Browse by Themes
Kerala mural paintings were not collections of isolated images. They were narratives — the Ramayana moving continuously around all four walls of a room, the episodes of the Mahabharata unfolding in sequence across a temple's circumambulatory path, the Devi Mahatmyam telling the goddess's battle against darkness from entrance to inner sanctum. To browse by theme is to follow the stories. But it is also to do something more interesting — to see how the same story was told differently across different sites, different centuries, different painters. The Gajendra Moksham episode appears at Krishnapuram Palace and at multiple temple sites. Each painter made choices — about which moment in the episode to depict, which figures to include, how to position the elephant king and the crocodile and the descending god. Those choices are interpretations. Comparing them across the archive reveals the tradition not as a fixed system but as a living conversation between painters, texts, and devotional communities. Select a narrative cycle below to begin.
The Ramayana
The Valmiki Ramayana is the primary source, though painters drew on multiple textual versions. Note the absence of Uttara Ramayanam depictions across most sites.
The Mahabharata
Epic scenes including the Kurukshetra battle, the Pandavas in exile, and the Bhagavata episodes appear across multiple sites.
Bhagavata Purana
Krishna’s childhood in Vrindavan, the Gajendra Moksham episode, and other Bhagavata narratives across temple and palace sites.
Shaiva Narratives
Tales of Shiva — Kiratharjuneeyam, Shiva and Mohini, Shiva and Ganga — appear in both Vaishnavite and Shaivite temples, reflecting the absence of Shaiva-Vaishnavite conflict in Kerala mural iconography.
The same narrative episode painted across multiple sites can be compared using the All Murals browse with filters applied. For an essay on comparative narrative reading across sites, see One Story, Many Walls in Contexts — coming soon.
