Vazhachal Falls

Treat Vazhachal as the slower riverside stop: river views, short walks and somewhere to pause with a family. It still depends on the access allowed that day, the water level and which visitor paths are safe.

The story of Vazhachal Falls

Where Athirappilly drops in one thunderous plunge, Vazhachal spreads out and races. Here the Chalakudy River widens across a long shelf of dark, water-sculpted rock and shatters into a fan of cascading rapids and low cascades rather than a single tall fall. In the monsoon the whole width turns into a roaring sheet of foam; in the drier months it settles into braided channels sliding between smooth boulders, with the trees crowding right down to the water's edge.

The setting is the real spectacle. Vazhachal sits at the threshold of the Vazhachal Forest Division, a rare low-elevation riverine woodland that forms part of the Anamalai landscape in the Western Ghats — a UNESCO-recognised global biodiversity hotspot. The Chalakudy is one of the most species-rich rivers in Kerala, and the ribbon of green along it is a corridor for elephants, a refuge for the endangered lion-tailed macaque and Malabar giant squirrel, and, most famously, a stronghold for hornbills.

This is one of the very few places in the entire Western Ghats where all four of the region's hornbill species are found together: the magnificent great hornbill, the Malabar pied hornbill, the Malabar grey hornbill and the Indian grey hornbill. The great hornbill — locally the Malamuzhakki Vezhambal, roughly the one whose deep call resounds through the mountains — needs tall old riverside trees with natural cavities to nest, which is exactly what this stretch of the Chalakudy still provides.

This is not empty wilderness; it is the ancestral home of the Kadar, a small indigenous community who have lived along the Chalakudy for generations. Traditionally gatherers of wild honey, medicinal plants, fruit and fish, the Kadar hold an intimate, working knowledge of the river and its trees. In recent decades members of the community have turned that knowledge to conservation — helping monitor and protect hornbill nests, and largely ending the earlier practice of hunting the birds.

That guardianship has a hard-won political edge. Under India's Forest Rights Act of 2006 the Kadar settlements have secured Community Forest Rights over a long stretch of this landscape, giving them a formal say over what happens on their territory. Figures such as Geetha Vazhachal — described as the first woman moopathi, or chieftain, of the Kadar — have become well-known voices for the community and for the river, linking indigenous rights with the defence of the river country itself.

For the visitor, all of this gives Vazhachal a different mood from its crowded neighbour. It rewards those who slow down: the shine of spray on rock, the possibility of a hornbill's heavy wingbeats overhead, the sense of standing at the edge of country that people have fought, successfully so far, to keep whole.

Legend & myth

Kerala's state bird lives here, and the whole state believes it is dying of thirst.

The great hornbill is the malamuzhakki vezhambal in Malayalam — roughly, the one whose call makes the mountains resound — and the belief attached to it is that it cannot drink water the way other birds do. It cannot dip its bill in a river or a puddle. The only water it can take is water falling out of the sky, caught in the open bill as it comes down.

So the image that goes with the bird, and it runs all through Malayalam song, poetry and everyday speech, is of a vezhambal high in a bare tree at the worst of the summer heat, head tipped back, bill open to an empty sky, calling and waiting for the first drop of the monsoon. To wait like a vezhambal is to wait for something that will not arrive one moment sooner for your wanting it. Standing at Vazhachal you get the full cruelty of the picture: the bird is supposed to be parched directly above one of the most water-rich landscapes in India.

It is not true, and the truth is better. Great hornbills are fruit specialists — figs above all — and take essentially all the water they need from what they eat. A bird that never goes down to the river is not a bird that cannot. It is a bird with no reason to. The belief most likely grew out of timing: hornbills become loud, mobile and conspicuous in the weeks before the rains break, which is exactly when a Kerala village is watching the sky hardest.

One warning about hornbill folklore, because a good deal of it travels badly. A widely repeated account of rain-doctors ritually killing a hornbill during drought, weighting the body with a stone and throwing it into a river pool, belongs to southern African traditions about the ground hornbill — a different bird on a different continent. It is not Kerala's story and we have left it out. The rain-drinking belief needs no borrowing; it is attested in Kerala's own idiom.

There is a second thing everyone gets wrong here, and it is a matter of where you are looking. Every superlative attached to Vazhachal points upwards — the hornbills, the canopy, the last riverine rainforest in Kerala. The strongest claim this place has is underneath you, in the water going over the rock, and almost nobody mentions it. The Chalakudy carries the richest freshwater fish fauna of any river in Kerala: 98 species recorded, of which 35 are endemic to the Western Ghats and three critically endangered species are found in this river system and nowhere else on earth. Thirty-one of the 98 are classed as vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered.

That is a stranger thing to stand over than a waterfall. This stretch is famous for holding all four peninsular hornbills; the river below it holds fish that exist in this catchment and in no other, and the argument about damming the Chalakudy has always been as much about them as about the birds. The published threats are the ordinary ones and they are cumulative rather than dramatic: damming, loss of riparian cover, pollution, the collection of endemic ornamental species for the aquarium export trade, over-fishing of threatened food fish, and introduced exotics. None of it is visible from the viewpoint, which is precisely why it is worth saying here.