Ask anyone in Kerala to name the state’s most famous temple and you will hear Sabarimala. Ask where its god’s golden ornaments live for the other eleven months of the year and most people will not know. They are at Aranmula, about forty kilometres away, in a temple dedicated to a different deity entirely.
The Thanka Anki
The Thanka Anki is the set of golden ornaments of Lord Ayyappa, and the English Wikipedia article on Aranmula records that the Parthasarathy temple houses it. Each pilgrimage season it is carried in procession to Sabarimala to adorn the deity for Makaravilakku on 14 January, and afterwards it comes back.
The arrangement is worth sitting with. Sabarimala is a hill shrine in dense forest at about 1,260 metres, reachable only on foot, open for a few defined periods a year and thronged by millions of people when it is. Aranmula is a riverside village on the Pampa with a Vaishnava temple in it. The gold is kept at the accessible place and taken to the inaccessible one — which, once stated, is obviously the sensible way round, and is also a piece of practical logistics that has hardened into ritual.
One river, two shrines
The connection is not arbitrary. Both temples sit on the Pampa. At Aranmula the northern gateway of the Parthasarathy temple descends by a long flight of stone steps directly to the river; far upstream at Pamba, pilgrims bathe in the same water before beginning the climb to the eighteen steps. If you want a single thread that ties the Pathanamthitta district’s sacred geography together, it is that river, and Aranmula and Sabarimala are two beads on it.
- Aranmula Parthasarathy is dedicated to Vishnu as Parthasarathy, Arjuna’s charioteer at Kurukshetra.
- It is one of the 108 Divya Desams, the Vishnu shrines hymned by the Tamil Alvar saints.
- Eighteen ascending steps at the eastern tower; fifty-seven descending steps at the northern tower, down to the Pampa.
- The temple’s own history, architecture, Pandava tradition and festival calendar are set out in its record further up this page. This piece is only about the ornaments and what they connect.
The eighteen that are not those eighteen
A small confusion worth clearing up, because both numbers are famous and both are eighteen. Sabarimala’s pathinettam padi — the eighteen sacred steps at the shrine, which only a pilgrim carrying the irumudikettu may climb — are the ones everyone has heard of. Aranmula also has eighteen steps, at its eastern gateway. They are not related and nobody claims they are; they simply both happen to be eighteen, which is an auspicious number, and the coincidence gets written up as a connection by people who have found the two facts on the same afternoon.
The real connection is the gold, and it is better than the invented one. Once a year a set of ornaments leaves a village temple on a river and is carried up into a forest to be put on a god, and then brought back down. Whatever you believe, that is a two-hundred-kilometre round trip somebody has been making, in one form or another, for a very long time.