The Yakshi of Malampuzha: the naked stone woman Kerala argued about for fifty years

She sits thirty feet tall at the edge of the water, head tilted skyward, hair caught in her own fingers, entirely and deliberately naked. For half a century the Yakshi of Malampuzha Dam & Garden has been the first thing most visitors photograph and the last thing Kerala has stopped arguing about. She was carved to evoke a spirit out of local folklore — the beautiful, dangerous tree-woman who lures travellers into the dark. What her sculptor could not have predicted was how long the living, breathing humans of Kerala would keep fighting over her.

The largest reservoir Kerala ever built

Before there was a garden or a statue, there was a wall of masonry holding back a river. Work on the Malampuzha Dam began in March 1949, when Kerala did not yet exist as a state and the region was governed from Madras; the dam was inaugurated on 9 October 1955. It impounds the Malampuzha River, a tributary of the Bharathapuzha — Kerala’s second-longest river — and remains the largest dam and reservoir in the state. The structure combines a masonry dam of roughly 1,849 metres with an earthen embankment of about 220 metres, rising more than 115 metres, its canals feeding farmland across the Palakkad plains while the reservoir supplies drinking water to Palakkad town and the villages around it. It is, first and unglamorously, a piece of irrigation engineering. Everything else grew up in its shadow.

A garden terraced like a southern Brindavan

In the years after the water rose, the dry slope below the dam was planted into a stepped ornamental garden — fountains, flower beds and manicured terraces that earned it comparisons to the famous Brindavan Gardens of Mysore. A cable-car ropeway runs parallel to the dam, carrying visitors on an aerial loop of the reservoir and the hills beyond, and the grounds have accumulated the full apparatus of an Indian family day out: boating on the reservoir, an amusement park, a fish-shaped aquarium, a snake park. It is one of Palakkad’s busiest destinations precisely because it works on two registers at once — an engineering marvel for the guidebooks, and a picnic lawn for everyone who actually shows up.

The sculptor who would not clothe his Yakshi

The statue that made Malampuzha famous is the work of Kanayi Kunhiraman, one of Kerala’s most celebrated modern sculptors, and it was completed in 1969. Carved as a single monumental piece some thirty feet high, his Yakshi is a seated nude — legs apart, breasts lifted, eyes turned upward in a drowsy, ecstatic gaze. Nothing quite like it had been placed in a public Kerala park before, and the reaction was immediate. Objectors demanded the figure be clothed or removed; by some accounts the artist was physically assaulted during the work. Kunhiraman held his line, and the sculpture stayed. Fifty years on, in 2019, the Kerala government honoured him at a ceremony marking the statue’s golden jubilee — the same establishment that had once flinched at his creation now claiming it as heritage.

What, exactly, is a Yakshi?

To understand why the sculpture unsettled people, it helps to know what it references. In Kerala folklore the yakshi is a tree-spirit and a seductress — beautiful, long-haired, garlanded in jasmine, and utterly lethal. According to the tradition, she is often the ghost of a woman who died a wronged or violent death, returned to haunt lonely paths and groves. The legends hold that she lives in the pala tree (Alstonia scholaris), the Devil’s-tree whose sickly-sweet night flowers are said to announce her arrival. The story goes that she appears to a lone traveller after dark, asks him sweetly for a little chunam — the lime paste chewed with betel — and, once he is drawn under the tree, devours him. Kunhiraman took this figure of fear and desire and rendered her enormous, serene and unashamed. The provocation was the point.

A rock garden built from broken things

The Yakshi is not the only piece of art here made to challenge expectations. Malampuzha is also home to a rock garden — the first of its kind in South India — assembled by Nek Chand, the self-taught artist and Padma Shri honouree famous for his monumental rock garden in Chandigarh. According to accounts of the site, his Malampuzha creation is built almost entirely from discarded material: broken bangles, chipped tiles, used plastic cans, tin and other waste, reworked into walls, figures and passageways. Where the reservoir is an act of concrete permanence, the rock garden is the opposite philosophy carved into the same hillside — beauty scavenged out of the things everyone else threw away.

Held in the shadow of the Palakkad Gap

All of this sits about fifteen kilometres north of Palakkad town, cradled against the foothills of the Western Ghats. This corner of Kerala is defined by the Palakkad Gap, a broad natural break in the mountain wall that has for centuries served as the great gateway between the Kerala coast and the Tamil plains — a corridor for trade, armies, monsoon winds and, more recently, road and rail. The hills that form the reservoir’s backdrop are the western shoulder of that gap, and the dry heat that Palakkad is known for is a direct consequence of the gap letting the plains’ climate leak through. The Yakshi, then, keeps watch over one of the most geographically important thresholds in South India.

Fifty years, and the argument still runs

You might expect a half-century-old statue to have settled into uncontroversial old age. It has not. The Yakshi has flared back into public argument again and again, most recently when a Kerala Tourism social-media post featuring the sculpture drew a fresh round of objection and defence in 2022. Each cycle rehearses the same fault line the statue exposed in 1969 — between those who read the figure as vulgar and those who read it as art, folklore and free expression cast in stone. That the debate refuses to die is, in a sense, the sculpture doing exactly what a good yakshi does: refusing to let anyone walk past unaffected.

Visiting Malampuzha Dam & Garden

Malampuzha lies roughly 15 kilometres north of Palakkad town, an easy trip from anywhere in the district; you can plan a wider route from the Palakkad hub. Full details, timings, entry and the current state of the ropeway are on the Malampuzha Dam & Garden place page. The garden, ropeway, aquarium and rock garden are ticketed attractions with their own hours, so allow a half-day; early morning and late afternoon are kindest given Palakkad’s famous heat, and the light on the reservoir and the hills behind is best then too. The Yakshi herself stands in the garden grounds beside the dam, impossible to miss.