At Shanghumukham, on the strip of sand immediately beside the airport, a concrete woman lies on her side with a fish tail, twenty-six and a half metres from head to fluke. Most people photograph her and move on. She has a maker, a fight, an unpaid invoice and a world record, and the fight is the interesting part.
The sculptor, and the argument he had already had once
She is by Kanayi Kunhiraman, later Kerala’s Raja Shilpi, and by the time he began her he had been through this before. His reclining Yakshi at Malampuzha, finished in concrete in 1969, provoked a public campaign to have her removed that ran for years. Two decades later he started a second monumental reclining female figure, and the state produced the same reaction on cue.
Work began around 1990. Partway through, the District Collector ordered construction stopped on the grounds that the sculpture was obscene. It was the Chief Minister, K. Karunakaran, who intervened to let it be completed. It was finished in 1992, after about two years of work — and Kunhiraman took no remuneration for it.
That last detail deserves more attention than it gets. The largest sculpture of its kind in the world was made for nothing, by a man who had already spent twenty years being told his previous one should be demolished, and was halted mid-build by the district administration of the state that had commissioned it.
The record, and the two names
In October 2022 — thirty years after she was finished — Guinness World Records recognised her as the largest merperson sculpture in the world. The dimensions given are 26.5 m long and 7.6 m high, which is 87 feet by 25 feet.
She goes by two names and they are different words. Sagarakanyaka is daughter of the sea; Jalakanyaka is daughter of the water. Kerala Tourism’s own photo gallery labels her Jalakanyaka; the English Wikipedia article is titled Sagarakanyaka; Commons files use both. Neither is a mistake and there is no wrong answer, but if you are searching for her you will need both spellings, and a page that gives you only one is giving you half the index.
- The English Wikipedia article gives her size as 87 ft × 25 ft and then, in the same breath, as 1,100 cm × 2,700 cm.
- Those cannot both be right: 87 ft is about 2,652 cm and 25 ft is about 762 cm.
- The metric pair is transposed and wrong in both figures. The correct metric size is roughly 26.5 m × 7.6 m, which is what Guinness publishes.
- This is the ordinary way a bad number enters circulation — not invented, just converted carelessly and then copied.
Why she is lying where she is
Shanghumukham is the city’s own beach rather than a resort one — the sand the capital walks on in the evening, a few minutes from the terminal, with aircraft coming in low over the water. Putting a monumental nude on that particular stretch was a deliberate civic gesture and not a decorative one, which is precisely why it drew the objection it did. The sculpture is public art in the strict sense: it is on the public shore, it was free to make and it is free to look at.
The sea is the standing problem here. This coast erodes hard, and Shanghumukham has lost sand and seawall repeatedly in recent years; the beach you find is not reliably the beach in the photographs, and stretches of it have been fenced or rebuilt at various times. Check locally before making a special trip, particularly in and after the monsoon.
Two records in one city
It is a small coincidence but a real one: Thiruvananthapuram holds two Guinness records that both involve very large numbers of people or a very large amount of concrete, and both are about women. One is a crowd of two and a half million women cooking in the street at Attukal. The other is a single woman in concrete on the beach, who a collector once decided was too much for the public to be trusted with.