What to expect
Highlights
- Boat or canoe routes around Periyar river
- Village life, canals and lake/river scenery
- Good fit for homestays and local food stops
The story
Kerala’s longest river, and at Kalady it is not scenery — it is the reason the town is a pilgrimage place at all. Two of the three stories that made Adi Shankara’s name happened in this water: the crocodile that seized him and won him his mother’s consent to renounce the world, and the river that is said to have changed its course so his ageing mother could reach it. You can stand on the ghats where both are located.
The story of Periyar river
The Periyar runs about 244 kilometres from the high Western Ghats to the sea, and Kalady sits on its bank in eastern Ernakulam, roughly ten kilometres from Cochin International Airport. Here it is a broad, slow, working river with bathing ghats, coconut country on both banks and a steady traffic of local life.
The stretch worth walking is beside the Adi Shankara birthplace complex. There are steps to the water, people bathing and performing rites, and — in the traditional account — the spot associated with the crocodile. It is a short, unspectacular, quietly loaded walk.
This is not a sightseeing attraction with a gate and a ticket. It is open riverside in an active pilgrimage town, and its interest is entirely in what happened here and what people still do here. Treat the ghats as a religious space: dress modestly, ask before photographing people at their rites, and keep back from anyone bathing.
Early morning and dusk are the times to come. The light is better and the ghats are in use, which is the point.
Combine it with the Adi Shankara Keerthi Sthambha Mandapam, the eight-storey memorial tower a short walk away, and the birthplace temple complex — the three together are the whole of Kalady and take a comfortable half-day.
The Periyar is also the river of Bhoothathankettu, Paniyeli Poru, Thattekkad and Athirappilly further east and north. If you follow it upstream you get most of eastern Ernakulam’s landscape in one thread.
Legend & myth
The crocodile is the story that changed Indian philosophy, and it happens in this river. The boy Shankara, bathing in the Purna — the older name for the Periyar — was seized by a crocodile. He called to his widowed mother Aryamba on the bank that the creature would not let him go unless she consented, then and there, to let him take sannyasa, which she had long refused. She consented. The crocodile released him. He left home a monk and never lived at Kalady again.
The second story explains the town’s name. Kalady is popularly read as “kal-adi”, footprint. Shankara, so the tradition runs, returned to find his mother too frail to walk to the river to bathe — and caused the Periyar to shift its course to flow past the house, the new channel following the line of his footsteps.
The third completes the pair: that he had promised to return for her funeral rites despite being a renunciant forbidden to perform them, and did, and was ostracised by the local orthodoxy for keeping the promise. A spot associated with the cremation is shown at Kalady.
All three are traditional accounts, told as such. The firm biographical record for Shankara is thin — even his dates are disputed by centuries — and Kalady’s identification as his birthplace rests on tradition maintained by the Shankara monastic institutions rather than on independent evidence.
The Periyar has one more flood story and that one is documented rather than devotional. In 1790, with Tipu Sultan’s army driving into Travancore and pressing towards this river, a small Travancore party went upstream to the dam at Bhoothathankettu and deliberately breached its walls, sending a flash flood down the watercourse the invading force had to cross. Combined with the monsoon, cholera and a British declaration of war, it stopped the advance. So the Periyar is credited with moving to spare an old woman a walk, with nearly killing her son so that he could leave her, and with drowning an eighteenth-century army on purpose. Rivers in Kerala carry a great deal of narrative.
And one much older story is attached to the whole coast rather than to this river alone: the tradition, recorded in the Puranas, that Parashurama raised Kerala out of the sea by hurling his axe across the water, so that all of it — the estuaries, the backwaters, the ground the temples stand on — is land the ocean was made to give back. It is the frame every Kerala water story sits inside.
The uncomfortable modern coda belongs here too, because a river page that only tells legends is not being honest. The Periyar is Kerala’s longest river and the source of much of the state’s hydroelectric power, and downstream of Kalady it runs through one of India’s heavier industrial belts with a long and well-documented pollution record. The stretch at the Kalady ghats is the pretty part. What happens to the same water forty kilometres further on is a different story, and it is one the people who live beside it have been raising for decades.
What is not in doubt is the river. Whatever happened here, it happened on this water.
Read the full history of Periyar river 805 more words
History
Two numbers give the scale of what this river does before it reaches the sea. The Mullaperiyar dam near the headwaters sends part of it east through the Ghats into Tamil Nadu, out of the basin entirely; the Idukki complex — Idukki, Cheruthoni, Kulamavu — holds it for hydroelectric power, and the Idamalayar dam does the same on the tributary joining from the north-east. Then, at Bhoothathankettu, a barrage completed in 1964 catches everything those schemes release. The Irrigation Department is specific about the use: water stored there is diverted through a left-bank canal to irrigate 32,800 hectares across six taluks — Kothamangalam, Muvattupuzha, Kunnathunadu, Aluva, Paravoor and Kanayannoor — and the same works supply drinking and industrial water to greater Kochi, feed lift-irrigation schemes and hold back the tidal salt that pushes up the lower river.
That is the honest description of the Periyar today: not a wild river with dams on it, but a managed system with stretches of river left over. The reach at Kalady is one of the pleasant remainders, and it is worth knowing that the water going past the ghats has already been through a diversion into another state, several power stations, and a barrage that waters a third of the district.
The barrage has a cost that is recorded by the Kerala Forest Department rather than by its critics. Impounding the river at Bhoothathankettu in 1964 raised water along the northern bank by roughly six to ten metres and, in the department's own account of the Thattekkad sanctuary, destroyed almost all of the luxuriant riverine forest that had lined the Periyar there — the same low-elevation habitat Salim Ali had called the richest bird habitat in peninsular India in 1933. The sanctuary notified in 1983 protects the inland remnant.
And the river's single most consequential act has nothing to do with engineering. It is dated to 1341, when a catastrophic flood carried an enormous load of silt down to the coast. The silt choked the ancient port at Muziris — Kodungallur — out of business permanently, the river cut itself a new mouth to the sea, and the material deposited along the shore built new land, including the long bar that is now Vypin island. The sheltered water behind that new bar became the harbour that made Kochi. No eyewitness account of the flood survives; the evidence is a dating system, the Puthuvype era or Era of the New Deposit, which counts its years from 1341. One river destroyed one port and created another, and the people who lived through it started a calendar instead of writing it down.
The Periyar is the longest river in Kerala, running roughly 244 km from the Western Ghats to the Arabian Sea, and historically the most important waterway of the old Kochi country — the river that carried the spice trade inland and that Kerala’s modern irrigation and hydro schemes were built on.
At Kalady it is bound up with the Adi Shankara traditions: the crocodile episode that marks his renunciation, the change of course associated with his mother Aryamba, and the funeral-rite episode, all located on this stretch.
Kalady’s modern life as a pilgrimage centre was formalised by the Shankara monastic institutions, which established the Adi Shankara Janma Bhoomi Kshetram at the birthplace and, later, the eight-storey Keerthi Sthambha Mandapam dedicated in 1978.
Upstream the same river carries Bhoothathankettu, whose name comes from the legend of a dam abandoned by demons; Paniyeli Poru; the Salim Ali Bird Sanctuary at Thattekkad, notified in 1983; and, on its Chalakudy tributary system, the Athirappilly falls.
The Periyar today is heavily dammed — the Athirappilly hydroelectric proposal would have been the seventh dam on the Chalakudy alone — which makes the quiet, open stretch at Kalady less ordinary than it looks.
Why visit
Because the same water carries the whole of eastern Ernakulam on one thread — the barrage at Bhoothathankettu, the rock field at Paniyeli Poru, the Thattekkad sanctuary — and Kalady is the calmest place to stand beside it.
Because the flood of 1341 that is credited with building Vypin and opening Kochi harbour came down this river, which makes an ordinary-looking reach the most consequential water in the district.
Because the crocodile story — the hinge of Adi Shankara’s life — is located in this water, and you can stand where it is said to have happened.
Because the ghats are in active use, so you are looking at a living practice rather than a monument to one.
Because it is a five-minute walk from the Keerthi Sthambham and the birthplace complex, and completes them.
Because it is ten minutes from Cochin International Airport, which makes it the rare sacred river stretch you can genuinely fit around a flight.
And because it is free, open and unhurried, at either end of the day.
