Almost every old Shiva temple in Kerala is entered from the east. This one faces west, and the reason given is that the god turned to meet something coming at him. Triprangode stands among paddy and coconut on the Alathiyur–Codacal road, nine kilometres south of Tirur station by road, a walled complex of some six acres with nine shrines inside it and five separate ponds around it, and the whole of it is organised around a single moment: the one in which Shiva came out of the linga to stop Death.
The story of Triprangode Maha Shiva Temple
The main shrine is a dvitala vimana — two storeys — on a gajaprishta plan, rounded at the back like an elephant seen from behind, and it faces west. Inside is a swayambhu linga, one held to have appeared of itself rather than to have been installed. Parvati's shrine stands to its left, and the arrangement is read as Ardhanarishwara, the god and goddess as one body, split across two doorways.
The complex has nine shrines and they are not decoration. Four more Shivas stand within the walls, one of them the Karanayil temple, described as the original seat — the place the deity was before the present shrine existed. Three further shrines mark the steps Shiva is said to have taken to reach Yama, which is an unusual thing to build: the temple has laid out the choreography of its own legend in stone.
The rest of the enclosure fills in the Kerala pattern with a few surprises. Nandi sits in the namaskara mandapam facing the shrine. Ganesha is on the south-western door. There is a four-armed Vishnu with conch, discus, mace and lotus; Vettakkorumakan and Bhadrakali behind the Karanayil shrine; Ayyappa on the southern side; Krishna in his cowherd form as Gosalakrishna; and the serpent deities and a Brahmarakshas at the edges.
A stone image of Shiva as Mrityunjaya — the conqueror of death — stands in the complex, and it carries damage from Tipu Sultan's campaigns in Malabar. It is a small thing to look at and the single most direct piece of evidence on the site that the eighteenth century happened here.
The ponds are the other count that matters. There are five, and each has a use rather than a view. Santhikkulam is where the priests bathe. Vellottukulam lies out by the fields. One at the south-western corner is the pond in which the Lord is said to have washed his trident afterwards. A fourth sits in front of the Karanayil shrine, and the fifth, on the north-eastern side, is the large public one.
The mandapam is where the age of the place is easiest to see. Its ceiling is a coffered timber grid, each panel carved with a rosette and the beams around them run with a band of ornament, all of it cut in wood and all of it still carrying the marks of the tools. Kerala temple carpentry of this kind is often the oldest surviving fabric on a site, because timber is repaired piece by piece rather than replaced wholesale, and it is almost always overlooked in favour of the stone.
There are murals here too, painted on the shrine walls in the ochres, reds and whites of the Kerala tradition — the same palette of earth pigments used at Mattancherry and Ettumanoor, worked in the flat outlined style with figures filling the panel edge to edge. Under the gables, where the roof timbers meet, runs a white stucco frieze of small seated figures, repeated along the whole width.
The gilded doors of the Karanayil shrine carry the eye first in most photographs, and the board above them settles what the shrine is: it reads Sree Moolasthanam Karanayil Sivan. Moolasthanam means the original seat — the spot the deity is held to have occupied before the present temple was built round it. A great many Kerala temples have one and very few of them say so on a board.
The enclosure is large by Malabar standards, about six acres, and its buildings are arranged as ranges of white-walled shrines under separate tiled roofs rather than as one mass. The effect from the courtyard is of a village of small temples with a brass lamp column standing among them, which is exactly what a nine-shrine complex is.
Triprangode is one of the four villages the standard accounts name as the actual ground of the Kerala school of astronomy. The school is usually described as a Kerala-wide phenomenon; the addresses are four lanes in one taluk, and this is one of them.
Legend & myth
A sage called Mrikandu and his wife Marudvati had no child, and did penance until Shiva offered them a choice: an ordinary son who would live a long and unremarkable life, or an exceptional one who would die at sixteen. They chose the second, and Markandeya was born.
The boy grew up devoted to Shiva and learned the Mahamrityunjaya mantra, the verse addressed to the conqueror of death. On the day he turned sixteen Yama came for him. Markandeya ran to the temple and threw his arms round the linga, and when Yama's noose came down it went round the stone and the boy together.
What happened next is the reason the shrine exists. The linga split open with a roar and Shiva came out of it in a form of fire, and struck Yama down with his trident. That form is Kalasamharamurti — the destroyer of time — and it is the form this temple is named for in the record.
The gods then had to argue him out of it. With Death dead, nothing on earth would end, and the Devas asked for Yama back; Shiva revived him. So the temple commemorates a killing that was undone, which is why it is a place people come to when they are frightened for someone's life rather than a place of triumph.
The Mahamrityunjaya mantra the boy is said to have mastered is not a local text — it is a verse of the Rigveda, addressed to the three-eyed one who nourishes, asking to be released from death as a cucumber is released from its stem. It is recited across India for the sick and the dying, and this temple is one of the places where that recitation has an address. That is the practical link between a legend and a queue of people: the story is the reason the mantra is said here rather than anywhere else.
The choice Mrikandu and Marudvati were offered is the part of the story people argue about, and it is put to them plainly — a dull son who lives, or a brilliant one who dies at sixteen. They chose brilliance and had to live with it, and the temple exists because the bargain was then broken on their behalf. It is an unusually hard-edged founding legend for a place that people come to in hope.
Two details on the ground belong to the same story. A great banyan is said to have stood in the way of the entrance and to have parted into two halves to let Markandeya through. And the pond at the south-western corner is where the trident was washed. The temple faces west, the tradition holds, because that is the direction the god turned.
What people actually come here to do is ask for a life. The temple's business is prayers about illness, danger and long life, and the offerings and homams arranged at the office follow from that rather than from a general calendar of devotion. It gives the place an atmosphere unlike a festival temple: quieter, more purposeful, and busy at times that have nothing to do with the season.
The absence worth noticing is Yama's. Death was killed here and then revived, and there is no shrine to him — the three shrines that mark the steps are to the god who took them, not to the one they were taken against. For a temple whose entire story is a confrontation, only one of the two parties is present in stone.
Read the full history of Triprangode Maha Shiva Temple 519 more words
History
The oldest hard evidence on the site is written on it. Inscriptions of the later Chera ruler Goda Ravi Varma, of the tenth century, have been recovered from this temple, which fixes it as a functioning establishment with royal attention more than a thousand years ago. Descriptions of the fabric place the complex itself in the ninth century.
It was a landmark early enough to be used as one. The Kokila Sandesha, a fifteenth-century Sanskrit messenger-poem by Uddanda Sastrikal, names Triprangode among the major destinations of this region — the sort of casual mention that tells you more about a temple's standing than a dedication would.
The territory around it was Vettathunad, the kingdom of Tanur, whose rajas were vassals of the Zamorin of Calicut; it is the same small principality that held Trikkandiyoor and the same milieu the astronomers of these villages worked in. The eighteenth century arrived here as it did everywhere on this coast, and the damaged Mrityunjaya image is what is left of it.
Vettathunad, the country this temple stood in, was one of the smaller Malabar principalities and its rulers were vassals of the Zamorin of Calicut. The same kingdom held Trikkandiyoor to the north, and the two temples therefore share an administrative history as well as a century. What Vettathunad is best remembered for is not its size but the concentration of learning inside it — the astronomers, the mathematicians and, at Tirur, the poet who settled the alphabet.
The temple's standing can be measured by who mentioned it. A sandesha kavya — a messenger-poem, in which a traveller or a bird is sent across a landscape and the poet describes what it passes — is one of the few genres that records what was worth seeing in medieval Kerala. Uddanda Sastrikal's Kokila Sandesha, written in the fifteenth century, sends its cuckoo past Triprangode. Being on that itinerary five hundred years ago is a firmer statement of importance than any modern listing.
The temple is today one of the more important Hindu pilgrimage centres in northern Kerala, and its draw is specific rather than general: it is where people come with prayers about death and long life, because that is the transaction its founding story records.
Why visit
It is a west-facing Shiva temple, which is rare in Kerala, and the reason given for it is the legend the whole complex is built around.
The two-storeyed apsidal vimana is one of the more complete pieces of ninth-century Kerala temple architecture still in use.
Three of the nine shrines mark the steps Shiva is said to have taken to reach Yama — a legend laid out as a walk rather than told as a story.
Tenth-century inscriptions of the Chera ruler Goda Ravi Varma were recovered here, and a fifteenth-century Sanskrit poem already treats it as a landmark.
The stone Mrityunjaya carries damage from Tipu Sultan's Malabar campaigns, which is the eighteenth century visible on the object itself.
Five ponds surround the temple and each has a job — the priests' bath, the field pond, the public tank, and the one where the trident was washed.
