Talakadu

About Talakadu

On the left bank of the Kaveri, about 133 kilometres from Bangalore and 45 kilometres from Mysore city, sits a town that looks more like a desert than anything you would expect to find in this part of Karnataka. Talakadu is believed to have once held more than thirty temples, and today most of them lie buried under sweeping mounds of sand, a landscape that has as much to do with local legend as it does with actual geology.

The town takes its name from twin brothers, Tala and Kadu, who were hunters by trade. According to legend, a sage named Somadutta and his disciples were once killed here by a wild elephant while deep in penance, and were reborn as elephants themselves, coming to worship a silk-cotton tree out of some residual devotion carried over from their previous lives. Curious about this strange behaviour, Tala and Kadu took an axe to the tree, and it began to bleed. A voice then instructed them to apply leaves and fruit from that same tree to the wound, and when they did, an image of a bleeding Shiva appeared before them, the tree healed itself, and the elephants, who were the reborn sages all along, finally attained moksha. Stone images of Tala and Kadu still stand today in front of the Veerabhadra Swamy temple, marking the spot where the story is said to have unfolded.

History of Talakadu

Talakadu's recorded history stretches back to the 2nd century AD, and over the centuries it passed through the hands of an unusually long list of ruling dynasties: the Western Gangas from roughly 350 to 1050 AD, followed by the Cholas in the 11th century, then the Hoysalas, the Vijayanagara kings, and finally the Wodeyars of Mysore, who would go on to rule the region for centuries afterward.

The Wodeyar dynasty's own founding is tied directly to Talakadu. Raja Wodeyar, a local chieftain serving under Tirumala Raya, the Vijayanagara viceroy stationed at Srirangapatna during the empire's decline around 1610, uncovered a plot by Tirumala Raya to have every rival chieftain killed during a Dussehra festival gathering. Rather than wait to be a victim of that plan, Raja Wodeyar struck first, attacking and capturing Srirangapatna and overthrowing Tirumala Raya outright, an event that marks the real beginning of Mysore's Wodeyar rule.

Tirumala Raya's widow, Alamelamma, was a devout follower of Sri Ranganatha and his consort Ranganayaki, and for years she observed a personal ritual of lending her own jewellery to adorn the goddess's idol every Tuesday and Friday. That devotion cracked, according to the story, after her husband Rangaraya fell incurably ill. Advised to bathe daily in the Kaveri and pray at Talakadu for a week as a cure, he died on the fourth day regardless, and a grieving, furious Alamelamma stopped offering her jewellery to Ranganayaki altogether, blaming the goddess for failing to save him.

Raja Wodeyar, keen to get his hands on Tirumala Raya's confiscated property and the jewels that came with it, sent soldiers to track Alamelamma down at Talakadu. She fled with the jewels packed into a chest, climbed a cliff overlooking the Kaveri with the soldiers closing in, and is said to have declared, 'you vanquished us in life but not in death,' before praying to Ranganatha and jumping. Just before she did, she pronounced a three-fold curse: 'Talakadu Maralagali,' may Talakadu turn to sand; 'Malangi Maduvaagali,' may Malangi become a whirlpool; and 'Mysore Dhoregalige Makkalagade Hogali,' may the rulers of Mysore remain without heirs.

Each part of the curse maps onto a specific act of desperation. Turning the ground to sand, locals say, was meant to slow the soldiers chasing her, and today roughly 1,600 acres around Talakadu remain covered in the resulting dunes. Cursing the Kaveri into a whirlpool near Malangi, her own birthplace, was supposedly intended to swallow her body and jewels so neither could ever be recovered. The final curse about the Mysore succession she is said to have delivered only in the last moment before jumping. Interestingly, the sand itself is not purely a matter of legend: geologists and forestry officials have pointed to a real combination of shifting river courses, prevailing winds and historic deforestation as the actual cause, and the Karnataka Forest Department has run afforestation projects since the 1980s, planting casuarina trees in an effort to stabilise and green the dunes, with mixed but visible success in parts of the area today.