Almost everyone who comes to Malampuzha photographs the Yakshi, and almost nobody arrives knowing that she has an author, a completion date and a commissioning government. She is not folk art, not an old shrine figure and not anonymous. She is a signed modern sculpture, finished in 1969, and the argument about her started immediately and has never really stopped.
The man who made her
Kanayi Kunhiraman was born on 25 July 1937 at Kuttamath in Kasaragod district — the far north of Kerala, a long way from Palakkad. He went to school at Kuttamath, Puthoott and Nileshwaram, which is a small coincidence worth noting on this site, because Nileshwar is one of the towns we have written up in its own right. He then studied sculpture at the Government College of Fine Arts in Chennai under K. C. S. Paniker, and won a Commonwealth Scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where he was from 1965 to 1968.
The Yakshi is what he did on returning. That sequence matters: a Kerala sculptor comes home from three years at the Slade and his first major public commission is a monumental nude drawn from Malayalam folk belief, installed at a state irrigation project. It was not a naive act and it was not going to be read as one.
Kanayi Kunhiraman’s major public works, as recorded by en.wikipedia
| Work | Where | Year | Material |
|---|---|---|---|
| Yakshi | Malampuzha dam garden, Palakkad | 1969 | Concrete |
| Mukkola Perumal | GCDA complex, Kochi | 1973 | Concrete |
| Sagarakanyaka | Shankumugham beach, Thiruvananthapuram | 1990 | Concrete |
| Kumaran Asan | Kumaranasan memorial, Thonnakkal | 2018 | Bronze |
He was given the Raja Ravi Varma Award in 2005, the Thikkurissy Award in 2006, the MS Nanjunda Rao National Award in 2018 and the Kerala Sree in 2022. The state that spent decades fielding demands to remove his most famous work also spent those decades decorating him for it.
How big is she? Two reference works, two answers
This is the part where we have to be honest rather than confident. The English Wikipedia article on the sculpture gives her as 30 feet — 9.1 metres. The English Wikipedia article on the sculptor, in its table of works, gives the same piece as 5.5 metres, about 18 feet. Those are two entries in the same encyclopaedia describing one object, and they differ by nearly a factor of two.
We have not found a primary source — a commissioning record, a departmental measurement, a catalogue — that settles it, so we are not going to pick the more impressive figure and present it as fact. What can be said without hedging is that she is monumental rather than life-size: large enough that visitors stand well back to photograph her, and large enough that the argument about her was never going to be private. If you want a single sentence, use “somewhere between about 18 and 30 feet, depending on which reference you read, and nobody has published the measurement that settles it.”
- Sculptor: Kanayi Kunhiraman.
- Completed: 1969.
- Material: concrete, made as a single piece.
- Owner: the Government of Kerala.
- Location: the Malampuzha dam garden, Palakkad district — currently behind a closed gate (see our piece on the rock garden and the closure).
The obscenity argument
The figure is nude, seated, with her head tilted back and her fingers in her hair. On completion she was condemned by conservative critics as obscene and as an affront to the state’s morality; the sculptor faced sustained opposition while the work was under way and was, by several accounts, physically attacked. Kunhiraman has never presented this as an accident. He has said that with the Yakshi he set out to provoke the public conscience and its aesthetics, and to generate debate about the morality of artistic expression. On that stated objective, it is difficult to argue he failed.
The argument did not end in 1969, or in 1989, or in 2009. Malayalam-language reporting as recently as 2022 records fresh proposals to clothe the figure. In 2019 the Government of Kerala honoured Kunhiraman at a fiftieth-anniversary celebration of the same sculpture, and the work was given a restoration by its own sculptor, then in his eighties. A state can hold both positions at once for fifty years, and this one has.
Why she is at a dam
The placement looks arbitrary until you remember what the Malampuzha garden was for. The dam was commissioned in 1955; the landscaped gardens on its downstream face came afterwards, deliberately, as a public amenity attached to a public utility, and the sculpture belongs to that second phase. The wider question — what it means for a modern state to commission a figure out of the oldest layer of folk belief and install her as the presiding spirit of a waterworks — is taken up on this town’s main page, and we will not repeat the argument here. What belongs to the object itself is simpler and more human: one sculptor, one commission, one year, and a fight that outlived nearly everyone who started it.