Kerala's port capital once ruled by Ay and Venad lines
Thiruvananthapuram, also Trivandrum, is Kerala's capital near India's southwestern tip, a port about ten nautical miles from a busy east–west shipping lane. Ay rulers tied to Chera feudatories held the area before twelfth-century Venad conquest and later Travancore statehood.
The name means city of Lord Anantha, the eternal one, after the deity of the Sri Padmanabhaswamy Temple; poets also called it Ananthapuri, and the anglicised Trivandrum stayed official until 1991. Trade here reaches back to around 1000 BCE, with spices, sandalwood and ivory, and tradition even holds that King Solomon's ships called at a port named Ophir, now Poovar, in 1036 BCE. Its early political story ran largely apart from the rest of Kerala.
The Ay dynasty, closer to the Pandyas of Madurai, ruled the coastal belt from its capital at Vizhinjam, a port since the second century BC that Cholas and Pandyas repeatedly fought over. After King Vikramaditya Varaguna died in 925, Ay power faded; in the tenth century the Cholas sacked Vizhinjam and destroyed the famed Kanthalloor Sala college, and in the 12th century the branch that ran the temple merged into Venad. In the 18th century Marthanda Varma conquered Kayamkulam, Kottayam and other neighbours, founded Travancore in 1729 and patronised Kathakali, Koodiyattam and Thullal; the capital moved here from Padmanabhapuram in 1795. Victory over the Zamorin at Purakkad in 1755 made Travancore Kerala's leading state.
The mid-19th century under Swathi Thirunal and Ayilyam Thirunal was a golden age, bringing the first English school in 1834, an observatory in 1837, a general hospital in 1839 and University College in 1873. The Sree Moolam Popular Assembly of 1904 was the first elected legislature in any Indian state, and although never directly under British rule, the city was active in the freedom struggle.
The municipal corporation counted 957,730 residents in 2011, and the metro area over 1.7 million. The city is home to India's first deep-water transshipment port at Vizhinjam, the University of Kerala, ISRO's Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre and the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology. It topped the ASICS ranking of Indian cities in 2015 and 2016 and is linked with the composer-king Swathi Thirunal and painter Raja Ravi Varma.
Source: Thiruvananthapuram
