Places to Visit in Kottakkal

Arriving at Kottakkal is not like arriving at a sight. The junction on the old highway is a working small-town crossroads — buses nose in from Tirur, Malappuram, Manjeri and Kozhikode, autorickshaws stack up three deep, and the shopfronts read as a list: medicals, medicals, supermarket, medicals. What marks the town out is who is walking around in it. A high proportion of the people on the pavement are patients or their attendants, in town for a course of treatment measured in weeks, and the shops, lodges and tea stalls are pitched at exactly that. Kottakkal is a place people come to and stay in, which is rarer in Kerala than it sounds.

The centre of it is the Arya Vaidya Sala campus on the eastern side of town. The main residential hospital, the Ayurvedic Hospital & Research Centre, was established in 1954 during the institution’s golden jubilee and now runs to around 300 beds; there is an outpatient block, a temple, gardens and staff quarters within the same compound. Alongside it stands the older Charitable Hospital, which the institution dates to 1924 and which treats free of charge — its own published account gives roughly 800 outpatients a day and inpatient space for about 160 people at a time, with outpatient consultation, basic lab, X-ray and ECG investigations, medicines, inpatient treatment and food all provided at no cost.

One department there is worth naming because it is unusual. The Charitable Hospital has run a dedicated free outpatient clinic for cancer patients for more than thirty years, drawing people from well outside Kerala; the institution reports 7,179 cancer patients seen in a recent year, 5,601 of them returning and 1,578 new. Those are the institution’s own figures and we print them as such. What Ayurvedic care can and cannot do for any given condition is a clinical question this page does not answer — what is documented is the scale of the service and that it is free, and anyone considering treatment should take medical advice on their own condition rather than take a travel page’s word for anything.

The manufacturing side is the part visitors rarely see and the part that makes the town’s economy work. Arya Vaidya Sala runs three medicine-making units — at Kottakkal itself, at Kanjikode near Palakkad, and at Nanjangud in Karnataka — producing, by its own count, more than 550 classical and newer formulations. Distribution runs through 27 branches and around 2,000 authorised dealers across India; the Kerala Tourism write-up gives a figure of over 1,600 authorised dealers, and the two counts do not agree, so treat the order of magnitude rather than the number as the fact. English Wikipedia additionally cites an annual manufacturing turnover of about US$19 million and more than 800,000 patients treated a year across the group; those are secondary figures and we attribute them rather than assert them.

The teaching arm has a longer and more tangled history than the town’s shorthand suggests. The Aryavaidya Patasala was started in 1917 — and it was started at Calicut, not here — financed by the Arya Vaidya Sala and run by the Arya Vaidya Samajam, offering a four-year course leading to the qualification “Arya Vaidyan”. It moved to Kottakkal in 1924 so that students could train on the wards of the Charitable Hospital. The Arya Vaidyan course was abolished in 1958 and replaced by a Diploma in Ayurvedic Medicine; the Patasala was upgraded to a full Ayurveda college in 1959; it was affiliated to the University of Calicut in 1972 with a new Bachelor of Ayurvedic Medicine degree; and since 2010 the Vaidyaratnam P. S. Varier Ayurveda College has come under the Kerala University of Health Sciences.

The thing most visitors miss entirely is that Kottakkal is also a Kathakali town. P. S. Varier had earlier run a troupe performing musical drama, and in 1939 he turned it into the P. S. V. Natyasangham, a Kathakali company and training school attached to the institution at a moment when the art form’s audience was shrinking. It recruited teachers of the first rank — Pattikkanthodi Ravunni Menon, Guru Kunju Kurup, Kavalappara Narayanan Nair, Kalamandalam Neelakanthan Nambissan, Kottakkal Krishnankutty Nair — and it is the reason so many senior Kathakali artists carry “Kottakkal” in front of their names, the same way Kalamandalam graduates carry theirs. The troupe has toured Germany, Switzerland, France, China, Korea and Indonesia, and it is known within Kerala for a conservative, strictly classical style rather than for experiment.

The Vaidyaratnam P. S. Varier Ayurveda Museum opened in 2002, in the institution’s centenary year, and it is housed in the double-storeyed building that held the Arya Vaidya Chikitsasala — the charitable hospital — from 1924. Eight galleries carry photographs, graphics and drawings alongside the physical apparatus of the trade: medicine-making vessels, pottery, wooden barrels, therapy equipment and teaching models of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ayurvedic practice. It is open 8.30 a.m. to 12.30 p.m. and 2 p.m. to 4.30 p.m. and closed on Sundays. For a town with no fort left and no beach, it is the one place where Kottakkal’s history is laid out to be looked at.

Raw material is the other half of the operation. There is a herb garden in the town itself, on the western side toward the Ayurveda college, and the institution has been growing and conserving medicinal plants at scale for a long time: it records acquiring 120 acres of forest land in the Western Ghats in 1934 for cultivation and conservation, and opened a Centre for Medicinal Plants Research in 2003. English Wikipedia describes four herb gardens totalling about 220 acres supplying 44 varieties of herb; the institution’s own page leads with the 1934 Western Ghats holding. The two accounts describe overlapping but not identical things and we have not been able to reconcile them into one number.

Today Kottakkal functions as a medical-stay town well beyond the one institution. Arya Vaidya Sala opened a further 120-bed hospital, Susrutam, at Kavathikalam in Kottakkal East in July 2023. Independently owned Ayurveda hospitals cluster along the highway — Dr. P. Alikutty’s integrated Ayurveda-and-modern hospital at Changuvetty and Kottakkal Ayurgarden among them — and the town’s hotel stock at Changuvetty, Edarikode, Parambilangadi and Puthur exists largely to house patients, attendants and the families who come with them. It is worth being plain that “Ayurveda town” here means clinical care sold by the course, not spa treatments sold by the hour, and the two are priced and conducted very differently.

Kottakkal has a civic life that has nothing to do with any of this. Girls’ schooling arrived with a government lower-primary school in 1914 and the Rajas High School followed in 1920, founded by Manathevan Raja; the Government Rajah’s Higher Secondary School still occupies the ground. The town also had a moment of national political visibility when the Kerala Congress session was held at Parappoor in 1939, in the middle of a decade of agitation by agricultural workers against eviction by the janmi landholding families. Furniture and household-goods manufacture is the other trade of any size. It is an unglamorous, busy, well-off small town that happens to be famous.

Legend & myth

The town is named after a fort that is not there. Kottakkal is kotta, a fort, plus kal — the place of the fort — and Malayalam sources describe the fort, its moat and its ramparts as the work of a military commander of the Valluvanad ruler, whose name appears in the sources as Karuvarai Moossath, Karuvarayur Mussath and Karuvayoor Moosad in three different transliterations of the same man. In Sanskrit the place was Sweta Durgam, the White Fort, and in Malayalam it was called Venkalikotta or Venkita Kotta. None of the walls survive above ground, and no ruin in Kottakkal today can honestly be shown to a visitor as the fort. The name has outlived its object by several centuries, which is the most Kerala thing about it.

How the fort was lost is told as a quarrel rather than as a campaign. In the version carried by the English sources, the Valluvanad chief marshal stationed here killed a minister of the Zamorin of Calicut; the Zamorin sent a force under a royal kinsman remembered as Moonnarpadu Thampuran, and the fort at Kottakkal passed to Calicut. That is a satisfying story and it is also where the sources part company. English Wikipedia places the Zamorin’s seizure of the Valluvanad fort in the fourteenth century; the Malayalam article says the place remained a small garrison of the Valluvanad ruler until the early eighteenth century. Those two datings cannot both be right and we have not found a source that settles between them, so the record carries both and claims neither. What is not disputed is the outcome: the Kizhakke Kovilakam, the eastern house of the Zamorin’s family, ended up at Kottakkal, and it is still there.

One physical fragment complicates the whole thing pleasantly. In 2013 two swords were recovered from a well at Kottakkal, medieval and European in style and finish, and the obvious reading is contact with the Portuguese. It is an object that fits the story of a garrison town on a contested frontier — but two swords in a well prove that two swords ended up in a well. They are not a dated stratum, and nothing about them fixes the century in which the fort changed hands. It is the kind of find that deserves to be reported and not leaned on.

The oldest sacred story in the town has nothing to do with medicine. Tradition at the Venkittathevar Mahadeva temple, about 700 metres south of the Arya Vaidya Sala campus, holds that a Brahmin newly arrived in the area saw a cow standing at a place called Venkilangu and letting down her milk over a bare stone. He read the stone as self-manifested and built a Shiva temple on the spot, and the deity took the name Venkittathevar — vengitangil kudikonda bhagavan, the lord who took up residence at Venkilangu. The cow-and-the-stone is one of the standard Kerala foundation motifs and turns up at dozens of shrines, which is exactly why it is worth saying that here it also does explanatory work: it accounts for a name that is otherwise opaque. The temple is recorded as having belonged first to a family remembered as Karuppath Moosa and later to the Kovilakam, and it is administered today by a committee under the Kovilakam’s guidance. Its presiding form of Paramasiva is described as a fierce one, with Ganapathi, Ayyappan and the nagas in the subsidiary shrines, and the tank sits at the north-eastern corner in the orthodox position.

There is also a Vettaikkaran shrine near the town, and the deity behind it is one of Malabar’s most particular. Vettakkorumakan — literally “the hunter’s son” — is held to be the son born to Shiva and Parvathi when Shiva took the form of a Kirata, a tribal hunter, in the episode in which he fights Arjuna and then gives him the Pashupatastra. He is worshipped almost exclusively in northern Kerala, he was the god hunters made offerings to before going out, and he is the family deity of several Malabar ruling houses, the Kottakkal line among them. That is the connection worth making here. What does not belong to Kottakkal is the six-day Pattu Utsavam that people usually mean when they say Vettakkorumakan festival — that is Nilambur’s, at the Nilambur Kovilakam temple, and it should not be borrowed onto this town.

The medical town has its own myth, and it is a good one. The seven-day Kottakkal Pooram, held at the Sree Viswambhara temple inside the Arya Vaidya Sala compound in the Malayalam month of Meenam — mid-March to mid-April — is celebrated in honour of Dhanvantari. In the Puranic account, when the gods and the asuras churned the ocean of milk, the last thing to rise from it was Dhanvantari, physician of the gods, carrying the pot of amrita. He is the figure Ayurvedic physicians invoke, and a festival honouring him at a hospital’s temple is not decoration; it is the institution stating what tradition it belongs to. The pooram runs to a caparisoned elephant carrying the deity, panchavadyam and chenda ensembles, and evenings of Kathakali by the P. S. V. Natyasangham alongside Carnatic and Hindustani concerts — a temple festival whose cultural programme is unusually serious because the troupe is in-house.

The temple itself is modern and its founding story is documented rather than legendary, which is worth saying plainly instead of dressing it up. P. S. Varier consecrated the Viswambhara temple in 1932, next to the house he had built in 1929, Kailasamandiram. The image is a four-armed figure of Viswambhara, a form of Vishnu, carrying conch, discus, mace and lotus, carved in white marble and commissioned from Agra; by the institution’s account Varier anointed it and performed the daily worship himself for a full year before it was installed in the sanctum. The institution also records that caste and creed were never a bar to entry, from the temple’s inception — that is the institution’s own statement about its own history, and we report it as such, but it is a pointed claim to make about a Kerala temple built in 1932, eight years after the Vaikom Satyagraha and four years before the Temple Entry Proclamation.

Behind all of it sits the legend Kerala Ayurveda tells about itself. The tradition holds that Vagbhata, author of the Ashtangahridaya, came to Kerala and taught the eight branches of Ayurveda to eighteen Nambudiri families, from whom the Ashtavaidya houses descend. P. S. Varier’s own training belongs to that line — from the age of eighteen he studied at the Kuttancheri gurukula under Vasudevan Mooss, of one of the eight families. The sting in the story is that the Kuttancheri house is now counted among those with no practising vaidyan left, while the institution its student founded at Kottakkal has outlived every one of them. And the legend’s own geography points away from here: Vagbhata is said to have spent his last days at Pulamanthol Illam, elsewhere in Malappuram district, not at Kottakkal. This town’s claim on Ayurveda is entirely a modern one, and it is stronger for being honest about that.