Padmanabhaswamy Temple

The shrine

The deity of the temple is Vishnu as Padmanabha, "lotus-navelled", lying on the coils of the serpent Ananta, with Brahma seated on a lotus that rises from his navel. The image, about six metres long, is so large that it is seen through three doors of the sanctum: the face through one, the navel and Brahma through the second, the feet through the third. By tradition it is made of a compound of many sacred substances rather than carved stone. The temple is one of the 108 Divya Desams, and the shrine at Thiruvananthapuram, Tiruvanantapuram in Tamil, "the town of the sacred Ananta", is praised in the hymns of the Alvar Nammalvar. The city takes its name from it.

Long before the eighteenth century the temple was managed by a body of Brahmin trustees and local lords, the Ettara Yogam, together with the rulers of Venad, whose power these lords often checked.

Marthanda Varma

Marthanda Varma (r. 1729–1758) turned the small kingdom of Venad into Travancore. He broke the power of the local lords, the Ettuveettil Pillamar, executing many of them, defeated the Dutch East India Company at Colachel in 1741, and annexed neighbouring principalities. He rebuilt the temple in stone, with a long corridor of carved granite pillars round the inner shrine, and the seven-storeyed eastern gopuram in the Tamil style, begun in the sixteenth century, was completed in his time, an unusual form in Kerala, where temple roofs are usually tiled and sloping.

In January 1750 he performed the Thrippadidanam: he laid his sword on the steps of the shrine, gave the kingdom to Padmanabha, and received it back to rule as the deity's servant, Padmanabhadasa. His successors took the same title and the rulers of Travancore governed in the god's name until the state merged into India after 1947.

The vaults

The temple's wealth was kept in underground vaults. In 2011, during a case about the temple's management, the Supreme Court of India ordered an inventory. Several vaults were opened and found to contain a very large hoard of gold coins, jewellery, vessels and images, offerings accumulated over centuries. Figures circulated in the press, but no official valuation was published. One vault, known as Vault B, was not opened, partly on the grounds of religious objections. In 2020 the court upheld the role of the former royal family in the temple's administration.

Worship

Entry is restricted to Hindus and follows a strict dress code. The temple's main festivals take place twice a year and end with a procession of the deity to the sea at Shankhumugham for a ritual bath, led by the head of the former royal family carrying a sword.