The Forgotten Buddha of Mavelikara

Reshma Suresh
3 min readFeb 8, 2021

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While waiting for the traffic to clear at Buddha junction, I always used to think about what has Buddha got to do with this small junction in a Southern Indian small town of Mavelikara. Throughout my school days, five days a week, I used to cross this junction on my bicycle; it never even occurred to me that there was actually a statue of seated Buddha in a corner near the crossroads. In my defense, the statue was poorly maintained, barely noticeable for a passerby.

The seated Buddha at Buddha Junction, Mavelikara.

The statue, which dates back to the 9th century CE, was discovered in a pond or paddy field adjacent to Kandiyoor Maha Shiva Kshetram (Lord Shiva Temple in Kandiyoor)in the 1900s, later placed on a pedestal situated at the junction in front of Sree Krishna Swamy Kshetram (Lord Krishna Temple in Mavelikara), hence the name, if you already haven’t guessed, Buddha Junction. It was in the mid-1990s, there was a renewed interest in the Buddha statue and our lost Buddhist heritage. The premises were cleaned and renovated which, after all these years, helped recoup its lost glory (if not at least reinstate some respect).

It is widely believed that Buddhism flourished in Onattukara (erstwhile Feudal state in late medieval Kerala), which includes Karthikapally, Kayamkulam, and Mavelikara taluks in Alappuzha and Karunagapally and parts of Kunnathur taluks in Kollam, from 6th century CE to 9th century CE. Post revival of Hinduism in the 8th century CE by Adi Shankaracharya, the Buddhist history was probably consciously forgotten. The timeline is highly disputed and the role of Adi Shankaracharya is also a subject of contention among historians.

However erstwhile Onattukara still carries its Buddhist heritage in its city/village names, local festivities, and folklores. Palli, the common suffix or prefix of city/village names in the Onattukara region is something that was borrowed from the Pali language, which is pivotal to Theravada Buddhism. In medieval Kerala, Buddhist monasteries were also referred to as Palli. Popular city/village names with Palli as suffix or prefix in Onattukara include Karunagapally, Pallickal, Pallithode, Pallithottam, etc. It is also believed that Kandiyoor Maha Shiva Kshetram was a popular Buddhist vihara in medieval times. The local festivities and rituals like Chettikulangara Kettukazhcha, Chettikulangara Kuthiyottam, Parayezhunallathu, Pallivetta are most probably remnants of the long-forgotten Buddhist traditions.

For a southern city in the state of Kerala, a southernmost state in India, Buddhism looks distant and an alien culture or tradition but the truth is far from that. The forgotten and sparsely explored Buddhist history of Kerala lies buried in temples, ponds, paddy fields, and monuments of Onattukara. Mavelikara and its surrounding regions were considered as the cultural capital of the Travancore kingdom and rightly so with such rich and diverse heritage. The cultural exchanges that Mavelikara had are unparalleled in the rest of Kerala but largely ignored by its own people.

The Buddha statue in Mavelikara is one of the many statues that have been discovered in and around Onattukara and surrounding regions. There is probably more lying buried, hidden deep under the weight of centuries of civilization and carefully rewritten pages of history.

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Reshma Suresh
Reshma Suresh

Written by Reshma Suresh

Data Analyst with interest in subaltern history & anthropology. How much ever I would like to call myself an amateur historian, I would not dare so.

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