Overview

Location

History

Deities

Photo Gallery

Utsavams

Vahanas

Adimakkavu

Other Agraharam Information

Contact Information

Well Known Elders from the Agraharam

Food and Catering

Hall for functions and Lodging

Bank Accounts for sending Kanikkai, donation or vazhipadu

Author's Notes

Vadakkanthara

Agraharam 103 in the 100 Agraharams Project

Vadakkanthara is two histories sharing one name.

The first is the agraharam — the Tamil Brahmin settlement, tentatively placed around the fifteenth–sixteenth centuries, though no inscription fixes its exact date.

But woven through the same sacred ground is another memory: Thirupurakkal Bhagavathy, associated with the Moothans, Palakkad’s old merchant community. Their Devi is remembered as Kannaki, the heroine of Silappadikaram — the wife of Kovalan, who, wronged in Madurai, became a symbol of chastity, justice and divine feminine power.

The epic links Kannaki’s deification with the Chera king Senguttuvan. In Palakkad, this memory travelled through the Moothans — a Tamil-rooted trading people who settled here under local patronage and carried Kannaki’s worship westward.

Temple tradition remembers reconsecration after the troubled years of Tipu Sultan’s Malabar campaigns. Yet the Devi’s open-to-sky presence also belongs to Kerala’s older kavu tradition, where Bhagavathy guards the grove beneath trees and sky.

Vadakkanthara’s grama Shiva is remembered as Thiruvenkattappan — the Lord of Thiruvenkadu, the Swetharanyeswarar kshetra on the old Chola coast near ancient Poompuhar. Thus both strands point eastward: the agraharam’s Shiva to Thiruvenkadu, and the Bhagavathy’s Kannaki to Puhar. Did you know that the Saivite saint and poet Pattinathar was born in Poompuhar!!

No inscription tells the full story. What survives is layered memory: epic, trade, migration, goddess worship, reconsecration — and an agraharam beside it.

Sriram (Hari)

June 4 2026