Kerala’s capital city Thiruvananthapuram on Sunday turned into a virtual Yagashala as about 40 lakh women from various states and even from outside the country cooked Pongala (rice-jaggery pudding) on open hearths on the city streets and offered to the Goddess of the Attukal Devi temple, famous as the Women’s Sabarimala.
The rush of women devotees of the Goddess on the occasion was so heavy that women had lined for cooking Pongala on the city streets in a ten-kilometre radius from the temple. Women from all walks of life — ordinary women, bureaucrats, film and television stars, politicians, spouses of VIPs — made Pongala offering to the deity of the temple.
The ritual of offering Pongala to the Goddess started at 10.30 am after Tanthri Chennas Dinesan Namboothiri, traditional chief priest, handed over the flame from the sanctum sanctorum to the temple priest for
kindling the Pandara Aduppu, the main hearth arranged in the courtyard of the temple, to the accompaniment of the Mantras rising from lakhs of throats.
After this ritual, the lakhs of women devotees kindled the hearths they had set up everywhere in the city. The women cooked the Pongala to be offered to the Goddess in fresh earthen pots decorated with flowers using firewood they themselves had brought. Women from Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka and even foreigners prepared Pongala for the Goddess.
The ritual concluded at 2.30 pm with the sprinkling of holy water in the Pongala pots. Over 350 priestly assistants were engaged in the job of sprinkling the holy water in the millions of pots. Pongala offering was the main ritual marking the conclusion of the ten-day annual festival of the Attukal Devi temple.
The temple had got into the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest convergence of women at one place at the same time in 1997, when 1.5 million devotees converged on Thiruvananthapuram city for the ritual on February 23 that year. Temple authorities said the number of devotees offering Pongala for the Devi had been increasing steadily since then.
The festival has also been a celebration of womanhood with women from very poor families rubbing shoulders with celebrities like film actresses, top officials and wives and daughters of VIPs. “I am a devotee of the Attukal Goddess. She has given me all I had asked for,” said film-TV actress Chippy who has been offering Pongala for the past two decades.
The belief is that Attukal Devi, the deity of the temple, is an Avatar of Kannaki, the heroine of Tamil epic Silappathikaram. According to local ballads, after burning down Madurai city, Kannaki traveled to Kerala where she rested for a while at Attukal on the southern border of today’s Thiruvananthapuram city before moving on.