Places to Visit in Pala and Erattupetta highlands

Start with the water, because both towns are arguments about a river. The Meenachil rises on Kudamurutti hill above Vagamon, at around 1,156 m, and runs 78 km west to Vembanad Lake, gathering 38 tributaries, 47 sub-tributaries and 114 named streams on the way and draining a catchment of about 1,208 sq km. Its two head-streams — the Poonjar Ar, known locally as the thekkanar or southern river, and the Theekoy Ar, the vadakkanar or northern one — do not meet somewhere out in the hills. They meet in the middle of Erattupetta, a few steps from the shops.

That confluence is the whole explanation of the town. Before the bridges, the water cut Erattupetta into three separate karas — Thekkekkara, Kizhakkekkara and Vadakkekkara — and in a good monsoon the eastern bank was effectively an island; people swam it if they had to. Two bridges now tie the three together, with three causeways added later to take traffic out of the centre, and a fourth crossing runs off the Pala road past St George’s College. It is an ordinary-looking market town until you notice that its road layout is a river map.

Erattupetta’s older life was commercial and riverine. Kettuvallam cargo boats came up from the west with rice and provisions and went back loaded with malanchakku — the hill produce of pepper, cardamom and areca that came down off the Cardamom Hills — and at night rafts of timber floated west with hurricane lamps burning on them, which was how the highland forests reached the coast. Bullock carts from Tamil Nadu used the town as their terminus until the eighteenth century. When Alappuzha port was developed, that inland-port trade fell away, and Erattupetta became what it is now: a busy retail and produce market rather than a transhipment point.

The other thing the river gave the town was a public square. Once the flow shrank to a summer channel, wide white sandbanks appeared on both sides, and those sandbanks became Erattupetta’s civic space — temporary shops, festivals, fairs and mass meetings. Jawaharlal Nehru, travelling with his daughter Indira during the independence campaign, addressed a gathering on the Erattupetta manappuram. Sand extraction has since taken the banks away almost entirely, and Malayalam Wikipedia’s account of the town says so bluntly; the ground Nehru spoke on is not there any more.

Today Erattupetta is the larger of the two towns — 34,814 people in 7,686 households at the 2011 census, against Pala’s 22,056 — and it is Muslim-majority, a fact with a straightforward historical cause. Christian settlers pushed on into the surrounding hills after farmland, while the trading families stayed put in the town centre. There are now twelve juma masjids and around twenty-five smaller prayer mosques in the municipality, organised around three historic mahallu jamaats: Nainar Palli in the town, Puthanpalli, and the Muhyiddin mosque at Thekkekkara, described in local accounts as one of the largest mosques in Kottayam district. Gulf remittances are a visible part of the economy.

Pala, downstream, reads completely differently. The town centre sits on the north bank; the tall Gothic clock-tower spire of St Thomas Cathedral is the landmark you see from every approach, and the municipality — 16.06 sq km, about 31 m above sea level, roughly 2,840 mm of rain a year — is a compact grid of shops, banks, colleges and church institutions rather than a market strung along a highway. Its bones are commercial: Pala is the principal market for the rubber, pepper and coffee of the whole Meenachil taluk, and Malayalam Wikipedia puts it without softening — living standards here follow the rubber price. Rubber-based small industry sits round the town’s edges.

Pala also has a claim on Malayalam letters that most towns its size would trade a great deal for. Kattakayam Cherian Mappillai, born here on 24 February 1859, spent fifteen years writing Sreeyesuvijayam, generally described as the first Malayalam mahakavya on the life of Christ; he finished it in 1926, and Pope Pius XI sent him a gold medal in 1931. He also founded and edited Vijnana Rathnakaram, one of the earliest literary magazines in the language. The poet known simply as Pala Narayanan Nair carries the town’s name as part of his own. K. K. Aroor, who played the lead in Balan — the first Malayalam film with sound — was from Idayattu in Pala.

And it is a political town. K. M. Mani represented the Pala constituency in the Kerala Assembly continuously from 1965 until his death in 2019, the longest unbroken run any member of that house has managed; the by-election that September went to Mani C. Kappan and was the first time the Left front had ever taken the seat. Sport runs alongside: the volleyball player Jimmy George and the athlete Shiny Abraham both trained at Pala’s colleges, and a former Chief Justice of India, K. G. Balakrishnan, did his intermediate at St Thomas College here. For a municipality of twenty-two thousand people, the honours board is unreasonable.

Legend & myth

The river carries the oldest story, and it is a borrowed shape rather than a local invention. The Meenachil’s older name was Gaunar — also written Kavanar and Kaunar — and the tradition recorded in Kerala temple encyclopaedias explains it exactly as the Kaveri is explained: as Agastya’s water-pot tipped over to make that river, so the kamandalu of a sage called Gauna tipped over here, and the flood that ran out of it became this river. Downstream of Nagampadam in Kottayam the water is still called Kavanar, so the older name never entirely went away — it simply retreated to the lower reaches.

The name it acquired instead is an immigrant’s name. Vellala farmers from Kumbakonam and Vellala traders from Kaveripoompattinam moved up into these hills, and both groups were devotees of Madurai Meenakshi. Where they settled — at Kanjirappally, and at Poonjar just above Erattupetta — they built Meenakshi kovils, and the tract took the goddess’s name. Meenakshiyar, the river of Meenakshi, wore down to Meenachilar. That is as far as this record goes with it: the dynastic migration legend that arrived with the same devotion, the Pandya prince and the crossing of the passes, belongs to the Poonjar Palace record and is told there in full.

Pala’s own name has never been settled, and two rival explanations are still repeated side by side. One holds that the Meenachil was once styled Palazhi — the ocean of milk of the Puranas — and that Pala is what is left of the word. The other, less cosmic and rather more likely on the evidence, is that the town is named for the Palaath Chettiar who founded its market in the seventeenth century. Malayalam Wikipedia records both as beliefs and endorses neither, and older land records call the place Lalam rather than Pala at all. We are not going to pretend one of them has won.

The most vivid legend attached to Pala is startlingly recent, and it comes with a date. Kerala Tourism’s own festival documentation for the Kadappattoor Sree Mahadeva Temple, inside Pala municipality on the Meenachil bank, says the temple’s stone Shiva idol was found on 14 July 1960 by a woodcutter named Madathil Paachu Nair. The day was violently stormy; as the tree he was cutting came down he took fright and jumped into the river, and the idol appeared from inside the trunk. Word of it spread across central Travancore, people came in crowds to look, and a temple grew up around the find. The annual eight-day Thiruvutsavam in March–April draws around six thousand people. Note the tension honestly: the same temple is elsewhere described as ancient and as a stop for Sabarimala pilgrims, so the 1960 story is best read as the discovery of this idol rather than the founding of worship on the site.

In the middle of Pala stands the Lalam Mahadeva Temple, one of the oldest Shiva shrines hereabouts and known locally as Dakshina Kashi, the Kashi of the south — a title several Kerala Shiva temples claim, and one worth hearing as devotional emphasis rather than as a ranking. Its ten-day festival falls in the Malayalam month of Dhanu and ends with the arattu, the ceremonial immersion, in the Meenachil. Both of Pala’s great temple occasions therefore end in the river, which is a neat piece of evidence for how completely the water organises life here.

At Erattupetta the first place of worship, by local account, is the Angalamman Kovil standing at the point where the two rivers join, and the second is the Bhagavathy temple at Nadakkal, built by the Poonjar Koyikkal Thampurans and still run in association with the family. The Shivaratri at the Angalamman shrine and the Meena Bharani at the Bhagavathy temple both draw people across caste and religion in a town where that matters. A word of restraint here: Angalamma — Angalaparameswari — is a well-known Tamil village goddess with an elaborate mythology of her own, and it would be easy and wrong to bolt that pan-Tamil cycle onto this shrine. What her name honestly tells you is that Tamil settlers brought her, and planted her at the confluence. We found no local legend text for the shrine itself and are not inventing one.

Erattupetta’s Muslim traditions are unusually specific about people. Islam is said to have reached the town in the first century of the Hijra, carried south from the Kodungallur landing by Malik ibn Habib, nephew of Malik ibn Dinar. Around the 1240s the Chishti saint Sheikh Farid al-Din Ganj-i-Shakar — Baba Farid — is held to have come here, and the Poonjar raja to have granted tax-free land in his honour, on which the Puthanpalli Maqam was raised. Treat that as devotional memory: the historical Baba Farid’s life is documented in Punjab and he died at Pakpattan, and no independent record puts him in Kerala. The second figure is easier to hold. Sheikh Saeed Bava, of a family settled on Androth in Lakshadweep, reached Erattupetta by way of Kochi in Hijri 720 (AD 1320), married into the Methar community, was made khatib of the Nainar mosque, and was buried beside it — and his descendants, the Labbas, have supplied the mosque’s khatib ever since.

One thread we could not pull. Malayalam Wikipedia states that Kottarathil Sankunni’s Aithihyamala — the eight-volume corpus of 126 Kerala legends compiled between 1909 and 1934 — speaks of Erattupetta explicitly. We searched for which of the 126 it is and could not identify it, so we are recording the lead rather than the tale. Similarly, the tradition that St Thomas himself preached here between AD 50 and 72, and that the St George Forane Church at Aruvithura therefore dates to the third century, is flagged as unsourced even on the Malayalam page that reports it. It is what the community believes; it is not what anyone has shown.