Padmanabhaswamy Temple, Thiruvananthapuram – Temple Records

Padmanabhaswamy Temple, Thiruvananthapuram – Temple Records

A pertinent event in the long-recorded history of the temple was the construction of a "granta-pura" (record-room) within the temple compound itself around 1425 A.D. by the then Venadu King Veera Iravi Iravi Varma, to store the "Mathilakam" (within-the-walls) records, as the then existing temple records were known. A major portion of those records (numbering around 30 lakhs of documents) from the Mathikalam, had been donated later to the Archives Department in 1867, at the time of the formation of the latter.

Despite their cultural value, only a minuscule portion of these grantas (bundles) of cadjan leaf records, written mostly in ancient scripts of proto-Tamil and archaic-Malayalam, have been deciphered. The translations of this section of manuscripts by some scholars serve as a rare but very inadequate primary source material on the temple and its rich traditions. The rest of the 30 lakh documents – three thousand bundles of records pertaining to the temple - each bundle consisting of over a thousand cadjan records – segregated under 70 "heads" - is still lying idle with the Archives Department.

According to Aswathi Thirunal Gouri Lakshmi Bayi, a member of the Travancore Royal Family and author of a book on the temple, from a very early period in recorded history the temple had employed two kinds of 'record writers'. One group was to record the proceedings and transactions of the Ettarayogam, a council of temple administrators, that included the then king. The other was to write and preserve the records of the day-to-day functioning of the temple, maintain correct accounts of the temple-treasury, and of temple-revenue-collections and temple-expenditure, and as well as write down all the other records, connected with the functioning of the temple.