Kamal Ghorui
A small hamlet in Thrissur comes together to reclaim a dying temple pond
It was the sight of an old man tucking up his mundu and wading into the slime that chang ed everything.
Until that moment, the crowd on the bank of the thodukulam— the pond beside the Peruvanam Mahadeva temple in Cherpu panchayat, Thrissur—had been doing what crowds do: Watching, filming, keeping a comfortable distance from the muck.
The crane was already at work, scooping great dark loads of slime from the thodukulam and depositing them on the bank.
A dozen panchayat workers were knee-deep in the water. But the young men with their phones stayed where they were.
Then Peruvanam Kuttan Marar walked past. The chenda maestro—whose name is woven into the very identity of the Peruvanam Mahadeva temple— had been returning from the temple when he saw the commotion. He paused, looked at the pond, turned around and walked home. Minutes later he was back, mundu folded above his knees, and stepped into the water without a word.
The bank went quiet. Then the phones went down. One by one, the youngsters waded in.
The thodukulam had been dying for years. Water hyacinths had crept across its surface in a thick, unbroken green sheet, swallowing the water beneath. Slime had settled deep into its bed. The nearly one-acre pond— once a landmark where villagers gathered every evening, where elephants were led to rest on the far bank before festival processions—had become something people walked past without looking at. In a village defined by its temple and its traditions, the pond had quietly ceased to exist.
With the Peruvanam Pooram days away on March 27—the pond is central to the aarattu ritual— panchayat president Sijo George had exhausted every official channel. “Letters to the devaswom. Appeals to the MLA. A formal request to the Cochin Devaswom Board on March 3 that drew a polite acknowledgment and then silence. Five years of renovation work had moved at a crawl, funds had lapsed and the pond had only grown greener,” said a local resident Ganesh Pichakkassery.
So, on March 14, kicking off a weekend effort, Sijo sent a message to every WhatsApp group in the hamlet and asked people to come. He wasn’t sure anyone would. By the time Marar stepped in, something had already shifted. But his presence sealed it. “Seeing an elderly gentleman like him getting in, many people got into the waters,” he said. People tugged at hyacinth roots, passed clumps of moss hand to hand, laughed when someone slipped, steadied each other. By afternoon, the water was visible. By Sunday evening, the thodukulam was breathing again.
The official response arrived the next morning — after the cleanup had gone viral. The Cochin Devaswom Board issued a letter claiming it had already ordered the cleaning, and noted pointedly that the panchayat had acted without permission.
“We have only cleared the surface,” says P Dinesh, who remembers watching elephants wade to the far bank as children gathered in the evening dusk. But at least it looks like a pond again. Outside, the water catches the light. The pooram is almost here.
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