Asramam Adventure Park

The story of Asramam Adventure Park

The best way to understand Asramam is that it is not really one attraction. It is a large piece of open ground on the edge of a lake, in the middle of a city, onto which about six different civic ideas have been laid over four decades, and most of them have stuck.

The park proper covers about forty-eight acres — nineteen hectares — and opened to the public after 1980. It is owned by the Kollam Municipal Corporation and operated by the District Tourism Promotion Council, which is the arrangement that explains its character: municipal ground with a tourism department running the activities on it.

Start at the water, because that is what the place is for. The boat jetty sits under a pavilion with a beautifully painted gable — deep green, scrolled foliage, a carved face at the apex — with kayaks racked along the side and the lake opening out beyond. From here the DTPC runs backwater cruises in houseboats, luxury boats and speedboats, and there is kayaking and parasailing. Ashtamudi is eight arms of navigable water converging on a single outlet, and this is one of the easiest public places in Kollam to get onto it.

Then the dry-land adventure half, which is what gives the park its name: aerial net walking, rope climbing, a zipline, a children's play area. And an open gym of nineteen pieces of fitness equipment, installed at a cost of about fifteen lakh rupees, described as the first open gym in the state. That is the genuine state first here, and it is worth saying because a different superlative usually gets attached to the water sports instead.

The strangest and best thing in the park is the sculpture. In 2012 a Monsoon Sculptures festival brought ten sculptors here, and the works stayed. They are scattered through the grounds with no particular ceremony — you come round a path and there is one. The titles are as good as the objects: Meditation, Story Teller, Do not disturb, She, Love without heart and brain, Buddha 99, Victim, Descent, Winter Morning, Imagining Humanness, From the Margins, Adimakuthirakal, Nature of My Mother, Kuravanum Kurathiyum.

A municipal park that quietly became a permanent open-air contemporary sculpture collection, because a festival packed up and left its work behind, is a much rarer thing than a zipline. Nobody signposts it as a sculpture park. It simply is one.

Along another edge runs the Paithruka Veedhi — the heritage way — a walkway lined with terracotta relief panels on the history of this district. They are worth slowing down for, because they are not decorative filler; each one is captioned and each one is about something specific. One shows the 1809 Quilon revolt, its Malayalam label reading plainly enough for anyone: a scene of cavalry, sepoys with muskets and a field gun being hauled by hand. Others take the port of Kollam, the old cashew processing that employed this city for a century, the Punalur suspension bridge upriver, the Seethakali festival.

That first panel deserves a moment, because it explains the building at the other end of the park. The rising of 1809 is what brought the East India Company down hard on Travancore, and it is why Colonel John Munro arrived as Resident in 1810 — the man for whom the British Residency at the lake end of these grounds was built. The park has a relief of the war on one path and the house that the war produced at the end of another. Neither is labelled as having anything to do with the other.

The Residency itself we have written about separately, because it is a substantial thing in its own right and because most of what is printed about it is wrong. It is still in official use as the Government Guest House and its interior is not open, but it is visible from these grounds and it is the reason the grounds are laid out the way they are — this was a Residency park before it was a municipal one.

Behind all of it is the part that will outlast the ziplines. The Asramam mangrove wetland on the Kollam waterfront has been given a biodiversity heritage tag by the Kerala State Biodiversity Board, and it is habitat for Syzygium travancoricum, an endangered tree. Over fifty hectares of grounds, mangrove and creek produce the most reliable bird counts anywhere on Ashtamudi. There is also a Miyawaki plantation in the park — dense, fast-grown native woodland of the kind Kerala's municipalities have been planting through the 2020s.

And there is more civic furniture besides: an open-air theatre, a cultural complex, a walkway arch, a museum of the painter A. Ramachandran mapped in the same grounds. It is a lot for one park. The honest description is that Asramam is Kollam's front garden, and that almost everything the city has wanted to say about itself in the last forty years has been built here.

Legend & myth

The first correction is one we had to make to our own working notes, and it concerns where this park actually is. The coordinate we had inherited for Asramam Adventure Park was derived rather than surveyed, and it lands about three hundred and seventy metres south-east of the park — next to the Payment Subtreasury and the traffic police office, which is a fair distance from a zipline. The pin on this page is now the centre of the mapped park polygon itself. If a route ever drops you outside a government office, that is why.

The second is a superlative on the wrong facility. You will read that the park offers aqua parasailing, the first in Kerala. Parasailing is certainly offered here. But the state first we can actually put a source under is the open gym — nineteen pieces of outdoor fitness equipment installed for about fifteen lakh rupees and described as the first open gym in Kerala. We print that one and leave the parasailing as parasailing.

The third is a museum that we could not find. The park is often credited with a Paramparya Museum, and no source we searched supports a museum of that name. What does exist, and is well documented, is the Paithruka Veedhi — the heritage way, the walkway of terracotta relief panels — and, separately, a museum of the painter A. Ramachandran mapped within the same grounds. Paramparya and Paithrukam both mean roughly heritage, and the likeliest explanation is that a walkway has been promoted into a museum somewhere in the retelling. We describe the walkway, which is real and good.

The fourth is small and is about the sculptures, and we raise it only because a list looks authoritative once printed. The titles of the 2012 Monsoon Sculptures works are not consistent between sources — one list gives Bundle of slogans where the photographic record gives Bundle of Thoughts. We name works that can be tied to a photograph or a source, and we do not present a canonical set.

The fifth is about the Residency, and it is a correction we make at length on its own page rather than here. English Wikipedia's article about this park repeats the standard line that the British Residency was built by Colonel John Munro during 1811 and 1819. Those dates are Munro's tenure — he took charge in October 1810 and resigned in 1819 — not a documented construction period, and the version that adds Maharani Gowri Parvati Bayi is chronologically impossible, since she became Regent only in 1815 at the age of thirteen. This page does not repeat it.

The sixth is a claim we are deliberately not carrying, and the source that prints it agrees with us. A line in wide circulation says that most of a well-known Malayalam film was shot at the British Residency in these grounds. The encyclopaedia article that carries that line flags it as uncited, and we could not put anything better under it. We are not going to name a film on the strength of a claim its own publisher marks as unsupported, and a park does not need a filming credit to be worth an afternoon.

The seventh is a caution about what kind of place this is, because listings can make it sound like a theme park. It is a municipal park with tourism-department activities on it: entry is a modest ticket, commonly quoted at around ninety-five rupees with hours of roughly ten to six, though we would confirm both on the day rather than trust an aggregator. The rides are rope courses and a zipline rather than engineered attractions, and the best things in the park — the sculptures, the relief panels, the mangroves, the lake — are free of any of that.