Three or four kilometres out of Kalpetta on the Mananthavady road, at a place called Puliyarmala, there is a hillside carrying three separate pieces of Indian history that have nothing to do with one another. Nobody planned the arrangement. It is worth twenty minutes precisely because nobody did.
First: a thirteenth-century Jain temple
The Ananthanatha Swamy temple is dedicated to Anantanatha, the fourteenth of the twenty-four Tirthankaras, and is dated to the thirteenth century — among the oldest surviving structures in Kerala. It is built in a Dravidian manner rather than the Kerala temple idiom: a stepped, pyramidal form with painted carving, a carved granite pillar before the outer gate, carved entrance doors in three panels, and a main shrine whose steps carry something like twenty Jain images and symbols in stone, ceramic, brass and gold.
Wayanad’s Jain layer is real and this site’s Kalpetta page sets out the background — the tradition of a southward migration under Bhadrabahu, the shrines dedicated to Anantanatha, and the mirror temple at Kannadi twenty kilometres away. What Puliyarmala adds is a building you can stand in front of.
Second: an arsenal
Tipu Sultan used the temple premises to store ammunition, and locally the place is still sometimes called Tipu Fort as a result. That is the whole of the second layer and it does not need embroidering: an eighteenth-century army looked at a five-hundred-year-old stone building on a defensible rise beside a road to Mysore and saw a magazine.
It is a useful corrective to the way heritage is usually presented. Old buildings survive because they keep being useful, and being useful is not always dignified. A temple that had been a place of worship for five centuries spent part of its life full of gunpowder, and that is part of why it is still standing.
Third: a boarding house
Beside it is the building that now houses the Gandhi Memorial Museum and Library — a boarding house in which Gandhi rested during his visit to Wayanad in 1934, on the anti-untouchability tour he ran through 1933 and 1934. Speaking afterwards at Calicut he described being taken to "a most beautiful bit of Malabar" with "the most romantic scenery".
On the date we have a genuine disagreement and would rather show it than hide it. This site’s own Kalpetta page gives 14 January 1934, which fits the Kerala leg of the Harijan tour. At least one published account places the Kalpetta visit in August of the same year. We have not found a source that resolves it, so we give the year with confidence and the day without.
- Puliyarmala is 3–4 km from Kalpetta town centre on the road towards Mananthavady, and takes twenty minutes to see.
- The Jain temple is a protected historic structure and, in places, a working shrine. Leather items off, ask before photographing.
- The Gandhi museum is small and its hours are limited; it is worth checking locally rather than turning up late in the day.
- Do not conflate this temple with the Jain temple at Sulthan Bathery or the mirror temple at Kannadi. Wayanad has several and they are routinely mixed up online.
Why the three together are better than any one
Separately they are a modest temple, a footnote about a sultan and a small municipal museum. Together they are a fairly complete summary of what has happened to this plateau: a heterodox faith arriving from the north and putting down stone, a Mysorean army passing through and repurposing it, and a national movement stopping overnight on its way somewhere else. Wayanad is a corridor — between the Malabar coast and the Deccan — and Puliyarmala is what a corridor accumulates.