Places to Visit in Tirur

The town is compact and busy rather than pretty. Tirur is a trading centre first — betel leaf, fish, electronics — and the market streets run tight around the railway line, which cuts through the middle of town on an embankment with a road bridge over it. The Tirur river, the Tirurpuzha, loops along most of the municipal boundary and historically defined it. West of the town the land runs flat to the coast at Vakkad and Thirunnavaya lies south on the Bharathappuzha. Nothing here has been arranged for visitors, which is a large part of the pleasure of it: you come for what happened on this ground, and the ground is still in ordinary use.

The place-name that matters is Trikkandiyoor, now a locality of Tirur about two kilometres from the railway station. It carries the Trikkandiyoor Mahadeva temple, counted among Kerala’s hundred and eight Shiva shrines, and it carries Thunchan Parambu, the plot held to be Ezhuthachan’s. It also carried, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, an extraordinary concentration of astronomers. The English Wikipedia article on Tirur puts it flatly: the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics was mainly centred in and around present-day Tirur taluk. That is not a tourist-board line. It is where the men and the manuscripts were.

Nilakantha Somayaji was born on 14 June 1444 and lived at Kundagrama, which is Trikkandiyoor. He learned astronomy from Damodara, son of Parameshvara, and completed the Tantrasangraha in 1501 — the verses carry chronograms that fix the work to a handful of days in 1500. His Aryabhatiya-bhashya is one of the great commentaries in Indian astronomy. What he is most often cited for now is a computational scheme in which Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn go round the Sun, and the Sun goes round the Earth: a partially heliocentric model arrived at in Malabar roughly eighty years before Tycho Brahe published something structurally similar.

Jyeshthadeva, about 1500 to about 1575, was a pupil of the same Damodara and a contemporary of Nilakantha. His family house, Parangngottu, is recorded as still standing in the vicinity of Trikkandiyoor and Alathiyur. Around 1530 he wrote the Yuktibhasha, a companion to the Tantrasangraha that supplies proofs and rationales rather than results — including derivations of infinite series for trigonometric functions. Two things about it are remarkable. It argues rather than asserts, which is rare in the genre. And it is written in Malayalam, the spoken language, not Sanskrit, at almost exactly the moment Ezhuthachan was doing the same thing for poetry a short walk away.

The third of them, Achyuta Pisharati, was born at Trikkandiyoor around 1550 and died on 7 July 1621. He studied under Jyeshthadeva, wrote nine works spanning Sanskrit grammar and astronomy, and is credited with the technique known as the reduction to the ecliptic. He was also the teacher of Melpathur Narayana Bhattathiri. So the line runs Parameshvara to Damodara to Nilakantha and Jyeshthadeva, Jyeshthadeva to Achyuta, Achyuta to Melpathur — four generations of it, most of them living within a couple of kilometres of each other, on ground a visitor can walk across in an afternoon.

Thunchan Parambu itself is a working institution rather than a ruin, and it has its own page here — the museum, the manuscript library, the pavilion, the tree and the two ceremonies are all set out there rather than twice.

The town’s newest institution grew from the same root: Thunchath Ezhuthachan Malayalam University, out at Vakkad on the western edge of Tirur, which teaches its subjects through Malayalam rather than English. It has its own page here.

Then there is the crop. Tirur vettila, the Tirur betel leaf, received a Geographical Indication on 14 August 2019 on an application filed in December 2018 by the Tirur Vettila Ulpadaka Sangam — the first betel leaf from Kerala to be registered, and by the usual count the state’s thirty-sixth GI good. It is grown across six block panchayats: Tirur, Tanur, Tirurangadi, Kuttippuram, Malappuram and Vengara. The registered case rests on measurable difference — higher total chlorophyll and protein in the fresh leaf, a thicker leaf, a sharper pungency. The Puthukodi cultivar goes for export, chiefly to Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh; the Nadan is usually intercropped under coconut and areca and sold into Malappuram, Kozhikode and Thrissur markets. Kottakkal Arya Vaidya Sala buys from here.

And there is the platform. The first railway line in what is now Kerala opened on 12 March 1861 and ran from Tirur to the coast; Tirur is therefore the oldest railway station in Kerala still standing and still working, which is a quieter and more durable claim than the one usually made about the other end of that line. A passengers’ committee has proposed renaming the station after Ezhuthachan. Whatever is decided, the platform already carries a much heavier memory: it is where a hundred prisoners were shut into a goods wagon on the evening of 19 November 1921.

Legend & myth

The oldest story in Tirur is not about a poet. It is about Parasurama and a day of three consecrations, the last of them at dusk at Trikkandiyoor — a legend that arrives with a route attached and is still driven. It belongs to the Trikkandiyoor Mahadeva temple and is told on that temple’s page.

A few kilometres east, at Vairankode in Athavanad, the goddess arrived by water. The tradition is that a sister of the Kodungallur Bhagavathi crossed the Bharathappuzha and reached the Azhvanchery Mana at Athavanad; the family sensed her presence, took astrological counsel, and installed her at Vairankode. The temple’s most-repeated custom is a study in inverted hierarchy: the Azhvanchery Thamprakkal, the highest Brahmin authority in Malabar, do not enter the sanctum, because it is believed that the goddess would rise and bow to them, and they will not permit it. The Vela here, the Theeyattulsavam, falls in Kumbham, February into March, and opens with the ritual of maram muri. The claim sometimes printed that the temple is fifteen hundred years old comes from promotional and devotional sources and rests on nothing we can date.

Ezhuthachan’s own life is where legend has done the most work, and the sources say so themselves. The Malayalam Wikipedia article states plainly that his biography lies buried under myths and half-truths. His name is disputed — Ramanujan, or Krishnan, or simply Thunchan, meaning the youngest. His community is disputed three ways, between the Ezhuthachan scribe caste, the Kaniyar astrologer-teachers and a Chakkala Nair family. The Aithihyamala preserves a story that he was a gandharva cursed to be reborn a shudra as the price of spreading the Adhyatma Ramayanam; modern scholarship reads that as a later attempt to raise his ritual standing rather than as a record of anything. We repeat none of it as fact, and we would rather print the disagreement than resolve it.

Four legends belong to other places and this record refuses them. The Mamankam, with its twelve-yearly fair and its chaver warriors, happened at Tirunavaya on the Bharathappuzha, not at Tirur, and the two are constantly conflated; the Hanuman who stands leaning to listen belongs to Alathiyur; the Narayaneeyam was composed at Guruvayur, not here, even though the guru who taught its author lived at Trikkandiyoor; and Ezhuthachan’s end is not Tirur’s to claim. He is held to have founded a gurumatham at Chittur in Palakkad and to have died there around 1575, and his samadhi is on the bank of the Shokanashini there. Tirur has the beginning of that life and the ground he taught on. That is enough, and it is more than most towns can show.