Places to Visit in Mananthavady

The municipality is large and mostly not urban. Its 80.10 square kilometres make it one of the biggest municipal areas in Kerala, and the built-up town is only a small knot within it — a bus stand, a bazaar of two or three streets, the district hospital, and then paddy, plantation and forest-edge in every direction. The Mananthavady river rises near Periya on the western rim, runs along the boundary and joins the Kabani at Koodalkadavu; the Kabani itself, one of the few rivers of Kerala that flows east, forms the whole southern and eastern edge and carries the town’s water away from the Arabian Sea and into the Kaveri.

The elevation is given two ways and we print both: English sources put Mananthavady at 760 metres (2,490 feet), while the Malayalam Wikipedia article states 2,570 feet, which is about 783 metres. The climate is what that height implies — a mean daily maximum near 27°C and roughly 3,010 millimetres of rain a year, most of it between June and September, when the plateau disappears into cloud for weeks at a time.

For a town of this size the civic apparatus is unusually heavy, and the reason is historical. Mananthavady was the taluk headquarters of Wayanad under the Madras Presidency, and it is still the headquarters of Mananthavady taluk and of the revenue division. The taluk covers about 740 square kilometres across 16 villages and held 258,140 people at the 2011 census. The town’s own local government came late: a panchayat was constituted in 1935 covering only about twenty square kilometres, without Kaniyaram and Ozhakkodi, with the rest added afterwards, and municipal status followed on 14 January 2015, the first council election being held that November across 36 wards.

The colonial machinery that gave the place its shape is still legible on the ground. The Company stationed troops here to hold down the Wayanad country, and the remains of the barracks, the canteen and the officers’ club survive — Club Hill still carries the name — along with a separate military cemetery at Gorimoola and a powder magazine near Chuttakadavu that has been standing, damaged, ever since. Mananthavady began under the Sub-Collector at Thalassery and was later given a Deputy Collector of its own with magisterial powers; between 1859 and 1879 that officer also held civil powers. When William Logan described the town in the Malabar Manual of 1887, its offices ran to a Deputy Collector, a police inspector, a sub-registrar and a sub-assistant conservator of forests, with a government middle school and a post office. Until 1886, every medical officer posted here was European.

The plantations that now define upland Wayanad started, oddly enough, as an army pastime. Private coffee gardens existed around Mananthavady by about 1830, and the panchayat’s own history credits a Ceylon man named Pugh with opening the first proper coffee plantation here around 1835 — the work having begun as recreation for the soldiers garrisoned in the town. Tea followed in 1854 at Chirakkara and Jessie, and by 1892 Parry and Company had established itself in the district. The Forest Department, created in 1859, divided the Wayanad forests into fourteen blocks and put the sub-assistant conservator’s office at Mananthavady, which is why the forest bureaucracy that now controls access to Tholpetty, Kuruva and Brahmagiri has always been administered from this town.

Underneath the planters lay an older tenurial order. Most of the farmland in the panchayat belonged to the Sree Valliyoorkavu Devaswom and to the Vadiyoor Devaswom at Koyileri, with Brahmin, Chetti and Gowda landlords holding it and tenants working it on written lease. A tenant paid the landlord an amount of paddy equal to the seed sown for wet land, and five rupees an acre for dry. The agricultural labour was done by the Paniyan, Kurichiya, Adiyan and Kuruma communities. That arrangement is the direct ancestor of the labour question this district is still arguing about, and it is why land, not scenery, is the subject that matters most here.

Two waves of newcomers reshaped the town in the twentieth century. Muslim families trace themselves to the Pathans who reached Mananthavady in Tipu Sultan’s campaigns and to those who followed; the Pathani mosque at Thazheyangadi is recorded as the oldest. Christian migration began as a trickle in the early 1930s and became a flood by the 1960s, driven initially by the food shortages of the Second World War, with families arriving from Thodupuzha, Muvattupuzha and Pala. The first church, Amalothbhava, dates from 1848, and a second small church was maintained at Pathivayal specifically for converts from the Kurichiya community — a detail that says a good deal about how mission and caste worked in the hills. The 2011 census returned the municipality as 46.31 per cent Hindu, 29.52 per cent Muslim and 23.6 per cent Christian.

The town was also, until quite recently, a hard place to live. Malaria was endemic across Wayanad and Mananthavady was not spared; local memory records that the usual recourse in serious illness was the long journey down to a vaidyar at Vadakara. When petrol ran short in the war, buses here were run on charcoal and coir. In 1946–47, on the suspicion of plague, the town was closed and the roofs of houses were pulled apart to get at the rats. Set against that, the present figures are a genuine achievement: 47,974 people at the 2011 census, a density of 599 per square kilometre, 1,051 women per 1,000 men and literacy at 91.98 per cent.

What Mananthavady is for the traveller follows from all of this. It is not a viewpoint town; it is the service town — the hospital, the banks, the fuel, the buses and the forest offices for the whole northern half of the district. Roads run west over the ghat to Thalassery and Vatakara, about 65 kilometres to the latter and around 110 kilometres down to Kozhikode, south to Kalpetta at a distance variously given as 32 and 35 kilometres, and north-east through Tholpetty and Kutta into Karnataka for Kodagu and Mysuru. That last road crosses the Nagarhole forest, where through traffic is barred at night, generally quoted as 6 pm to 6 am. Plan the day around that gate rather than around the distance.

Legend & myth

The name is the town’s first legend, and it is a hunting story. The prevailing explanation is that Mananthavady is a worn-down form of māne eytha vāḍi — the settlement where the deer was shot — and the argument is usually clinched by pointing at Ambukuthi, “where the arrow struck”, on the far side of the plateau. It is a satisfying etymology and it may well be right. But it is not the oldest name on record. A copper water-spout plaque preserved at the Anantanatha Swami temple at Varadoor carries an inscription in Kannada script that calls this place Hosangadi — new market, or new town — and one reading of the local past has that new market rising between an older settlement and a bead-and-pearl bazaar after the fall of the Mahodayapuram kings. Among the Adivasi communities the town is not called Mananthavady at all but Manthodi. In Pazhassi Raja’s own time the tract was Vemom, in Ilamkur nadu, and the British wrote it Manantoddy or simply called the whole thing Wayanad Bazaar. Later still the town was known by its trades — Chettitheruvu, Erumatheruvu, Anchampeedika. Five names, and only one of them involves a deer.

Behind the Kottayam rajas and the Company lies an older tradition of who owned this country. Wayanad remembers a line of Girivargam — hill-people — chieftains, of whom the last two were kinsmen named Arippan and Vedan; everything north of Panamaram, which is to say the whole of the present Mananthavady taluk, is said to have been Arippan’s. The tradition holds that the line ended not in battle but in treachery, Vedan being destroyed by the raja of Kumbala Maippadi. What lifts this above campfire history is its provenance: the oral traditions of Wayanad were collected and written down under an order of the Malabar district court in 1810, and versions of them survive in the Mackenzie manuscripts. It is still tradition rather than record — but it is tradition taken down within living memory of the events it describes, which is more than most Kerala origin stories can claim.

The Adivasi communities of the taluk carry their own cosmologies, and they are not decoration. The Adiyan, who after Thirunelli are most numerous in Mananthavady, trace themselves to ancestors named Keeyoruthi and Meloorachavan, and the landscape their myth attaches to lies in the country between Thirunelli, Pakkam and this town. Their song-and-story tradition is one of the richest in the district. The Ooralikkuruma, the craft specialists who make almost everything a household needs, are described as naga-makkal, children of the serpent. The Paniyar remember Ippimala as their home hill. These are living traditions belonging to particular families in particular hamlets, and the honest thing to say about them here is that they are theirs to tell — this record notes that they exist and where, and does not paraphrase them into travel prose.

The town’s most famous story is a death, and it has two endings. On 30 November 1805 Kerala Varma Pazhassi Raja was brought to bay at Mavila Thodu near Pulpally. The Company’s account, and the version most historians accept, is that he was shot in a short and violent skirmish. The tradition preserved in Malayalam is different: that rather than be taken alive he swallowed his diamond ring. Both survive side by side in the sources and neither has displaced the other, so both are printed here. What is not in dispute is what happened next, and it is the reason this town holds his memory at all. The body was carried the fifteen-odd miles to Mananthavady the following day under strong guard, and the British — who had hunted him for twelve years — had him cremated at Thazheyangadi with Brahmin rites and the remains interred, the ceremony conducted with official honours. They then built the tomb. A tree grew over it and is standing yet.

The war that ended there had produced a folklore of its own around a Kurichiya archer. Thalakkal Chandu commanded the bow companies, and Pazhassi is remembered saying that even if every Nair deserted him he would fight the Company again so long as the Kurichiya stood. Chandu was taken by a ruse in November 1805, a fortnight before the Raja himself, and beheaded beside a koli tree near the Panamaram post. When Edachena Kunkan heard of it he is said to have answered only that he had lost his right hand. The koli tree at Panamaram is still pointed out, and it took 207 years for the state to put a memorial beside it; a second memorial to Chandu on the Kabani bank near Panamaram was opened on 22 September 2012, displaying replicas of the weapons and the traditional farm tools of the Kurichiya. Since 1982 KIRTADS has run an archery competition in his name for Kerala’s Scheduled Tribes — a commemoration that is also, unusually, a continuation.

The revolt of 1812 came wrapped in omen and ritual. The Wayanad bamboos flowered and died that year, which is a real ecological event on a decades-long cycle and reliably brings rats and then hunger, and Malayalam accounts wonder whether the famine that followed helped light the fire. Kurichiya priests told the fighters that the gods of their own hills would be with them. The weapon was the bow, and the arrowheads, tradition insists, were made from iron bars prised out of the Company’s bridges — the colonial infrastructure disassembled into ammunition. Thomas Hervey Baber, the sub-collector who had hunted Pazhassi and now had to face his old enemies again, recorded that the aim of the rising was to drive the vattathoppikkar — the round-hat men — out of the country. It is the most quotable line anyone left from the whole affair, and it comes to us through the man it was aimed at.

Three well-known legends of this landscape are deliberately left alone here, because they belong elsewhere and are told in full on their own pages. The story of Brahma, the swan and the amla tree that gives Thirunelli its name, and the Papanasini that dissolves sin, belong to Thirunelli. The tradition that the Bhagavathy of Valliyoorkavu is swayambhu and chose the river grove for herself — and the far harder history of nilppupanam, the standing money handed over before the goddess to bind a year’s labour — belongs to Valliyoorkavu, three kilometres from this town, and we tell it there rather than borrowing its weight for the town hub. The arrow of Lakshmana and the spring it opened belong to the Karnataka face of Brahmagiri. A town that has its own five names and its own two accounts of a king’s death does not need to annex anyone else’s miracles.