Muringoor Divine Retreat Centre

The story of Muringoor Divine Retreat Centre

Start with the shape of it, because the shape explains almost everything else. The centre occupies two campuses on opposite sides of NH 544 at Muringoor, between Chalakkudy and Koratty, on ground that slopes to the Chalakudy river. One campus runs the Malayalam retreats; the other runs the English retreats and the other five languages. They are not overflow of one another — they keep different weekly clocks, which is the plainest evidence that this is two parallel operations sharing a name and a kitchen rather than one hall used twice.

The clocks are worth writing down, because nothing else about the place is as concrete. The centre states that retreats on the English campus “begin every week on Sunday at 10 am and conclude on Friday at 2 pm”, and that the Malayalam campus retreats “begin every Sunday at 2 pm and end on Friday at 8 am”. Its own home page gives the English cycle slightly differently, as Sunday 10 am to Friday 1 pm. Both figures come from the same website and we print both rather than choose. Either way it is a six-day residential commitment, not a visit.

Seven languages are held at once, in separate halls: English, Malayalam, Konkani, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu. That list is the reach of the place stated in the most factual way available. Malayalam Wikipedia’s article on Chalakkudy records that people come to the Potta and Muringoor retreat centres not only from across India but from neighbouring countries; the language list is what that sentence looks like in timetable form. Konkani and Telugu in a Thrissur village are not a local congregation — they are Goa, coastal Karnataka and the Andhra country arriving by train.

What the six days contain, in the centre’s own description, is a fixed daily round: the Eucharist, Eucharistic adoration, preaching, testimony, praise and worship, availability of confession, and personal spiritual counselling. That is the whole programme. There are no excursions, no sightseeing and no free afternoons in the published shape of it, and a visitor who arrives expecting a retreat in the wellness sense — a quiet room and a walk by the river — has misread the place completely. This is six days of large-hall preaching and liturgy, in company, from morning to night.

Accommodation and dining are provided on campus for participants, and the centre says that special accommodation will be provided for the bedridden if it is told in advance, and that medical facilities including an ambulance service are available on request. That last detail is not incidental. A significant share of the people who come here are ill, or are bringing someone ill, and the buildings and the staffing are organised around that fact in a way that few religious buildings anywhere are.

Alongside the ordinary weekly cycle the centre runs a published calendar of specialised retreats — Inner Healing, Couples, Family Healing, a long Lenten series through February and March, a Passover retreat around Holy Week, Divine Mercy, Pentecost, Eucharistic Healing, a National Youth Retreat and an International Youth Retreat, a retreat for priests, religious and lay leaders, and an International Bishops, Priests and Religious Retreat in October. On the Malayalam campus a children’s retreat, the Jesteen, runs every week. The calendar is published on the centre’s site and the dates move each year.

Now the numbers, and a warning about them. The centre states that it receives “an average of 5000 retreatants every week”, that “over 10 million pilgrims from all over the world have attended retreats here”, that it runs “5 charitable homes with over 2000 residents”, and that it feeds “over 3000 residents of the Retreat Centre and its charitable homes”. Every one of those figures is the institution’s own and we could find no independent audit of any of them. We print them because the scale is the single most important thing about the place and because a refusal to print any figure would understate it more badly than the figures overstate it. Treat them as the institution’s claim, which is exactly what they are.

The charitable homes are the part of the operation a visitor is least likely to have heard of and the part that is easiest to check on the ground. They are named as the Divine Mercy Home for the aged; St Mary’s Home for destitute women, which also runs a crèche for abandoned children; the Samaritan Home for school-going children aged three to seventeen; the Shantipuram Care Centre for the mentally ill, begun in 2001; a de-addiction centre; and St Vincent Aids Home. That is a residential social-care establishment of some size that happens to share a campus with a preaching ministry.

The centre is known above all for healing — that is why most people come, and it would be dishonest to write the place up without saying so. What we can report is what the institution and its retreatants say: that people come ill and expect to be healed, that testimony of healing is a scheduled part of every retreat, and that the daily services are broadcast on Catholic television channels including Divine TV and Goodness TV. We do not repeat any healing claim as established fact, and we are not in a position to assess any of them. Readers who want to understand the place should understand that this expectation is the engine of the whole operation, and that it is held sincerely by very large numbers of people.

For a traveller who is not here for a retreat, the honest position is that there is not much to do. This is not a monument, a shrine with an art-historical interest, or a landscape. It is a working residential institution with a gate, and the interesting thing about it is the logistics of five thousand people arriving and leaving on the same two days of the week. The best hour to understand it is Sunday morning or Friday midday at Divine Nagar halt or on the NH 544 shoulder, when the buses and the trains do the work. Dress as you would for any Kerala church, ask before photographing anyone, and do not wander into the charitable homes.

Legend & myth

There is no folklore attached to the Divine Retreat Centre, and there should not be. The institution was founded in living memory — the Muringoor property was acquired in 1989, the ministry it grew out of began at Potta in January 1987, and the house that ran that ministry dates only to 1977. Nothing here is old enough to have acquired a legend, and inventing one would be both easy and contemptible. Here is exactly what we searched before publishing that blank: on Malayalam Wikipedia, ധ്യാനകേന്ദ്രം, മുരിങ്ങൂർ, പോട്ട, ഡിവൈൻ ധ്യാനകേന്ദ്രം, പോട്ട ആശ്രമം and വിൻസെൻഷ്യൻ സഭ, and the full text of the ചാലക്കുടി, മുരിങ്ങൂർ, കോട്ടമുറി, മേലൂർ ഗ്രാമപഞ്ചായത്ത് and നെടുംകോട്ട articles; on English Wikipedia, Divine Retreat Centre, Potta Ashram, Potta, Muringoor, Vincentian Congregation, Varkey Kattarath and George Panackal. Not one of them offers a legend of the centre. The blank is real.

The ground under it is a different matter entirely, and this is the part almost no visitor to the retreat knows. Muringoor is where the Nedumkotta was broken. The hamlet immediately beside the highway is called കോട്ടമുറി — Kottamuri, “the cut in the fort” — and Malayalam Wikipedia is explicit about why: the wall that stood in the way of Tipu Sultan’s advance was breached by him at the place in Muringoor known as Kottamuri, and the site is now under the protection of the State Archaeology Department. The name is the memory. Nobody had to write it down for it to survive; it is simply what the place is called.

The Nedumkotta — the Travancore Lines — was a rampart of earth and stone thrown across central Kerala in the reign of Dharma Raja Karthika Thirunal Rama Varma, running from the sea in the west to the Anamalai hills of the Western Ghats in the east. The Cochin government’s archaeologist P. Anujan Achan walked its full length in five days in 1926 and measured it at thirty-five miles, about 56 km. It stood forty to fifty feet high, with a ditch along its northern face sixteen feet wide and twenty feet deep, thorn scrub and bamboo planted beyond the ditch as a second obstacle, wells sunk at intervals for the garrison’s water, powder magazines built against the wall at the tactical points, round forts at spaced intervals, over sixty encampments, and a cave in which more than a hundred soldiers could lie hidden at once. Malayalam sources credit the design and construction to the Dutch engineer Captain De Lannoy, built to a European pattern.

The thing that happened here happened on the night of 28 December 1789. Tipu had camped on the 24th at Thazhekkad, near what is now Kallettumkara, and set about emplacing his heavy guns. On the night of the 28th he moved with fourteen thousand infantry and five hundred pioneers by a roundabout track towards the right of the wall at a place the Malayalam account calls Cheruputhumala, shown the way by a local man. By nine on the morning of the 29th he was inside the line. The Travancore troops had been falling back as he came on — and then a party of them, hidden in a section of the wall, let the Mysore musketeers get well inside and opened fire on them from behind. Malayalam Wikipedia records, in a parenthesis, that the spot where this happened, in Muringoor village, is called വെടിമറപ്പറമ്പ് — Vedimarapparambu, the field of the gunnery screen — to this day.

What followed was a rout in a confined space. Tipu’s commander was killed. The retreating army found the way back too narrow, men were crushed and many fell into the ditch and died there, and when the palanquin bearers went down the Sultan himself fell into the ditch and got out somehow. About two thousand Mysore soldiers died against roughly two hundred on the Travancore side, and a handful of prisoners were taken including five of Tipu’s European officers. By January 1790 he had withdrawn completely. Two claims commonly attached to that night need marking carefully. The first is that Tipu was left with a limp by the fall — Malayalam Wikipedia reports this as something “some historians believe”, and we repeat it on exactly that footing and no firmer. The second is that it was after this night that he gave the Nedumkotta its famous nickname, ഹലാക്കിന്റെ കോട്ട, the fort of ruin. That is a tradition about a name, not a documented utterance.

He came back, of course, and in the spring of 1790 the line was breached — and that breach is the one that named Kottamuri. What the visitor sees now is the least dramatic thing imaginable: a laterite bank beside a lane with a small marker on top, and a stretch of national highway that runs through the gap where a fifty-foot wall used to be. It is, in its way, the honest monument. The wall was a border, the border failed, and the road that replaced it now carries five thousand people a week to a retreat house built two hundred years later on the same ground.

Two stories that circle this place belong somewhere else and we are refusing both by name. The first is Sampaloor, also called Ambazhakad, a few kilometres west across the Chalakudy river — the Jesuit seminary where Arnos Pathiri was ordained and the site associated with early printing in Kerala. Malayalam Wikipedia’s Muringoor article claims for Muringoor only that it is the gateway to Ambazhakad; that is a junction, not a connection, and Sampaloor’s story is its own and much older. The second is Pottan Theyyam, which despite the name has nothing whatever to do with Potta in Thrissur — it is a North Malabar ritual of Kannur and Kasaragod, told on our Kannur pages, and the resemblance is a coincidence of spelling. The war narrative itself — the Dutch sale of the forts, the ultimatum, the fall of Cranganur, the Periyar flooded at Bhoothathankettu to stop the advance — belongs to Pallipuram Fort, where we tell it properly. Muringoor’s share of it is one night, one ambush and one place-name, and that is enough for any village.