The temple that named the town: how a Jain basti became the Sultan’s battery

A kilometre and a half from the bus stand, past the shops and down a side road into Kidanganad, stands the building that named the town: a granite Jain temple from around the thirteenth century, its square pillars carrying a roof of stone slabs, the whole of it plain, cool and quiet in a way nothing on the highway is. It is protected by the Archaeological Survey of India, it holds no festival, and its sanctum is empty. All three of those facts are the story.

Three lives

The temple was built by the Jain communities who came down into Wayanad from Karnataka — the same merchant world whose trade founded the town, told properly in the story further up this page. Its architecture is usually described as Vijayanagara in style: an open pillared mandapa, floral carving, a snake and a swan worked into the stone. Accounts of the site give it three lives in sequence — first a shrine, then a centre of the pepper and hill-produce trade, and finally, in the late eighteenth century, an ammunition store. When Tipu Sultan’s army came up the ghat from Mysore, the strongest stone building on the plateau became its magazine — its battery, in the military English of the day.

That third life is the one that stuck. The town around the temple had been Ganapathivattam, the ground of the Ganapathi temple; British record-keepers, writing up the place after the Mysore wars, set it down as the Sultan’s Battery, and the clerk’s phrase outlived the army, the Company and the empire. The temple gave up its name to the town and kept almost nothing for itself — most maps today label it simply “Jain Temple, Sulthan Bathery”.

Why the sanctum is empty

The basti is a protected monument, not a working shrine. There is no image in the sanctum and no utsavam in its calendar — the ASI conserves it as architecture, and worship moved elsewhere generations ago. That absence bothers some visitors; it is better read as honesty. The building is not pretending to be what it was in 1300. For a living temple, the town’s Mahaganapathi shrine — the one that held the old name — keeps its eight-day flag festival from the fifteenth of Makaram; and for the living Jain tradition, the Anantnath Swami temple at Puliyarmala near Kalpetta, twenty-odd kilometres west, is the quieter working sister. Seeing the pair — one conserved, one alive — is the honest way to read how deep Jainism once ran in these hills.

The name is still being argued

In April 2024, campaigning for the Wayanad Lok Sabha seat, the Kerala BJP president K. Surendran promised to rename Sulthan Bathery as Ganapathyvattam, calling the present name a historical wrong; the CPI(M) called the demand communal, the Congress mocked it, and the seat went elsewhere. We take no side and simply note what the record shows: the town has already carried at least three names — Kidanganad, Ganapathivattam, Sultan’s Battery — and each of them is a layer of the same history, sitting one on top of the other exactly as they do in the stone of the basti itself.