Guruvayur Sri Krishna (Guruvayurappan)

The image is small — a standing Mahavishnu a little over a metre high, cut from the dark stone tradition names Patala Anjana, four arms holding conch, discus, mace and lotus. That is Vishnu entire; and yet Kerala calls him Unnikkannan, the little Krishna, and serves him as a child is served — woken, bathed, dressed, given butter. The fullness and the child are one here.

Melpathur Narayana Bhattathiri is said to have drawn his teacher Achyuta Pisharadi's illness into his own body and come to this sanctum crippled by it. He composed ten verses a day for a hundred days — a thousand and thirty-six in all, the Bhagavata Purana distilled into a hundred dasakas — and rose well. Its closing word, ayurarogyasaukhyam, long life and health and happiness, is also a chronogram: the date it hides is 27 November 1587. His contemporary Poonthanam's Malayalam Jnanappana is sung here still.

Guruvayur Ekadasi, in Vrischikam, is the year's long night. Chembai Vaidyanatha Bhagavatar sang here on that day for some sixty years, and after his death in 1974 the Devaswom took the gathering as its own. The Chembai Sangeetholsavam runs about a fortnight, draws musicians by the thousand, and closes on Ekadasi with all of them together in Chembai's favourites and Tyagaraja's Pancharatna kritis. That evening the temple's elephants line up before the statue of Gajarajan Guruvayur Keshavan, and the eldest garlands it.

Some things are best said plainly. Entry is for those who profess the Hindu faith, and the dress code is kept at the gate: men in a plain white or cream mundu, chest bare or an angavastram over the shoulder; women in a sari, set-mundu, skirt and blouse or churidar. Trousers and jeans are not admitted; cameras and phones stay at the counters outside. What a devotee brings instead is a vazhipadu — thulabharam, weighed against bananas or jaggery; choroonu, a child's first rice; palpayasam; a Narayaniyam recitation; or a night of Krishnanattam, the eight-play Krishna drama the Devaswom alone still keeps.

Guruvayur is a walled temple at the centre of its own town, twenty-nine kilometres north-west of Thrissur. Its name is its own account of itself — Guru and Vayu and ur, the place of Brihaspati, preceptor of the gods, and of the wind, who are said to have brought the image here and set it up where Shiva showed them before crossing to Mammiyoor, where by custom the devotee goes on from Guruvayur.

The buildings are much younger than the worship. The central shrine as it stands was reconstructed in 1638, the work credited to the Zamorins of Calicut. A Dutch raid in 1716 burnt the western gopuram, rebuilt in 1747; and when Tipu Sultan's army came through in 1789 the image was carried to Ambalappuzha, returning only on 17 September 1792.

Fire took the chuttambalam and the lamp-walls on the night of 30 November 1970, sparing the sreekovil and the image. The gates were an argument of their own: K. Kelappan's satyagraha of 1931–32, which Gandhi called the miracle of modern times, pressed the case for temple entry, and Guruvayur was opened to all Hindus in 1947. Since 1956 the Guruvayur Devaswom, a statutory board of the Government of Kerala, has held it.

The temple keeps Kerala's own idiom — low, wide, tiled and timbered, with no tower over it. A square two-storeyed sreekovil stands at the centre of a walled court, the nalambalam around it and the chuttambalam around that, the vilakkumadam carrying its tiers of oil lamps and seventeenth-century murals running the wall below. Before the eastern door rises the dwajasthambam, a flagstaff some seventy feet high and clad in gold, and beside it the deepastambam, a lamp-column of twenty-four feet bearing thirteen tiers of wicks. The Rudratheertham tank lies alongside, and the four gates open on the four nadas.