A weathered granite shrine standing quietly in the hills a few kilometres from Kalpetta, the Puliyarmala Jain Temple — properly the Ananthanatha Swami Temple — is one of the last living witnesses to Wayanad’s remarkable medieval Jain past. Dedicated to Ananthanatha, the fourteenth Tirthankara of the Jain faith, it is a place where austere Digambara spirituality, Dravidian stonecraft and the turbulent military history of eighteenth-century Malabar all meet under one low, brooding roof.
The story of Puliyarmala Jain Temple
Long before Wayanad became a byword for coffee estates and monsoon mist, these highlands were part of a busy medieval trade world. Jain merchants and settlers — followers of the austere, sky-clad Digambara tradition — moved up from the Karnataka plateau and along the spice routes into the hills, and for several centuries they were among the most influential communities in the region. They built granite basadis (Jain temples), endowed them, and wove Jainism into the fabric of local life. The Puliyarmala temple is one of the finest survivors of that world, a rare place where you can still feel the presence of a faith that once shaped this whole plateau.
The temple is dedicated to Ananthanatha Swami, the fourteenth of the twenty-four Tirthankaras — the enlightened teacher-liberators whom Jains revere as guides who forded the ocean of worldly suffering. In the Digambara understanding, a Tirthankara is not a god to be petitioned so much as a supreme example of renunciation and self-conquest; the idol you approach here is a serene, meditative figure, utterly still, embodying the Jain ideals of non-violence (ahimsa), non-attachment and inner victory. That quiet, inward mood is exactly what the temple radiates.
For all its serenity today, the shrine sits at a genuine historical crossroads. Older accounts tie the site to the great southern kingdoms and to a period when the surrounding country moved through Jain, then Shaiva and Vaishnava, patronage — and you can still see that layered heritage in carvings that mingle Jain Tirthankaras with Hindu deities on the same walls (indicative — dating and attribution vary between sources, confirm locally). Wayanad’s Jain community gradually shrank over the centuries, and by the modern era many basadis fell silent; that Puliyarmala kept its lamp lit at all is part of its quiet drama.
The temple’s most talked-about chapter belongs to the eighteenth century and to Tipu Sultan of Mysore, whose armies swept repeatedly through Wayanad during the Anglo-Mysore campaigns. Local tradition — echoed at the far more famous Jain temple at Sultan Bathery to the east — holds that Tipu’s forces pressed this sturdy granite shrine into service as a garrison and a store for guns and ammunition, which is why villagers still sometimes call it “Tipu’s Fort” (indicative — a persistent local tradition; confirm details locally). Whatever the precise truth, the thick stone walls that made it useful to an army are the same walls that carried it, battered but standing, into our own time.
Do not confuse this shrine with its better-known cousin. Roughly two dozen kilometres east, at Sultan Bathery (Sulthan Bathery), stands Wayanad’s largest and most-photographed Jain temple — a grand, open pillared hall that draws the tour buses. Puliyarmala is the quieter, more intimate sister near Kalpetta: smaller, less commercial, and for many visitors all the more moving for it. Together the two temples are the twin anchors of any honest attempt to understand how deeply Jainism was once rooted in these hills.
Today the temple is a modest but active place of worship and a recognised heritage landmark, cared for and visited by a trickle of pilgrims, history-lovers and travellers who want something older and stiller than the usual Wayanad viewpoints. Stand in its cool granite shade, look at the meditating Tirthankara and the worn carvings, and it is easy to sense the long, patient continuity of a faith that has held to non-violence and simplicity here for many hundreds of years.
History
Wayanad’s Jain story is the essential backdrop. From the early medieval centuries, Jain merchants and settlers — largely of the Digambara tradition, with strong links to the Karnataka country to the north — established themselves across these hills, building a network of granite basadis and becoming a prosperous, literate trading community. Puliyarmala’s Ananthanatha Swami Temple is one of the enduring monuments of that era, when Jainism was a leading presence on the plateau (indicative — precise chronology of Wayanad’s Jain settlement is debated; confirm scholarly detail locally).
Sources differ sharply on exactly when the temple was raised. Popular accounts variously place its construction in the medieval period and link it to the great southern dynasties, while others hint at far older roots; the honest position is that a firm, single founding date is not established, and figures you will see quoted online should be treated as approximate (indicative — dating disputed, confirm locally). What is clear is that it is genuinely old and that its fabric has seen the region pass through successive religious and political currents.
The eighteenth century brought Wayanad into the path of the Mysore rulers Hyder Ali and, especially, Tipu Sultan, whose forces campaigned through the district against local chieftains and the British. Wayanad’s solid granite Jain temples, built to last, are widely said to have been commandeered as military posts and magazines during this period — a tradition attached both to the Sultan Bathery temple and to Puliyarmala, which locals accordingly nickname “Tipu’s Fort” (indicative — based on local tradition; the historical record is uneven, confirm locally).
A commonly repeated detail is that the temple’s administration changed hands in the modern era, and that its custodianship passed to a local family who reorganised its upkeep and its links to nearby Kalpetta (indicative — dates and names vary between sources; confirm locally). Through such stewardship the shrine survived the long decline of Wayanad’s Jain population, when many other basadis were abandoned or lost.
In the present day the temple stands as both a working Jain shrine and a protected heritage site, valued as a tangible record of a community and a faith that shaped Wayanad far more than most visitors realise. Its very endurance — through dynastic change, war and demographic decline — is the reason it is treasured today.
Why visit
It is one of the finest surviving windows into Wayanad’s medieval Jain heritage — a chapter of Kerala history that most travellers never encounter. Where else in the state can you stand inside a living Digambara Jain shrine set among the hills, dedicated to the fourteenth Tirthankara?
The granite architecture is genuinely striking. Cool stone pillars, carved doorways and a low, fortress-like solidity give the temple a character quite unlike Kerala’s more familiar wood-and-tile Hindu temples — a distinctly Dravidian, Jain-basadi feel (indicative styling — confirm details on site).
The Tipu Sultan connection makes it a compact history lesson in stone. Knowing that these walls are said to have sheltered an eighteenth-century army’s guns and powder utterly changes how you read the space — the “Tipu’s Fort” nickname suddenly makes sense.
It is blessedly quiet. Unlike the crowd-drawing Jain temple at Sultan Bathery, Puliyarmala usually offers a still, contemplative atmosphere — ideal for travellers who want reflection and photography without a jostle of tour groups.
Its setting near Kalpetta makes it an easy, rewarding add-on to a Wayanad itinerary, pairing naturally with the town, nearby viewpoints and the wider highland scenery for a half-day that mixes culture with landscape.
For anyone interested in India’s religious plurality, the temple is a rare object lesson — carvings and traditions that layer Jain Tirthankaras alongside Hindu deities, telling a story of coexistence and change over many centuries (indicative — confirm on site).
