Kanakamala Kurishumudi

The story of Kanakamala Kurishumudi

Get the geography right first, because almost every account of Kanakamala collapses two places into one. At the bottom, at roughly 30 metres above sea level and reached by a tarred road, sits the parish church, with its cemetery, parish hall and a marked-out parking area beside it. The post office and the government homoeopathy hospital are on the same short stretch of road, a few dozen metres from the church door. The shrine that gives the hill its name is not there. It is 771 metres away in a straight line, on a bearing of 077°, at the top of the hill at about 310 metres. Between the two runs the pilgrim path, and everything that matters about a visit happens on it.

That path is mapped, and the numbers are worth having before you set out. It is 1,039 metres long. It leaves the churchyard at about 37 metres, is at 74 metres by the 220-metre mark, 155 metres by 430, 237 metres by 684 and 314 metres by the time the summit shrine is in front of you. There is no flat section and no false summit; it simply climbs, and the steepest run is the middle third, where it gains close to 40 metres of height for every hundred metres you walk. OpenStreetMap grades it mountain_hiking with good visibility, which is mapper’s shorthand for a real hill path rather than a stepped and railed pilgrim stair. No motor road reaches the top.

The surface is the thing nobody warns you about. Much of the upper climb is bare gneissic sheet rock, tilted and scoured smooth, with tussocks of grass rooted in the cracks and low scrub and small trees along the crest. In the dry months it grips well and the exposed stone throws heat back at you. After rain the same rock is slick, and the photograph on Commons of pilgrims going up in September shows the sheet glistening and the group picking a line along the grassy seams rather than straight up the slab. Barefoot ascent is a common act of penance here, and it is worth knowing that the barefoot pilgrims ahead of you are walking on hot or wet rock, not on paving.

Fourteen crosses mark the way. They are the Stations of the Cross, the standard Catholic devotion of fourteen moments in Christ’s Passion, laid out along the ascent so that the climb becomes the meditation — the same device used on pilgrim hills across the Catholic world and on at least two others in Kerala. The first station is at the foot, on the flat ground under the trees before the slope begins: a plain white-painted concrete cross on a black plinth, with room around it for a group to stand. Pilgrims gather there, pray, and quite often leave their sandals at its base before starting up.

The belief attached to the top is specific and it is worth stating exactly as Malayalam sources state it: that whoever climbs past all fourteen crosses and prays at the chapel on the summit will have the sins they have committed wiped away. It is not a claim about ancient miracles and it is not tied to a relic. It is about the completed act — the fourteen, then the prayer, in that order — which is why local usage treats the ascent itself, rather than the building at the top, as the pilgrimage.

April is when the hill is busiest, and the reason is Holy Week. English sources describe Kanakamala as a place of pilgrimage during Holy Week and particularly on Good Friday, and Easter falls in late March or April, which puts Good Friday and the days around it squarely in the month Malayalam sources name as the crowded one. There is an annual Kanakamala Perunnal that draws thousands. I could not establish its calendar date from any source I could reach, and I have not guessed one — see the FAQ, which says so.

Outside the Perunnal it is a quiet hill, and quiet is most of its appeal. The view from partway up is the flat green Chalakudy plain running west to a hazy horizon — coconut, rubber and the scattered white of village houses — with the parish church directly below you, small enough to hold in a hand. Transmission towers cross the lower ground. The upper slopes are scrub and grass; the Mupliyam Model Forest Station at Chungal is two kilometres north, and forest cover picks up again in that direction.

Administratively the place sits in a slightly confusing spot, and it is better to explain that than to tidy it away. Kanakamala is ward 7 of Kodakara grama panchayat, in Chalakudy taluk, Thrissur district. Its postcode is 680689. A reverse geocode of the church will return Kodakara, because Kodakara is the panchayat town and is only 5.6 km away by road; Chalakudy is the taluk headquarters, the nearest railway station and the town most visitors will actually be coming from, 8.0 km by road. Both are correct answers to different questions.

The settlement around the church is small and largely institutional. Besides the church, the post office and the homoeopathy hospital, there is a primary aided school that dates from 1940, an adoration convent, and an ashram called Akasaparavakal — literally the birds of the sky — which is a charitable institution for orphans. The diocesan website recorded the parish population as 2,250 in October 2013. This is a village of a couple of thousand people that happens to have a pilgrim hill behind it, and on most days of the year it behaves like one.

Finally, be careful with the name in a search engine. There are at least three places in Kerala called Kanakamala — this one in Thrissur, a laterite hill at Peringathur in Kannur, and a locality in Chithara panchayat in Kollam. They get mixed up constantly, including on Wikimedia Commons, where two bird photographs taken at the Kannur hill sit in the same category as the photographs of this one, and one of them is additionally filed under Birds of Thrissur district. If a source about Kanakamala does not tell you which district it means, it is not telling you anything.

Legend & myth

The origin story of this pilgrimage is a dream, and unusually for a Kerala hill it comes with a name and a year. In 1940 Fr Anthappan Valiyaveettil, then vicar of St Antony’s Church at Perambra — a large white church with a central dome and flanking towers, 2.85 km west of the hill and in the neighbouring ward of the same panchayat — is said to have seen a place in a dream. He went looking for it, decided that Kanakamala was the hill he had been shown, and began leading people up it. That is the founding act. The parish church at the foot came three years later, in 1943, and it was dedicated not to St Thomas but to St Anthony of Padua, the patron of the priest’s own parish. The pilgrimage is older than the church it now starts from.

The reasoning he is credited with is as interesting as the dream, because it is an argument rather than a vision. St Thomas, in the tradition of the Kerala Christians, came ashore in AD 52 at Azhikode near Kodungallur. Kanakamala, the account runs, is the nearest hill to that landfall — and praying on hills was characteristic of Jesus and his disciples. Therefore the apostle would have come this way, and therefore this height was already holy before anyone thought to say so. It is a deduction built out of a map and a habit of scripture, and it is the reason a hill whose church honours St Anthony has a summit shrine that OpenStreetMap and the Malayalam Wikipedia both record under the name of St Thomas.

It is worth sitting with how recent all this is. Kerala is full of shrines whose beginnings dissolve into the fifth century or the ninth, and where the honest thing to write is that nobody knows. Kanakamala is the opposite case. We can name the man, name his parish, name the year, and name the reasoning — and the tradition is no less real for it. Within a single lifetime a farming hill above a small village became a place where thousands come to walk barefoot up bare rock in April. Watching a devotion acquire its shape inside living memory is rarer, and in some ways more instructive, than another undatable legend.

There is a legend I am refusing outright, and naming the refusal is the point. Malayattoor, 25.7 km south-east across the Periyar, has the great St Thomas story of this coast: the apostle fleeing hostile locals up the hill, drawing a cross on the summit rock and praying, and the villagers afterwards seeing a golden cross at the spot — which is how Kurisumudi got its name — together with the venerated rock said to carry his footprint. Those belong to Malayattoor. Our own Malayattoor page tells them. They do not belong to Kanakamala, and the pull to lend them across is strong precisely because both hills are called kurishumudi and both are St Thomas hills. Nothing I found attaches a footprint, an appearing cross or an apostolic visit as event to Kanakamala. What attaches to Kanakamala is a priest’s inference that the apostle would plausibly have passed nearby, which is a different kind of claim and a weaker one, and saying so is not a criticism of the devotion.

The name itself is the second temptation, and I am leaving it alone. Kanakamala means golden hill — kanakam is gold. On a hill whose great neighbour is famous for a golden cross that appeared out of nowhere, that is an almost irresistible invitation to write a sentence connecting the two. No source I could reach explains why this hill is called golden: not the Malayalam Wikipedia article on the church, not the Kodakara panchayat article, not the Chalakudy article, not the English article on the village. It may be laterite colour, it may be a personal or family name, it may be something recorded only in a parish register. Until somebody produces the reason, the honest position is that the name is unexplained and that its resemblance to the Malayattoor legend is a coincidence we should not tidy into a story.

The third temptation is the wrong district. Search for Kanakamala legends in Malayalam and you will meet a genuinely old story — a Sufi traveller who came from Kufa in about AD 824 and based himself at Kanakamala, remembered in the accounts around Peringathur. That is the Kannur Kanakamala, a laterite hill some two hundred and fifty kilometres up the coast, and it has nothing to do with this one. It is a good story and it belongs to Thalassery’s country, not to Chalakudy’s. Anything you read about Kanakamala that does not name its district should be assumed to be about a different hill until it proves otherwise.

And now the blank, stated plainly, because a hill with a pilgrimage on it almost always carries an older layer and its absence here needs evidence rather than silence. I searched the Malayalam for കനകമല on its own and paired with ഐതിഹ്യം, ക്ഷേത്രം, ചരിത്രം, കുരിശുമുടി, പെരുന്നാൾ and തീർത്ഥാടനം; I read the Malayalam articles on the Kanakamala church, on Kodakara grama panchayat — which is the administrative level up, where the local lore usually sits — on the Kodakara forane church and on Chalakudy itself; I read the English article on the village and the one on Kodakara; and I checked what OpenStreetMap holds within two and a half kilometres of the summit. The panchayat article lists fourteen Hindu temples in Kodakara by name and puts Kanakamala Kurishumudi among the four principal non-Hindu places of worship. Not one of those sources records a temple, a kavu, a deity, a rock, a spring or a story on this hill before 1940.

I do not think that blank is a search failure, and I will say why rather than leave it hanging. Two things stand behind it. The nearest hilltop with a pre-Christian tradition is Aareshwaram, 1.7 km north, whose ritual is well attested and well recorded — so the sources plainly do cover hill traditions in this exact patch of country when there is one to cover, and they simply say nothing about Kanakamala. And the founding account itself, which comes from within the devotion and therefore has every incentive to claim ancient standing, does not claim any: it rests on a dream and a map argument, not on a takeover of an older sacred site. Set against that, a hill that was forest, grazing and rock until a parish priest in the next village had a dream is entirely credible. If a reader knows differently — a Malayalam parish history, an older name for the rock, a family tradition — that correction is welcome and we will print it.