Ettumanoor Mahadeva

Ettumanoor Mahadev

A Kerala Shiva temple with a painted gate and a singing festival

Ettumanoor Mahadeva, in Kottayam district, Kerala, is one of the temples counted in the Kerala 108 - the traditional number of Shiva temples of the region, an enumeration that is itself a devotional and administrative construction rather than an ancient canon. It sits in a landscape of backwaters and laterite, and its cult belongs to the Travancore-centred temple system of the region, in which the deity is served by Nambudiris and the temple is a landholding institution as much as a place of worship.

The feature everyone comes for is the wooden gate - the tataka - of the outer shrine, which carries the Saptaratnam mural, a painted sequence of the seven forms of Shiva's dance rendered in the Kerala mural idiom. The frontmatter describes it as "250-year-old". I have removed that number: it is a phrase that circulates in promotional and travel writing, and the age of a Kerala mural is a question for the study of the painting - its palette, its style, its attribution - not for a round figure in a guidebook. The temple's other murals and its wooden architecture belong to the same eighteenth- to nineteenth-century flowering of Kerala temple painting, and that is a defensible frame, though it is not a date.

What distinguishes the shrine in practice is its festival. The Panthrandu Nombu - the night-long recitation of the ashtami rudra and the naming of the deity in Malayalam at ajña time, beginning at the end of the Panthrandu - is peculiar to this temple and to very few others, and it is sung in a call-and-response form that belongs to the Kerala kuttam and chakyar traditions of musical performance rather than to Sanskrit liturgy. Set against the Malayalam Bhakti corpus the temple is sung to - the Nalayira Divya Prabandham and the Thiruvachira - this festival is a distinctly local institution. A national account that lists Ettumanoor among the 108 will miss the entire reason people come.

I have not asserted a foundation date. The frontmatter gives a 12th-century foundation; Kerala temple dates are frequently traditional and are frequently revised, and a date should come from the temple's own records or from a survey of its inscriptions.

Sources and what is still unverified

A guardian should check: the foundation date, and whether it is traditional or documented; the date, authorship and study history of the Saptaratnam mural; the Panthrandu Nombu's musical form and its relationship to the Kerala performance traditions; the temple's administration and landholdings; and whether the corpus's position of Ettumanoor as "second" of the 108 is correct, since that ordering is not uniform.