Kulathupuzha Sastha Temple

The story of Kulathupuzha Sastha Temple

The temple stands on the bank of the Kulathupuzha, in Pathanapuram taluk, on the road that connects Kollam with Shencottai across the ghat. It is a Kerala temple of the plainest and best kind: a long low nalambalam under a tiled roof, timber lattice walls, a gabled porch over the entrance, a smaller shrine standing separately to one side, and a wide open sand courtyard around the whole thing with forest closing in behind. There is no gopuram and no ornament visible from outside. The Travancore Devaswom Board runs it.

The deity is Ayyappa in the form of Bala Sastha — the child. The Kerala government’s own account adds a detail that most travel writing leaves out: he is understood here in a fierce aspect as well as an auspicious one, ugramoorthi as much as mangalapradayakan, which is a more complicated thing than a simple child-god. Around him are Shiva, Vishnu, Ganapathi, Yakshi, Boothathan, the naga deities — and Karuppaswami, a guardian deity of the Tamil country, which is the kind of detail that tells you exactly how close the border is.

Kulathupuzha is one of the names that appears in every version of the Pancha Sastha, the old Sastha circuit of this region, alongside Aryankavu and Achankovil. That is worth stating carefully, because no two published lists of the five agree: the Travancore Devaswom Board’s own circuit runs Pandalam, Kulathupuzha, Aryankavu, Achankovil and Erumeli, devotional accounts commonly give Kulathupuzha, Aryankavu, Achankovil, Sabarimala and Kanthamala, and other lists differ again. Only three names survive every version, and this is one of them. In the circuit’s age-sequence the Sastha appears at a different stage of one life at each temple, and here he is at the beginning of it — our page on the Achankovil Sastha sets that sequence out properly and there is no sense in writing it twice.

What belongs to Kulathupuzha and to nowhere else is the river. The Kulathupuzha runs past the temple carrying a large and visible population of fish, and they are not ordinary fish. Devotees call them Thirumakkal, the sacred children of the lord. Fishing is prohibited — not discouraged, prohibited — because the fish are held to be dear to the deity. And the temple’s characteristic vazhipadu is meenoottu, the feeding of the fish: you buy puffed rice, or roasted peanuts, and you throw it into the water, and the shoal comes up for it. It is offered particularly for skin complaints, and warts specifically.

You do not need to believe any of that to find it remarkable. The two species that dominate the water here are Tor khudree, the Deccan mahseer, and Hypselobarbus thomassi, the red canarese barb — and the second of those is listed by the IUCN as critically endangered, endemic to the Western Ghats of Kerala and Karnataka, and capable of reaching a metre in length. ⚠ The claim you will read, that both are endangered, is not right: Tor khudree is Least Concern and has in fact been spread across India by large-scale stocking of hatchery-bred fish. But one genuinely threatened endemic, in a stretch of river where nobody has been permitted to fish for as long as anybody can remember, is not a small thing.

The dating of the temple is the other surprise, and it does not come from any travel source. Three sculptures from Kulathupuzha are in the Napier Museum in Thiruvananthapuram, catalogued to the fifteenth century CE: a Dwarapalaka, a door guardian, carved in wood and standing about the height of a person; a Thripuranthaka Murthi, Shiva with the bow that destroyed the three cities; and a panel of Rama with Hanuman. Carved wood surviving five and a half centuries in this climate is unusual on its own. What it settles is that there was a shrine here worth carving for in the fifteenth century — which is more than can be said with confidence about the age of most temples on this coast.

The written history is a chain of custody rather than a founding date. The Kerala government’s account says the temple was founded by the Raja of Pandalam and the idol installed by a Brahmin from Kottarakkara, with the temple under the Kottarakkara raja before passing to the Travancore Devaswom Board — and, in the devotional register, that the idol itself was installed by Parashurama. The Pandalam connection matters: Pandalam is the royal house of the Ayyappa story, and it is the first name on the Devaswom Board’s own version of the Pancha Sastha circuit.

One practical note that the guidebooks get tangled. Kulathupuzha is also the name of the river and of the panchayat, and the river is one of the three headstreams of the Kallada — it meets the Chenthurunipuzha and the Kalthuruthy in the Parappar reservoir at Thenmala, and our pages on the Kallada, on Thenmala and on Shendurney are about that water rather than this shrine. If you are searching for Kulathupuzha you will mostly find the river. The temple is the thing on the bank.

Legend & myth

The legend here is a love story and it ends underwater, which is not how these usually go.

A Jala Kanyaka — a water nymph, a spirit of the river — is said to have fallen in love with the Sastha. He is a child at this temple and a celibate at Sabarimala, so the story has nowhere to go in the ordinary direction, and the resolution is the interesting part: out of compassion rather than reciprocation, the god allowed her to remain near him, living in the temple’s water in the form of a fish. That is the account attached to the fish of Kulathupuzha, and it is why they are not merely protected but related to the deity.

From that comes the name they are given. The fish are Thirumakkal — thiru, the sacred honorific; makkal, children. The sacred children of the lord. At a temple whose god is himself a child, the shoal in the river is family, and the word is doing a good deal of work: it converts a fishing ban into a kinship claim. You do not catch a fish here for the same reason you do not catch a cousin.

And from the kinship comes the ritual. Meenoottu, the feeding of the fish, is a formal vazhipadu at this temple in the way that a lamp offering or an archana is elsewhere — you buy puffed rice or roasted peanuts at the temple and scatter it on the water, and the offering is made to the fish rather than through them. It is prescribed particularly for diseases of the skin, and the sources are consistent and specific about warts. The logic, if you want one, is not hard to reconstruct: skin is what water touches, the fish are the water’s children, and the god who is a child is the one you ask.

It is worth resisting the temptation to explain this away as folk ecology invented for the purpose, because there is no evidence anybody designed it. What there is instead is an accidental outcome, and the accident is a good one. Hypselobarbus thomassi is critically endangered across its entire Western Ghats range, which runs from Karnataka down through Kerala. In most of that range the pressures are the ordinary ones — fishing, dams, siltation, sand mining. In the stretch of the Kulathupuzha that runs past this temple, the fish have been under a religious prohibition for centuries, enforced by nothing more than the belief that they are the lord’s children.

That is a genuinely unusual conservation instrument and it is not unique to here — sacred groves, temple tanks and river reaches across India have preserved species by exactly this route — but it is unusually visible at Kulathupuzha, because the protected animals are large, numerous, and swim up to be fed by anyone who buys a packet of puffed rice.

We should say plainly what we did not find. There is no origin legend for the temple building itself, no story of a stone that would not be moved, no vision in the forest. The Parashurama installation is recorded as belief by the Kerala government’s own account, as it is at a great many Kerala temples. Nothing in the record explains why the shrine is at this particular bend of this particular river rather than another, and we are not going to supply a reason. The Jala Kanyaka and the Thirumakkal are the tradition here; they are attached to this water and to no other; and one legend that explains the actual behaviour of actual people at an actual place is worth a dozen borrowed ones.