Ranipuram translates roughly as the queen’s town, and the obvious assumption is that some ruling house once held this hill. Nothing of the sort. The name was given in living memory, by people who had just arrived, and the queen in it is not a monarch at all.
What the hill was called before
The older name is Madathumala — മാടത്തുമല. The English Wikipedia article on the hills describes it as a toponym for the characteristic undulating terrain, which is what you see when you get up there: not a peak so much as a long roll of grass and moor with shola forest tucked into the folds. Kerala Tourism’s own destination page still records the town as “earlier known as Madathumala”, and so does the parish record. The name has not vanished — one of the best photographs of the grassland on Wikimedia Commons is filed as *Madatha Male*, the Tulu and Kannada form, by a photographer who evidently still thinks of it that way.
What happened in 1970
The Catholic Diocese of Kottayam acquired land here as part of a wider effort to resettle Knanaya Catholic families from central Kerala, where land had become scarce. The Archdiocese of Kottayam’s own parish page for St Mary’s Knanaya Catholic Church at Ranipuram — written in Malayalam, and a primary source rather than a travel write-up — gives the date precisely: the settlement was founded on 26 January 1970, the migration made to mark the silver jubilee of the then bishop’s consecration. The page records 26 families in the parish, the patron as the Holy Virgin Mary, and the locality’s former name as മാടത്തുമല.
The settlers renamed the place Ranipuram in honour of the Virgin Mary, who in Catholic devotion is addressed as Queen of Heaven. That is the rani. It is a Marian name, not a royal one, and it is a little over half a century old.
- If you are looking for a palace, a fort or a dynasty at Ranipuram, there is none to find. The history here is a settlement history.
- Madathumala is not an obsolete name. It is still in use locally and still appears on photographs and older maps.
- The parish page places the settlement in Hosdurg taluk, and Wikipedia places Ranipuram in Vellarikundu taluk. Both are right — see below.
The taluk that changed underneath it
Sources disagree about which taluk Ranipuram is in, and it is worth understanding why rather than picking one. Vellarikundu taluk did not exist in 1970. It was announced in the Kerala budget of 2013 and inaugurated on 21 February 2014, carved out of Hosdurg. So a parish record written around the founding says Hosdurg, and it was correct; the Kasaragod district administration’s own taluk-office roster today lists Panathady — the panchayat Ranipuram sits in — under Vellarikundu, and that is correct too. Nobody is wrong. The boundary moved.
Why the story is worth carrying up the hill
Ranipuram gets written about almost entirely as scenery, usually with the phrase “Ooty of Kerala” attached, which tells you nothing about the place and a certain amount about the person writing. The more interesting fact is that you are walking on a hill whose current name is younger than the road to it, given by twenty-six households who came here because there was no land left where they were from. The grass and the shola were here long before that. The name was not.