As Travancore remembers it
The Thrippadidanam of 1750 · 3 min read
Marthanda Varma did not inherit a kingdom so much as build one.
When he came to the throne of Venad, a small state at the southern tip of India, in 1729, it was weak and quarrelsome. The great noble families had more power than the king, and the old stories said they had once tried to kill him. He broke them. Then he turned on the little kingdoms around him and took them one by one. In 1741, at Colachel on the coast, his army beat the Dutch, which no Indian king had done before. By the end he ruled from the cape at Kanyakumari far up the coast into the north, and his kingdom had a new name, Travancore.
All through those years, his family's god was Padmanabha: Vishnu lying on the coiled serpent Anantha, asleep on the ocean, in his temple in Thiruvananthapuram. The king rebuilt that temple. He raised a new tower over its eastern gate. And in front of the god, he laid a single block of stone so large that it took a great deal of effort to bring, the Ottakkal Mandapam, the platform of one stone, from which the god can be seen through three doors: his face, his navel with Brahma on its lotus, and his feet.
"That stone is the god's threshold," the priests said. "His step."
On a Wednesday morning in January 1750, the fifth day of the month Makaram in the Kollam year 925, Marthanda Varma came to the temple. He brought his whole family. His chief minister, the Dalawa Ramayyan, was with him, and the officials of the state, and the council of the temple.
He went up to the stone. He took off his crown and laid it there. He laid there the royal umbrella, and the two white yak-tail fans, the signs of a king. Last of all he unbuckled the sword with which he had won every one of his battles, and laid it beside them, with a few leaves of tulsi, the plant that belongs to Vishnu.
Then the deed was read, and the king put his name to it.
"All the lands," it said, "with all the rights and honours and possessions we have held until today, between the Thovala fort in the east and the Kavana river in the west, we give, by absolute gift, to Sree Padmanabha, to last as long as the sun and moon shall last."
The kingdom was the god's.
The high priest lifted the sword from the stone and held it out to the king. Marthanda Varma took it back. He had given away a kingdom, and he received it back as a servant receives a task.
"Any land that I or those after me shall win," he said, "will be his also."
From then on he called himself Padmanabhadasa, the servant of Padmanabha. He ruled Travancore in the god's name, as his steward, and the kings after him did the same. Each royal son of the family, as a baby, was laid on that same stone and given to the god. The coins of the state carried the god's emblem.
This went on for nearly two hundred years, until 1949, when Travancore under its last king, Sree Chithira Thirunal, was merged into the new India. He too had signed his name as Padmanabhadasa.