Revi Karunakaran died on 25 November 2003. His widow, Betty Karunakaran, began building the museum that same year.
The date she chose
It took three years. The architect was Lalichan Zachariah; the building runs to 28,000 square feet behind a Greco-Roman colonnade with Greek mythological detailing — an idiom that makes no attempt to be Kerala and is not pretending to.
It opened to the public on 22 November 2006, inaugurated by Sir M. M. Jacob, a former Governor of Meghalaya. The date was not administrative convenience. Revi Karunakaran was born on 22 November 1931. She opened it on what would have been his seventy-fifth birthday.
The phrase
A third phase was inaugurated in 2015 by Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, the former President of Sri Lanka, who is reported to have called the building Betty’s Taj Mahal.
The line has travelled a long way from that occasion, which is how folklore gets made — and we would rather keep it attached to the person who said it and the day she said it. It is a quotation, not a legend.
It is also, as a comparison, both exactly right and quietly misleading. The Taj Mahal was built by a husband for his wife. This was built by a wife for her husband. Grand memorial architecture runs overwhelmingly in the first direction, which is precisely why the second is worth noticing — and the comparison, by being so familiar, hides the one genuinely unusual thing about the building.
A correction about the opening
Because of that 2015 ceremony, the Government of India’s Incredible India portal records the museum as opening on 22 November 2015. That is the third-phase date. The museum opened in 2006, and the 2015 listing has propagated from there into a number of other pages.
While we are correcting things: there is no working official website. rkmmuseum.com does not resolve — we tested it — so treat any page presenting itself as the museum’s own site with suspicion.
And now two people
Betty Karunakaran died in October 2025.
The building she spent three years raising for her husband, and nearly two decades running afterwards, is now unavoidably a memorial to her as well. A visiting head of state’s offhand phrase has turned out to be more precise than it was probably meant to be: a monument built out of grief by one person for another has ended up commemorating the person who built it.
Frequently asked questions
Who built the museum?
Betty Karunakaran, as a memorial to her husband Revi Karunakaran, who died on 25 November 2003. Construction began that year, to a design by the architect Lalichan Zachariah, and it opened on 22 November 2006 — what would have been his 75th birthday. She died in October 2025.
Why is it called “Betty’s Taj Mahal”?
The phrase is attributed to Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, former President of Sri Lanka, when she inaugurated the museum’s third phase in 2015. It is a reported quotation rather than a local tradition — and the comparison inverts, since the Taj was built by a husband for a wife and this by a wife for a husband.
Did the museum open in 2015?
No. The Incredible India portal gives 22 November 2015, but that is the date of the third phase. The museum opened to the public on 22 November 2006, inaugurated by Sir M. M. Jacob, a former Governor of Meghalaya.
Does the museum have a website?
Not a working one. rkmmuseum.com does not resolve, and we would treat any site claiming to be the museum’s official page with caution.