Sulthan Bathery sits at about 900 metres on the Kozhikode–Mysuru highway, in the driest, flattest and most Karnataka-facing corner of Wayanad — a working market town of some 45,000 people that is the headquarters of a taluk, a block and a municipality, and the only taluk in Kerala to share a border with two other states. Its name is a British clerk’s spelling of a Mysore army store: before Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan came up the ghat this was Ganapathivattam, the ground of the Ganapathi temple, and before that it was Kidanganad. The 2011 census counted 45,417 residents at roughly 441 to 444 people per square kilometre, with literacy at 89.36 per cent. Most visitors treat it as the bed-and-breakfast for Edakkal and Muthanga. It is worth an hour on its own terms.
Start at the western end of the bazaar, where a low black-stone building stands on a raised plinth behind a fence, ringed by broken pillars and coconut palms. This is the Kidanganad basti, the Jain temple that gave the town its second name and its first identity. It is not a ruin in the picturesque sense — the walls are square, the roof slabs are still seated, the doorway still has its carved jambs — but it is empty. There is no image in the sanctum. What survives is the architecture: a garbhagriha, an antarala, a closed mahamandapa of four pillars in two rows, a pillared mukhamandapa of six, and, unusually for a building in this idiom, a detached namaskara mandapa of the sort Kerala temples use.
The pillars are the reason to come. They are square in section with their middle lengths cut back into sixteen facets, and across those facets run floral bands, serpent-coils, hanging garlands, vajra motifs, geese, and — set into shallow square frames near the top of the shafts — seated Tirthankara figures, cross-legged in padmasana with the hands folded in dhyanamudra. The stair rails into the mukhamandapa carry vyali beasts. Kerala has very little medieval stone carving of this quality, because Kerala built in laterite, timber and tile; this is a Karnataka building that happens to stand in Kerala, and its presence is the plainest evidence that Wayanad’s medieval trade ran uphill to Mysore, not downhill to the coast.
That trade is the town’s real founding story. Settlement here is dated to around 1400 CE, and the first settlers on record are Jain merchants who came down from Karnataka into a landscape that until then had been Adivasi country. They gave the place a Kannada name — recorded variously as Hannaradu Veedhi and Hennaru Beedike — and they used a forest track over the plateau to move pepper, cardamom and hill produce north-east. Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan widened that track for an army. K. P. Unnikrishnan, as Surface Transport Minister in V. P. Singh’s government, made it National Highway 212. It is now NH-766, and the whole of Sulthan Bathery is still arranged along it.
The town proper is a Kerala highway town: a long main road, a bus stand full of blue-and-white private buses working the Kalpetta, Mananthavady, Gudalur and Mysuru routes, and behind them a grid of hardware shops, jewellers, bakeries, and the tea-and-parotta places that keep drivers going. Bathery is the district’s biggest trading centre, and it is unusually mixed even by Kerala standards. Roughly a third of the municipality is Muslim and about a fifth Christian; the rest is Hindu and Adivasi, and no single community holds a majority. The municipality counts 26 temples, 15 churches and 15 mosques inside its boundary. St Mary’s Orthodox Cathedral, founded in 1944, is the seat of the Sulthan Bathery diocese.
The land around the town is the flattest farmland in Wayanad — paddy in the low vayals, then coffee, pepper and ginger on the rises, with banana and areca filling in. This is also the district’s driest quarter. Bathery takes about 2,322 millimetres of rain a year, which sounds enormous until you set it against Lakkidi, Vythiri and Meppadi on the western scarp, which take 3,000 to 4,000. The ghat wrings the monsoon out before it reaches here, and the result is a growing season and a crop mix closer to Gundlupet’s than to Kozhikode’s.
Modern Bathery is largely a twentieth-century construction, and it happened fast. A single L. P. school appeared under the Malabar District Board in the 1920s. Until about 1940 the journey down to Kozhikode was made by bullock cart. Kidanganad panchayat was constituted in 1934; Sulthan Bathery panchayat was carved out of it in 1968, Noolpuzha the same year and Nenmeni in 1974. P. C. Ahmad Haji, an Indian Union Muslim League district office-holder, was panchayat president for three decades and is credited locally with the bus stand, the taluk hospital, the panchayat stadium, Kerala’s first mini industrial estate and Kerala’s first Lakshamveedu housing colony. Municipal status came in 2015.
The town’s least comfortable modern fact sits about fourteen kilometres east, at Muthanga. In August 2001, after 32 reported starvation deaths among Kerala’s Adivasi communities, C. K. Janu and the Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha built huts outside the Secretariat in Thiruvananthapuram and stayed for 48 days. The government signed an agreement promising five acres where five acres could be found and at least one acre elsewhere, a protective law against alienation, and at least 10,000 acres to be located and distributed in Wayanad, the district with the most landless Adivasi families. Distribution was to begin on 1 January 2002. It did not begin.
On 5 January 2003 families occupied forest land at Muthanga and built an oor — a settlement — inside the sanctuary. The state left them there for about 45 days and then went in. On 19 February 2003 the police opened fire. Constable K. V. Vinod was killed and so was at least one Adivasi man; the official count of deaths connected to the operation is five, and independent accounts have run higher. Between 132 and 135 people were arrested, among them 99 women, and taken to the Central Jail in Kannur; C. K. Janu and M. Geethanandan were arrested on 21 February. Land titles for the last 37 of the 283 families involved were handed over only in March 2023, twenty years on. What the firing produced in the meantime was the Aralam resettlement in Kannur, which we cover on that page rather than this one.
Bathery is also where Kerala’s road east stops at nine o’clock at night. NH-766 crosses Bandipur, and Karnataka has barred night traffic through the park since 2009 — broadly 9 pm to 6 am for cars, and from 6 pm for two-wheelers. If you are driving to Mysuru or Bengaluru you either clear Muthanga before the gate shuts or you go round by Mananthavady and Kutta, which is longer and rougher but stays open. For a town whose whole existence is owed to that road, it is a live and much-argued grievance, and it is the single most useful thing to know before you plan a Bathery day.
Legend & myth
The best story in Sulthan Bathery is a hole in the ground. In front of the Jain basti, set into the paved court, there is a square stone well, now covered with a steel grille. Local tradition holds that a tunnel runs out of that well all the way to Mysore — a hundred and fifteen kilometres of it, under the Bandipur forest, dug or used by Tipu Sultan so that his garrison could move men and powder without touching the road. It is a wonderful story and it is almost certainly not true. No tunnel has ever been found, no survey records one, and the distance is preposterous. But the story is doing honest work: it is a folk memory of the fact that this small Wayanad bazaar really was, for a few years at the end of the eighteenth century, an outpost of Mysore rather than of Malabar, and that the temple in the middle of it really was full of ammunition.
The name carries its own contested lore. Bathery is generally derived from the Portuguese bateria, meaning a battery or gun emplacement, taken into the region’s vocabulary and then into English as the Sultan’s Battery; the Jain settlers’ Kannada name, Hannaradu Veedhi or Hennaru Beedike, dropped out entirely. The older Malayalam name, Ganapathivattam, comes from the Ganapathi temple — and this is where the published versions tangle. English-language sources routinely write that Tipu used a thirteenth-century Ganapathi temple as his battery, which folds two separate buildings into one sentence. The Bathery Mahaganapathi temple is a living Hindu temple in the town and is one of the few in Kerala where Ganapathi is the principal deity rather than the doorkeeper; the basti at the western end of the bazaar is Jain. Ganapathivattam is named for the first. The battery tradition attaches to the second. Both are true; they are not the same claim, and we do not merge them.
The Jain building has one more layer of borrowed identity. Before the archaeologists took charge of it, it was known locally as Tipuvinte Kotta — Tipu’s fort — and it is recorded as having served in turn as a Jain temple, a Hindu temple and a trading hall before it became a magazine. A building that has been four things to four communities in six hundred years is not a monument with a legend attached; it is a legend with a roof on it.
Around the town the older belief-world is Kurichiya, and it is intact enough to describe rather than reconstruct. The Kurichiya’s own god is Malakkari — Kari of the hills — understood as Shiva appearing in the form of a hunter, and it is Malakkari who is asked for release from sorcery, protection from possession and success in the hunt. Alongside him stand Malon, whom the Kurichiya hold to have been installed in the forest by Shankaracharya himself; Karimbil Bhagavathi, who is asked for safe childbirth; and Athiralan Theyyam. Once a year the Malakkari theyyam is performed, and the preparation is the beautiful part: long green bamboos are cut, split partway along their length, filled with toddy and stood leaning together. That is the kumbham. Through the night before the theyyam appears the Kurichiya circle the leaning bamboos to a single chenda, singing the kumbhappattu, which asks the god to keep four things in four pairs of three — woman, child and family; soil, hill and forest; mittam, oor and nadu; plough, bullock and cow — and promises, if he does, that the bunch of bananas and the coconut will not fail.
The bow is not only a weapon here. A Kurichiya carries a bow and ten or twenty arrows as a matter of course, and the bow appears at both ends of a life: when a child is born the bowstring is drawn and sounded over it, and when a Kurichiya dies the bow and an arrow are planted upright at the grave. That is worth holding in mind when reading what happened in 1812, because the rebels of that year, short of iron, are said to have levered the rods out of bridges to make arrowheads. The line between the ritual object and the insurgent weapon was not a line the Company ever managed to draw.
Bathery’s living festival calendar belongs to other buildings. The utsavam at the Sulthan Bathery Mariyamman Kovil is treated locally as the town’s own festival, the one everybody turns out for. The Mahaganapathi temple flies its flag on the fifteenth of Makaram for an eight-day kodiyettu utsavam, and marks Vinayaka Chaturthi in Chingam and Pathamudayam in Medam; it is run by a lay committee of residents rather than a devaswom. Kuppadi Devi temple and Karivallikkunnu temple hold their own festivals, and theyyam is performed at Pazhappathur.
The Jain basti holds none of this, and the absence is documented rather than assumed: it is in the custody of the archaeology department, and Malayalam sources state plainly that only temple rites are observed there and no utsavam is celebrated. A protected monument is not a dead building, but it is a quiet one, and Mahavir Jayanti aside, Bathery’s Jain temple keeps no festival calendar.
Two things we looked for and did not find, and say so rather than invent. Bathery town has no Ramayana legend of its own — the Wayanad Sita traditions belong to Pulpally and to the forest, and we tell them where they belong instead of borrowing them up the road. And the basti has no founder story that the sources agree on: one Malayalam account attributes it to the Hoysala king Vishnuvardhana, which cannot be reconciled with a thirteenth-century date or with the Vijayanagara idiom of the carving, and we set it out below as a conflict rather than repeating it as fact. What the forest around the town does hold, scattered and largely unstudied, are veerakkallu — hero stones, memorials to men who died in some medieval fight or migration — along with the remains of old check dams. Nobody has written their story. It is still lying there.
More about Sulthan Bathery
History
Wayanad’s recorded history reaches this plateau from Karnataka, not from the coast. The Ganga emperor Erayappa is said to have named the region Bayalnad, the land of swamps, around 930 CE; the Kadambas displaced the Gangas in the twelfth century, the Hoysala Vishnuvardhana campaigned here around 1104, the Vijayanagara period follows in the sixteenth century, and in 1610 Raja Wodeyar of Mysore took authority over the country. Every one of those powers came over the Deccan side. That is the single fact that explains why Sulthan Bathery looks the way it does.
The Jain temple at Kidanganad belongs to that world. It is generally dated to the thirteenth century CE and attributed to Jains who migrated in from Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, and its inscriptions, pillar reliefs and plan are read as Vijayanagara in idiom. It measures roughly 25 by 7.5 by 4 metres, is built of black basalt with stone slab roofing, and its gateway gopurams and outer mukhamandapa had already collapsed before conservation began. The Government of India declared it a monument of national importance in 1921 and it is protected by the Archaeological Survey of India; in October 2014 a section of the building came down during ASI conservation work. Other Jain remains survive nearby at Punchavayal and Puthenangadi, their carved pillars half-fallen and the ground around them under scrub.
The British arrived through Pazhassi Raja’s defeat, and Ganapathivattam appears in their paperwork almost at once. H. S. Grahame’s report records Wayanad’s first revenue settlement being begun by the Thalassery sub-collector T. H. Baber, working with divisions that included Munnanad, Muthurnad, Ilankurnad, Nallurnad, Porannur, Kurumbala, Nambikkolli and Ganapathivattam; a police picket at a place written as Ganapathipalayam also turns up in the records. Company rule over Wayanad ran until the Crown took direct charge in 1858, after which the district answered to the Malabar Collector until 1947.
The rising this town should be known for came in 1812. After Pazhassi’s death the Company’s treatment of the Kurichiya hardened: smallholdings were seized, arrears were enforced, shifting cultivation was banned outright, and Principal Collector Thomas Warden’s revenue settlement left the cultivator about a third of what remained after costs while the Company took six-tenths and the janmi four-tenths of the rest — payable in cash. Families sold household goods to clear arrears and defaulters were put to work as bonded labour. In 1812 the bamboo across the Wayanad hills flowered, which in these forests means the bamboo then dies, and scarcity followed.
On 25 March 1812 the Kurichiya met at Malloor to take counsel and the police broke the meeting up by force. That was the trigger. Under their leader Ramanambi, and with the Kurumbar alongside them, they stopped the revenue collectors, closed the ghat passes completely, attacked police stations and took control of movement across Wayanad; men in Company employment resigned to join. Their priests told them their clan gods were with them. Sub-collector T. H. Baber recorded that the aim was to drive the round-hat wearers out of the country. They defeated a Company detachment in the field at a place recorded as Elachuram, with Plakka Chandu, Ayiraveettil Konthappan, Masilottadan Yamu and Venkalon Kelu leading from the front. The weapons were bows and arrows. Baber asked for reinforcements; troops came from Srirangapatna with modern arms and closed on the rebels from every side, and the rising was fully suppressed by 8 May 1812. Venkalon Kelu was publicly hanged. Ramanambi was beheaded — Malayalam sources give the date as 1 May, in a year printed as 1825, which we flag rather than smooth over. Historians describe the Kurichiya rising as both the first and the last anti-colonial tribal revolt in South India, and as the final campaign fought by Pazhassi’s own veterans.
The best-known Kurichiya soldier belongs to the earlier war, not to 1812, and it is worth saying so because the two are constantly confused. Talakkal Chandu commanded Pazhassi’s Kurichiya archers and led the assault on the British military post at Panamaram on 11 October 1802, where about 150 Kurichiya fighters under Chandu and Edachena Kunkan wiped out a camp of seventy soldiers under Captain Dickenson, taking 112 muskets, six boxes of ammunition and six thousand rupees, burning the post, and losing five of their own — the figures are William Logan’s, in the Malabar Manual. Chandu was captured on 15 November 1805 and beheaded beneath a koli tree by the camp. He was dead seven years before the 1812 rising began. A memorial was finally raised at the spot at Panamaram 207 years later, built with ₹16 lakh from the local-area fund of the MP M. I. Shanavas; since 1982 KIRTADS has run an archery competition in his name for Kerala’s Scheduled Tribes.
Why visit
The Kidanganad basti is the finest piece of medieval stone carving in Wayanad and one of very few Vijayanagara-idiom buildings anywhere in Kerala — an ASI monument of national importance since 1921, and free to walk into.
It is the only place where you can read the whole of the town’s name off two buildings: the Mahaganapathi temple that made it Ganapathivattam, and the Jain temple that made it the Sultan’s Battery.
Sulthan Bathery is the practical base for Edakkal Caves and the Muthanga gate, with the district’s largest bus stand and the widest choice of rooms and food in eastern Wayanad.
It is the only taluk in Kerala bordering two other states, which makes it the natural staging point for a Wayanad–Bandipur–Mysuru run — provided you plan around the night closure.
The country either side of the highway is the flattest, driest and most workaday farmland in Wayanad: paddy vayals, coffee, pepper and ginger, and an easy hour’s drive without hairpins.
It is where the Adivasi land question in Kerala became national news, and Muthanga is seventeen kilometres from the bus stand.
