The Paternal Palace

I found an interesting and detailed post at Living in India about the Padmanabhapuram palace.

My life is linked to this palace more than any other. Padmanabhapuram was the capital of the erstwhile princely state of Travancore (or Thiruvithamcode, which is the non-anglicised name), of which my grandparents were citizens. Padmanabhapuram literally translated means “The place of the one with a lotus in his belly button”. In spite of searching high and low, I can’t find a picture of the deity in question here, who is really Lord Vishnu with a lotus coming out of his navel. The very lotus where Lord Brahma sits.

But we are digressing, now about the palace — the palace does not seem to be too much of a palace really, at least not in the Windsor Castle scale of things. It has a tiled roof, and highly polished earthen floors, and is built almost entirely using Wood, finely engraved wood. The Kings of Travancore lived a very simple and austere life when compared with Kings elsewhere. I beleive they barely ever drank alcohol, never had meat, and were rather simple, like the palaces they lived in.

My grandfather used to work for the King. The King himself had laid his kingdom at the feet of Lord Padmanabha, the resident deity of the Padmanabhaswamy temple in Trivandrum, my hometown. He used to call himself Padmanabha-dasa (Padmanabha’s Servant). So my father was born and brought up close to Padmanabhapuram, and they moved to Trivandrum later on.

I was happy to read about the palace once again. There is a document describing the architecture for those inclined, complete with sketches and plans. Archnet, the source of the document is MIT’s effort to create an online resource of sorts for architects, with details about historical monuments from around the world. Engrossing! Now, if only all the documents were free of copyright issues. I have a terrible urge to add some Kerala related information to wikipedia. Later, perhaps. Now I have to deal with teaching tomorrow’s class, and catching up with the course plans, set back by Hurricane Frances.