Nobody knew for certain what was hidden beneath the ancient Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple, in Trivandrum, India. But a lawyer named Ananda Padmanabhan had a hunch. According to legend, treasure was sealed in the temple vaults, and Padmanabhan, who was passionate about history, knew that in centuries past maharajas had performed a ceremony in which they weighed local princes approaching adulthood, then donated to the temple an equivalent weight in gold. Padmanabhan believed that these riches were still hidden in the basement, uncounted and unguarded.

The Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple, in Trivandrum, has been amassing gold for centuries. Photograph by Chiara Goia

Padmanabhan, who is thirty-nine, has spent his life in Trivandrum, which is at the southwestern tip of India, in the state of Kerala. His home and his law office are on historic Brahmin Street, just outside the gates of the temple, which has a monumental seven-story tower whose pale granite façade is a tapestry of stone, etched with ornate images of gods, nymphs, sprites, and demons. On the day that I had arranged to meet Padmanabhan, in mid-October, I found him in the middle of the street, barefoot, in a downpour. He was staring at the temple, as if in a trance. I tried to get his attention, but couldn’t. Eventually, a clerk from his office brought him an umbrella, which he took without turning his head.

After several minutes, Padmanabhan looked at me, smiled, and explained that he had been praying. There was a festival that day, and the temple’s custodians had removed an idol from the sanctum sanctorum and were parading it around a courtyard. He was hoping to get a glimpse of it. The idol, he told me, “is like an incarnation of God, so it is as if God himself is coming out of the temple.” Like many observant Hindus, Padmanabhan believes that a temple’s deity—in this case, the supreme god Vishnu—resides within its walls. Worshippers come to make offerings of flowers, incense, silver, and gold. Whatever wealth accumulates belongs to the deity. Padmanabhan told me that it had become his driving purpose in life to serve Vishnu and, in so doing, protect the deity’s hoard. He explained, “In Lord Krishna’s Bhagavad Gita, he says we are only small things before the great lord. So if he says, ‘Dance,’ we dance, and if he says, ‘Sit,’ we sit. I am just a mosquito before him.”

Deities can actually own property in India, though the law treats them as minors and they must be represented by an official guardian. At the Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple, the Maharaja of Travancore has this role. Travancore was a kingdom that once encompassed much of southern India. Although it ceased to exist in 1947, when India became independent, the maharajas have continued to preside over the temple, both as spiritual leaders and as custodians of the deity’s wealth. For centuries, the royal family’s management of the temple received little scrutiny: there were no complete or easily accessible records of what the deity owned, or how the maharaja used this wealth to maintain the temple. Nobody challenged the arrangement until 2007, when Padmanabhan brought a lawsuit against the temple administration, on behalf of two devotees.

Padmanabhan and his clients argued that the head of the royal family, ninety-year-old Marthanda Varma, had mismanaged the site, and that the government should appoint a new trustee to safeguard the deity’s wealth. Even though Varma is not officially a maharaja, as his ancestors were, he is revered in Kerala, and many of his supporters refer to him as the King. Padmanabhan thought that his lawsuit might prove unpopular, but before long several other Indians joined the case, including the leader of a union of temple employees, who believed that treasures had been taken from the site.

In the lawsuit, Padmanabhan alleged that a series of kallaras—treasure vaults—existed beneath the temple, and that they were being looted. In any case, the temple was poorly guarded; as one member of the royal family told me, until recently security at the temple consisted of men “holding wooden sticks.”

The temple’s executive, Sasidharan Nair, denied the charges of mismanagement and said, in a sworn statement, that “the allegation that there is a treasure-hoard kept in some kallaras is false”; there was nothing beneath the temple except a few unused rooms “covered with cobwebs and dust.” The plaintiffs, Nair said, were spreading “old wives’ tales and gossipy rumors.”

Padmanabhan took me back to his office, which is filled with books and has two swords on display. He sat behind a large desk and asked me if I wanted tea. When I said yes, he picked up a remote control with a single button and pressed it. A clerk soon arrived, carrying a tray with two glasses of tea.

I asked Padmanabhan what had made him so confident that there was treasure. “These are all historical books,” he said, gesturing at his library. “It is all here.” He pressed the remote control again, and the clerk reappeared. Padmanabhan uttered a command in Malayalam, the regional language. The clerk squeezed between the back of Padmanabhan’s chair and a bookcase, removed a large volume, handed it over, and vanished. Padmanabhan opened the book to a chapter on the temple, and read aloud a sentence that he had underlined: “A cellar underneath the shrine secures the temple jewels.”

Perhaps I looked unconvinced, because Padmanabhan pressed his remote control once again. The clerk returned and retrieved another book. Padmanabhan read me a passage noting that, in 1855, the regional government had “faced financial difficulties” and, to cover its expenses, had taken out a sizable loan from the temple. Padmanabhan said, “People who studied history knew that treasure was there.”

The temple amassed much of its riches in the early eighteenth century. At the time, the Maharaja of Travancore was battling local chieftains. His main rivals were known, collectively, as the Lords of the Eight Houses. One day, these men gathered at an inn, south of Trivandrum, and plotted to assassinate him, during a festival at the Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple. The plan might have succeeded had it not been for an old man—the keeper of the well attached to the inn—who overheard the conspirators and sent word to the Maharaja. On the day of the festival, the Maharaja showed up at the temple armed, with a contingent of soldiers; he eventually ordered a number of rebels to be executed, seized their wealth, levelled their homes, and sold their wives and children into slavery.

The Maharaja went on to conquer nearby kingdoms, whose wealth was considerable. As the writer Gurcharan Das has chronicled, Indian kings and merchants had been accumulating profits from the spice trade for nearly two thousand years. In ancient Rome, senators lamented that local women used too many Indian luxuries, and, in 77 A.D., Pliny the Elder proclaimed that India had become “the sink of the world’s gold.” In the sixteenth century, the Portuguese echoed this sentiment, complaining that too much of their silver from the New World was going to India; after the British arrived on the subcontinent, they made similar protests.

The historian T. P. Sankrankutty Nair has written several books about the Kingdom of Travancore. When I visited him at his home, in Trivandrum, he told me that the Maharaja “was a very cruel man” who, after murdering so many, yearned for absolution. “As repentance, he dedicated his entire kingdom to God, in 1750,” Nair explained. “Whatever things he had collected by defeating all those kings—all the valuables, gold, silver, ornaments, and coins—he gave to the Lord.” This wealth, Nair said, was locked up beneath the temple. But it wasn’t clear what happened to those riches over the centuries. “We never cared to look into that,” he told me, somewhat defensively. “It was not the concern of us historians to study the wealth of the temples. It was beyond our jurisdiction.”

He motioned to me to follow him into his living room. On the walls were black-and-white photographs of his deceased relatives. Several photographs were adorned with flowers. Nair, like many Hindus, reveres his ancestors almost as deities; one of his grandfathers, he said, had kept his most valuable possessions in a small wooden box, which Nair had inherited. “I’ve never ventured to open it,” he said.

Why not?

“Probably it contains wealth, probably it contains a diary and some letters written by him,” he said. Many people in India had boxes like this. “Sometimes these boxes contain valuables and sometimes nothing—but, because of our belief in ancestors, we don’t care to open it. We keep them as something almost divine.”

Nair offered to show me the box, but his house was in disarray because of a construction project; after searching for a few minutes, he told me that he wasn’t certain where it was. He didn’t seem particularly concerned. His relaxed attitude about his grandfather’s box seemed similar to his feelings about the temple’s treasury. Did he ever worry that someone might try to rob the site? No, he said. “Whatever is there will be preserved by the deity.”

Like Nair, most residents of Trivandrum had not been clamoring for the temple’s vaults to be searched. This had initially puzzled me. In America—a nation of conspiracy-obsessed newshounds that places high value on “closure”—it’s inconceivable that a mysterious, locked door would be left alone. (Recall Geraldo Rivera breaking into Al Capone’s vault, in the nineteen-eighties.) But in India the wealth stored in the vaults of Hindu temples is viewed largely in spiritual, not monetary, terms. William Harman, a scholar of Hinduism at the University of Tennessee, told me, “People make deals with deities, and if they receive what they want they pay up.” Any treasure inside the Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple, Harman said, embodied “centuries of vows.”

I read several histories of Travancore but could find no detailed accounts of the temple’s wealth. One of the most popular books was written by a member of the royal family, Princess Lakshmi Bayi; it makes no mention of a treasury, or of underground kallaras. However, I did come across a tantalizing account, from 1870, of life in Trivandrum by a British missionary named Samuel Mateer. After noting that Europeans were prevented, “by native prejudice,” from entering the temple, he added, “It is said that there is a deep well inside the temple, into which immense riches are thrown year by year; and in another place, in a hollow covered by a stone, a great golden lamp, which was lit over 120 years ago and still continues burning.”

One day, I visited the central archive of Trivandrum, whose records go back to the thirteen-hundreds. At first glance, the place looked like a warehouse for wicker mats. Until a century ago, scribes, using metal styluses, recorded the temple’s activities on long palm leaves, and the archive’s hallways were lined with shelves containing bundles of dried fronds. An archivist showed me one leaf that was a yard long and an inch wide. It was the original deed from 1750, in which the Maharaja gave his kingdom to the deity. There were ten million leaves like it in the archive. “A careful researcher who read through these leaves would get a sense of the wealth hidden in the temple,” an archivist told me. “But it would be a big task—an enormous task.”

R. Chandrankutty is a leader of the Indian National Trade Union Congress—the union that lent its support to Padmanabhan’s suit. In Trivandrum, the organization represents roughly fifty temple employees, including clerks, sweepers, and priests. Some of these members have reported that valuables have been stolen from the temple, including a large ivory flute and an ancient ring adorned with nine precious stones.

When I met with Chandrankutty, at the union office, he offered more details, alleging that the flute was taken from a storage area containing ceremonial items, and the ring from the finger of the main idol, inside the sanctum sanctorum. Whoever stole the ring, he said, had replaced it with a cheap replica. He suspected that other temple employees, with the knowledge of the management, were to blame.

Chandrankutty said that after voicing his concerns to the temple’s assistant officer, to no avail, he decided to join the lawsuit. But this choice came at a price, he claimed: another union member—a senior clerk named K. Padmanabha Das—had been nearly killed for his involvement in the case. Chandrankutty then informed me that Das would be arriving shortly to tell the story himself.