Access to Shendurney is tightly controlled. You cannot buy a ticket at a counter; you present yourself at a forest office and ask permission, and most people never get past the reservoir.
Every year, thousands of people walk deep inside it anyway, to a place called Pallivasal — and the Forest Department writes about them in its management plan in language you do not often see in a government document.
What the plan says
Under the heading of problems in sanctuary management, verbatim: public visit to Pallivasal is one of the major problems faced by the Forest Department in the sanctuary management. Every year thousands of people are visiting this place for offering religious customary practices. The numbers of visitors are increasing every year without having any control. Since the area is within the sanctuary people have to travel deep inside forest to reach the holy place. People are leaving lot of spoilage including containers, plastic bottles, carry bags, etc. along the roads during the travel. This is causing severe damage to the biodiversity and rich wildlife of the sanctuary.
And in the section on fire: poachers, smugglers, people residing in the private estates, and pilgrims visiting Pallivasal are primarily responsible for fire incidents in the Sanctuary.
That is a state forest department naming a religious pilgrimage, in print, alongside poaching and smuggling, as a cause of fires in a protected area. It is a remarkably direct thing to publish.
Pallivasal is a real working place
This is not a vague reference to somewhere in the forest. Pallivasal appears repeatedly in the plan as an operational location.
It is listed among the areas of secondary moist mixed deciduous forest — a degraded type, described as subjected to heavy human interferences in the past — alongside Pullubetha, Rosemala, Kattilappara, Kallar, Choodal and Kalluvarambu. There is a picket station at Pallivasal, with elephant-proof trench works recorded against it. Two hundred running metres of kayyala — dry-stone retaining wall — were built there in 2005–06, part of a thousand metres across four locations. The plan’s forward programme proposes new check dams at strategic locations like Pallivasal and Rockwood.
And then the detail that makes the whole story land. In 2005–06 the department raised an eight-hectare medicinal plantation at Pallivasal — and a basketted-bed chenkurinji nursery there, a tenth of a hectare of it.
The department is propagating the tree the sanctuary is named after at the site it says pilgrims are burning.
What we cannot tell you, and why we are saying so
Here is the honest limit of this story, and it is unusual enough to be worth stating rather than hiding.
We do not know what the Pallivasal shrine is.
The word pallivasal is Malayalam for a mosque. But we could not establish from any source what the shrine at Shendurney actually is, whose it is, what is worshipped there, or when the pilgrimage began. The management plan — the only document that discusses it at all — says nothing beyond religious customary practices. There is no photograph of it on Wikimedia Commons. There is no article about it.
So we are not going to guess the faith, the deity or the festival date, because guessing any of those would be inventing somebody else’s religion for them.
What we can say is that thousands of people a year make a journey deep into a wildlife sanctuary to reach a place whose history nobody has written down. In a district whose every temple, fort and lighthouse has a page somewhere, that absence is itself the striking thing.
The tension, stated fairly
It would be easy to write this as pilgrims versus forest. It is not that simple, and the plan’s own numbers show why.
The sanctuary already contains 877 hectares of private estate and about 1,300 residents. Its fire problem is attributed to four groups, two of them criminal and two of them people going about their lives. Its staffing is described by its own managers as inadequate. Rubbish along a forest road is a real problem and so is a hundred-year-old customary practice, and neither cancels the other.
What a visitor can take from it: this is not a wilderness with a fence around it. It is a working landscape with a legal status, and the people using it were using it first.
Frequently asked questions
What is Pallivasal at Shendurney?
A place inside the sanctuary that thousands of people visit annually for what the Forest Department’s management plan calls "religious customary practices". We could not establish what the shrine is, whose it is, or when the pilgrimage began — the plan is the only document that discusses it and it says nothing further. The word pallivasal is Malayalam for a mosque, but we are not going to infer the faith from a place name.
Can I visit Pallivasal?
It is deep inside the sanctuary and reaching it means travelling well beyond where general visitors go. Entry to Shendurney is by Forest Department permission arranged in person at the section office at Thenmala; ask there rather than assuming access.
Why does the Forest Department object to the pilgrimage?
Not to the practice, but to its effects. Its plan records that visitor numbers are increasing without any control, that containers, plastic bottles and carry bags are left along the roads, and — in the fire section — that pilgrims visiting Pallivasal are among those primarily responsible for fire incidents in the sanctuary, alongside poachers, smugglers and residents of the private estates.
What else is at Pallivasal?
A picket station with elephant-proof trench works, 200 running metres of kayyala retaining wall built in 2005–06, an eight-hectare medicinal plantation raised the same year, and a small chenkurinji nursery — the department propagating the tree the sanctuary is named after, at the site it says is being burned.