Ten to fifteen million a year is an estimate. Here is one number that is not.

Sabarimala is routinely described as receiving over ten to fifteen million devotees a year, which would put it among the largest annual gatherings anywhere on Earth. It is an estimate, and the gap between its two ends — five million people — is larger than the total attendance at most pilgrimages in the world. Set beside it is a much smaller and much harder number.

1818

By 1818, approximately 10,000 to 15,000 devotees attended the five-day annual festival in January. That is a documented historical figure, from a period when someone was in a position to count and had reason to.

Put the two side by side and the arithmetic is startling. The same pair of numbers — ten and fifteen — appears twice, two centuries apart, with a factor of a thousand between them. Whatever the modern estimate’s error bars, the direction and the scale of the change are not in question: this pilgrimage has grown by roughly three orders of magnitude since the early nineteenth century.

Why the modern number is an estimate and always will be

Because of what is being counted and where. There is no single gate. Pilgrims arrive over a season that runs from about 15 November to 26 December for the Mandala Pooja and again for Makaravilakku on 14 January, with further openings on Maha Thirumal Sankranti on 14 April and for the first five days of each Malayalam month. They come on foot through forest from more than one direction, by bus to Nilakkal, by road to Pamba. Some make the journey more than once. Counting a crowd of that shape, in that terrain, over that period, produces a range rather than a figure.

What the growth did to the place

It built a second, temporary settlement. For most of the year this stretch of the Periyar Tiger Reserve is forest with a road that ends; in season it becomes one of the largest temporary settlements anywhere, with a vehicle city at Nilakkal and a base camp at Pamba. That transformation, and the apparatus that makes it possible, is the subject of this town’s own record on this page and we will not repeat it.

What belongs here is the consequence for the forest. A thousandfold increase in footfall into a tiger reserve is an environmental question whatever else it is, and it is the reason for measures that otherwise look strange — the Kerala High Court’s direction that the irumudikettu carry no plastic, the management of the trek routes, the concentration of arrivals at controlled points. None of that exists because anyone dislikes pilgrims. It exists because 1818’s fifteen thousand and today’s fifteen million cannot be accommodated by the same hill in the same way.

The honest way to quote it

If you need a sentence: Sabarimala is estimated to receive over ten to fifteen million pilgrims a year, and by 1818 its five-day January festival drew somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand. Give both, label the first as an estimate, and let the reader do the multiplication themselves. It is a more interesting fact than either number alone, and it is the only version where nothing has been asserted that cannot be supported.