The Kuravan and Kurathi of Ramakkalmedu: statue, legend and a name born of Rama

Stand on the exposed shoulder of Ramakkalmedu and the wind does the talking — it snatches at your jacket, flattens the grass and hums across the empty plains that fall away towards Tamil Nadu. And there, silhouetted against that huge sky, two enormous figures lean into the gale: a tribal man and woman, hand raised, gazing east across the horizon. They are the Kuravan and the Kurathi, and the very name of this Idukki hill carries a second, older story — one about a god who is said to have set his foot upon a rock here.

How Ramakkalmedu got its name

The name unpacks neatly in Malayalam: Rama-kal-medu, roughly the land where Rama set his foot upon the rock, or the hill of Rama's stone. It is worth stating plainly that this is a legend, not a matter of record. According to local lore, the hero-deity Rama, together with his brother Lakshmana, is said to have climbed to this high, wind-blown ridge while searching for his abducted wife Sita — pausing here, so the story goes, to scan the wide horizon for any sign of her.

You can see why the tale attached itself to this particular place. Few spots in the Western Ghats offer so commanding a sweep of the lowlands. From a summit set at roughly 980 metres above sea level, the eye runs unbroken across the Tamil Nadu plains — a natural watchtower where a searching gaze feels entirely at home. Whether or not any footprint was ever pointed out on the rocks, the landscape itself does the persuading.

The Kuravan and the Kurathi

The Kurava are a hill-tribe community of the Idukki high ranges, and the Kuravan (the man) and Kurathi (the woman) stand in local imagination for a couple bound to these hills — figures of resilience, of harmony with a hard mountain landscape, and of the raw beauty of tribal life. The great statue that crowns Ramakkalmedu makes them monumental: a couple set against the sky, facing outward over the plains they once knew intimately.

The sculpture was created by the artist C.B. Jinan and erected in 2005. It has since become the signature image of Ramakkalmedu — the thing every visitor climbs the last stretch of hill to see. Reports describe it as a large group composition rather than a single pair, evoking the wider world of the hill-tribe family. Visitors are generally not permitted to climb on the figures themselves, so admire them from the grass and let the wind supply the drama.

A link to the Idukki Dam

There is a further thread that locals love to tell, and again it belongs to the realm of legend rather than engineering record. The Idukki Dam — one of Kerala's great hydroelectric works — is built across a gorge pinched between two rock hills known as Kuravan Mala and Kurathi Mala. Popular lore holds that a Kuravan and Kurathi, familiar with every fold of this terrain, guided the way to the dam site, and the twin hills are said to carry their names. The Ramakkalmedu statue is often read as a tribute to that story, honouring the tribe's bond with the land that now powers much of the state.

Why the story still matters

Ramakkalmedu could have been just another breezy viewpoint. What lifts it is the way two very different stories share the same ground. The Rama legend reaches back into pan-Indian myth and hangs the hill's name on a single, sweeping gesture — a god pausing to search the horizon. The Kuravan and Kurathi reach in the opposite direction, rooting the place firmly in the lived heritage of Idukki's own hill people. One is grand and borrowed; the other is intimate and local. Standing between them, with the plains laid out below and the wind never once letting up, you feel both at once.