, Ramanattam, the Kottarakkara Thampuran or Perumthachan. The state tourism department, writing about this temple, does not make the claim at all. That does not make the tradition false; it does mean it is a tradition rather than an official history, and we would rather you knew which you were being told.

The fifth is Perumthachan, and it is a general caution about a specific name. The master carpenter of Kerala legend is credited with a remarkable number of the region's finest timber buildings, across a span of time and geography that no individual craftsman could plausibly have covered. An attribution to Perumthachan is best read as the tradition's way of saying that this is very fine old work, in the manner of the great builders. It is not a construction record, and the idol-and-prophecy story attached to him here is a foundation legend, not a dated event.

The sixth point is chronology: no reliable founding date is published. The temple is described as centuries old and nothing more precise is available. The seventeenth-century material — Veera Kerala Varma, given as 1653 to 1694, and Krishnanattam dated to 1657 — belongs to the Ramanattam story, not to the building. Sources also differ on whether 1653 to 1694 are the Thampuran's regnal years or his lifespan, so the span is retained without assigning it either meaning.

The seventh is practical and small. Kottarakkara is a working taluk town, and the temple sits close to the civil station, the taluk office, the bus stand and the market. It is not a secluded shrine in a grove. The tank is the thing that gives it space and calm, and the walk around the tank is worth as much as the forecourt.