KOCHI: The sprawling precincts of the Attukal temple imbibe a different aura during the annual 10-day festival. The shrine has long been identified by just one festival ritual--the Pongala that has famously entered the Guinness Records as the largest congregation of women in the world.
From being a ‘mudippura’ for the locals in the ages bygone to its current growth into a devotional centre for millions, from being a forum where local people would bring their ritual arts as an offering for the deity to a cultural centre where veterans and amateur artists come to perform on the vast stages set up each year, from being the annual celebratory and prayer ground of a region-specific local populace to a mass celebration that attracts devotees globally, the temple has seen it all.
It is now on the threshold of being a cultural ground of arts and traditions akin to a Kumbh Mela or at least a Marghazi.
As though a reflection of the times it has seen, the shrine acquires a bewitching charm during the annual fete. “In the 60s, Attukal festival was more or less a local one, with the Pongala stretching just in and around Manacaud where the temple is situated,” says historian M G Sasibhooshan.
“Now it has spread as far as Peroorkada and people from far and wide participate. Attukal was essentially a shrine for women whose male relatives were in the Nair brigade or the Native Infantry. It was also where traders offered prayers, as rivers that ran near the temple were the channel for trade in the region. Importantly, the Goddess of Attukal was the deity of farmers who would offer the rice harvested from the Makara Koythu (the second harvest of the year) as Pongala for good crops round the year. The local people thus had an emotional bond with the deity here.”
He says the growth of Attukal as a regional worship centre probably began in the mid-19th century when Sankara Natha Pandala, who was a minister in Maharaja Ranjith Singh’s court in Lahore, found in the deity here the same divine fervour as in the Kamakshi of Kanchipuram.
“He composed several songs on the Goddess and so did his son Attukal Sankara Pilla. A Govinda Pillai, a judge of the Travancore High Court and who translated ‘King Lear’ and ‘The Merchant of Venice’ into Malayalam, has also helped add to the fame of Attukal temple with his poems,” he says.
Whether as a local event or as a regional symbol, the temple’s annual festival may have grown in magnitude but the schedule of its conduct has remained unchanged with ritual arts connected to the temple held regularly with discipline and rigour.
A poignant and beautiful ritual art that gets staged in the temple every year during this time is ‘Thottampattu’. It is rather the main ritual art on which the entire festival hinges, as it is only when the ‘Thottampattu’ singers invite the Goddess of Kodumgalloor to visit them that the festival begins, with the ‘kappu kettu ceremony’.
“Earlier, the festival itself meant the ‘pattu’. People would say the ‘pattu’ has begun to denote the start of the festival,” says Mahesh Madhu, one of the Thottampattu singers, whose family has been staging the ritual art for several decades at the temple. For all 10 days, the singers narrate the story of the Goddess as recorded in their memory and handed down through generations. The story of the life of Kanyavu and her husband Palakar is narrated from her birth to her ascend to divinity.
The singers prepare the stage where the art is held by making an enclosure with green straws. They then take turns to sing the entire story broken into episodes over the days of the festival, from midnight to morning and then again from morning till afternoon.
“These 10 days are full of feminine power. Not the docile one but assertive, aggressive, and with raw power,” says Sreekanth Vellikkad, who has researched Thottampattu and written extensively about it.
“Thottampattu speaks of the story of a girl of 11 who transforms into a fiery Goddess when she sees evil and deceit taking centrestage. What ensues is her becoming all that nature turns to when stretched to its limits.”
There are several families dedicated to practising the ritual art form across Kerala. What is followed in Thiruvananthapuram and adjoining areas is the ‘thekkan shaili’ or the southern style.
“Usually staged in Kali temples, the song has variations based on the region and the temple where it is staged,” says Madhu Ashan, who leads the Thottampattu at Attukal temple.
The songs, based on chapters from the story, are handed down through generations and essentially follow an oral tradition. “The law is that it cannot be written down,” says Madhu Ashan.
The training is given for about three to four months, for which a ‘pattupura’ (the stage with straws) is made after the 10th day of the Malayalam month of Medam. The student has to undergo austerities and is taught the structure of the songs.
“The art can be properly learnt only with practice and experience. I have been accompanying my father ever since I was seven; even now I know only 60% of the entire spread of songs,” Mahesh, also a government employee, says.
Madhu Ashan is one of the three or four teachers of Thottampattu in Thiruvananthapuram, and handles the pattu ceremony in four other temples during their festival time. He plans to hand over his art next to his son. “The art is handed over to the best of one’s disciples,” Mahesh says.
Women are usually forbidden from taking up the art, and there is not even a hint of their entry now as nobody probably has even noticed it, say Mahesh and Sreekanth.
“Even otherwise, not many come forward to take this up. Yet we find people coming to our ‘pattupura’ to click selfies more than understand what is going on. But I must say there has been some change of late and people have shown interest to study and write about the art, much like they do with theyyam,” says Mahesh.
“Even theyyam went through several lows before it came to be accepted as a popular ritual art.”
In the same way, Thottampattu too will be taken note of as an art form with a strong base in rituals, the experts say. The growth of the stature of the Attukal temple festival as a regional event has helped ritual arts such as Thottampattu to get noticed. “As long as the temple festival remains, so will Thottampattu,” Sreekanth says.
Each passing year, the ‘pattu’ will find a home and stage in the straw hut positioned right in front of the deity, reminding people of the richness of the art that remained unsullied by the fickleness of time.