Rock shelter that speaks of centuries gone by

To a layman it would have looked like another monument. An expert will tell you how the same monument had once been a Jain shrine, there are carvings of Jain sages on it. And then it became a Bhagavathy (goddess), and finally the Siva shrine it is now. A rock shelter in Chitharal, Tamil Nadu, has so much to say of the centuries gone by. In a trip led by Heritage Walk Trivandrum, history enthusiasts became aware of the slow transition of Jain shrines into mainstream Hindu shrines, how fringe religious groups were accommodated into mainstream Hinduism.

The group at Chitharal.

Archaeologist Bina Thomas who has been leading the group of history lovers for nearly five years now, talks about the grey areas in the borders they have now expanded their monthly trips to. “We first covered the suburban areas of Thiruvananthapuram. Towards the end of 2016 we started the Fort walk series. People generally think there is heritage only in forts. That’s why I didn’t want to do the Fort walk initially. When we did it, we covered the temples, agraharams, the office buildings, mansions, and royal family history and associated connections. Once the Fort walk series ended, we thought it’d be nice to explore the Travancore area, and not just restrict our trips to the modern state of Thiruvananthapuram,” Bina says. “Kerala has a lot of connections across the border which many people are not aware of. For instance, people are curious to understand the Tamil speaking connections of Kerala.”

As part of this, the group has recently visited some grey zone areas near Thiruvananthapuram - like Neyyattinkara, which even has a prehistoric rock shelter called Pandavan Para. “At Chitharal we could make out it was initially a Jain shrine because of the sculptural depictions,” Bina says. They went to another rock cut shrine in Vizhinjam and after that the dynastic Kulasekharam. Here they learned about the Travancore royal family origin history dating back to the eighth and ninth centuries, the tussles between Pandyas and Cheras. That connection between the Pandyas and Cheras would be evident in the inscriptions at the rock shelters the group visited. In Tirunandikarai, they found at the base of a rock shelter, a Kerala style Siva temple. “It doesn’t seem like Tamil Nadu until you hear people speaking in Tamil,” Bina says. Inside, however, the few remnants of very early murals, are typical of the Tamil Nadu style. “Like the murals you find in the rock shelter in Pudukkottai.