Keezhperumpallam Ketu

Kīḻpeṟumpalliyam — Ketu's kṣetra

A planetary shrine on the Kaveri's edge

Kīḻpeṟumpalliyam, in Nagapattinam district near the Kaveri's distributaries, is the Ketu Navagraha kṣetra — the shrine where Ketu, the south node, is honoured. The planetary scheme behind these shrines is a South Indian development, and its sets differ between published lists, so a guardian citing one should say which text it follows rather than present the nine as fixed.

As with the other Navagraha kṣetras, the main deity of the temple is Śiva — here Vṛṣabheśvara in the corpus's framing, though the local name for the central form should be taken from the temple — and the planet is installed separately. The particular local claim in the corpus is that the Ketu image is shown with a chariot drawn by two horses, which is a distinctive iconography worth verifying rather than assuming, since Ketu is otherwise depicted in the usual serpent-tail form. If it is confirmed, the chariot is a plausible borrowing from the Solar iconography of the region and would be a good local note.

Kīḻpeṟumpalliyam is also the site of a Sūrya shrine, and the pairing of a solar temple with a lunar and planetary cult in the same complex is a feature of the coastal delta's religious geography, in which several deities share a landscape rather than a precinct. Pilgrimage here is tied to horoscope — the removal of planetary doṣa, especially Ketu's afflictions — and the temple's priests combine the Śaiva liturgical calendar with astrological counselling.

Sources and what is still unverified

Nilakanta Sastri for the historical frame; the Nagapattinam and Thanjavur gazetteers for the local record; and the Navagraha cult literature, which this record cites only generically.

Outstanding for a named guardian, ideally a Tamil speaker from the delta: whether the Ketu image is indeed represented in a chariot and what the temple's own account says of it; the source of the nine-kṣetra list followed locally; the relation of this shrine to the nearby Sūrya temple and to the Kaveri's temple network; and the date of the present structure.