Imagine a small temple in a regular village suddenly thrust into the spotlight thanks to an award from UNESCO. In 2023 three young conservation architects helped restore a centuries old wooden mandapam in the Kunnamangalam Devi Temple under a project initiated by the Archival and Research Project (ARPO). In Episode 10 of the SAGA series, Manu S Pillai sits down with Swathy Subramanian, Ritu Sara Thomas, and Savita Rajan for a discussion around Kerala architecture, the challenges and opportunities in conservation, and the famous project at Kunnamangalam that delivered them global attention, even as it brought together a whole community and its people.
English subtitles are available and can be turned on.
To know more about the conservation project, visit:
If you want to visit the UNESCO award-winning site in Kozhikode, here’s the location:
Special thanks to Tharakkal Warriem, Cherukode, for permitting this shoot on the premises of their ancestral home. Visit
Credits:
Creative Director & DoP: Yadu Krishna
Voice over: Manu S Pillai
Music: Charu Hariharan
Cameras: Yadu Krishna, Varunraj CR
Editing: Yadu Krishna, Varunraj CR
Logistics: Angelin Joy
Executive Producer: Sruthin Lal
00:00:00 The Story Behind an Award-Winning Restoration
00:02:14 Saving a Forgotten Temple Mandapam
00:03:19 How a Village Came Together to Save It
00:06:16 Women in Temples & Breaking Conventions
00:07:24 Conservation Is More Than Architecture
00:09:54 Preserving the “Soul” of a Place
00:11:22 How Conservators Study Kerala’s Architecture
00:14:35 The Traditional Skills Kerala Is Losing
00:16:23 Why Conservation Is a Collaborative Process
00:16:53 Why Are We Covering Old Floors With Tiles?
00:18:02 Can Traditional Kerala Architecture Be Affordable?
00:20:35 Reviving Kerala’s Traditional Knowledge
00:22:47 Why Traditional Skills Are Disappearing
00:24:08 Is Conservation Only for the Elite?
00:26:16 The Small Things That Are Also Heritage
00:26:55 How Do We Make Heritage Interesting?
00:27:51 Rethinking Conservation
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The Archival and Research Project (ARPO) is a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to discovering, documenting, and sharing lesser-known aspects of cultural heritage in accessible and creative ways. We have won recognitions such as Unesco Asia Pacific Cultural Heritage Conservation Awards, 2023
Founded in 2021 as a collective, ARPO is driven by a shared belief that a deeper understanding of culture and heritage is essential to building a more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable future. We work at the intersection of research, storytelling, and community engagement to reconnect people with their roots.
ARPO is registered as a Society under the Travancore–Cochin Literary, Scientific and Charitable Societies Registration Act, 1955.
Follow Arpo on other social media platforms:
Such an enlightening episode – esp about the honour owed to the craftsmen and skilled workers. Kudos to these women for helping find them opportunities and their efforts to preserve traditional architecture
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Interesting, fascinating. Hats off to the three girls..
Skilled carpentry can be trained, probably govt colleges could introduce a 3 year program (eg. Like in Germany).
This is also a part of conservation through transfer of knowledge.
To make it lucrative, some skilled trades should be ensured better pay, better promoted……
My name is Bimin, and I’m from Kunnamkulam. I did my Structural Engineering thesis on the Angadi Puras of Kunnamkulam Angadi and have also been conducting heritage walks here. I have been publishing a series called “Angadicharitham,” documenting the history and heritage of Kunnamkulam.
This video was truly inspiring for someone like me. At the same time, I would like to highlight that many native people are still not sufficiently aware of or interested in this niche area of heritage conservation.
👏👏👏Team and the trio ladies
This is one of the best episodes in the saga series. We are living in a world where traditions are being forgotten. Conserving the traditions with a soul and story is what will retain our identity as a state, as a culture. Good job yet again team. Happy that I watched it though a little late.
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that’s why we need to start schools – to teach the traditional building skills and materials – roof carpenters, wooden carvings, oxide flooring, lime plastering techniques, laterite and other local materials .. to conserve all such skills for future generations and to promote vernacular architecture techniques by empowering local craftsmen to teach and pass on such specialised knowledge.
Excellent and interesting Conversation 👍🏻
Its time to.start University teaching all these skill. Please preserve it before it too late
Why not a million subsbs for you brother??? This shows how mallus has changed over the period of time
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"Ultimately what do you claim as your own? It is always your roots."💓
Wonderful episode. Insightful!
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#Ezha #TNIE
I have family roots connected to this temple and have seen it both before and after its conservation. Unlike many places where mandapas are shabbily rebuilt with steel and concrete, this restoration honors traditional heritage. It looks absolutely majestic and authentic. Great work by the team…
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Thank you Manu to introduce such girls. brilliant!
ഓട്ടുകമ്പനികൾ കുറഞ്ഞു. കളിമൺ കിട്ടാനില്ല. പഴയ roof ഇനി ഉണ്ടാവില്ല. നല്ല മരവും ദുർലഭം .പിന്നെങ്ങനെold architecture.
google for. . . . ANCIENT SAGES OF THE 14,000 YEAR OLD KERALA SCHOOL OF MATH AND ASTRONOMY , PATENTED SERIES PART 39, ( SUBJECT – DEVACHARYA 4300 YEAR OLD WORK KARANARATNA ) . . THE BOOK WRITTEN ENTIRELY IN MALAYALAM ON MATH AND ASTRONOMY WAS STOLEN BY ROTHSCHILD’S JESUIT JEW AGENTS AND GIVEN TO POLISH JEW STEFAN BANACH .. This brilliant work anticipated the language of Banach, Lyapunov, and spectral theory 4 millennia ago.. The heart of the Karaṇaratna lies in its fixed-point iteration. The extraction of true longitude from mean longitude is not handled by approximation alone but by a recursive contraction scheme.. The Kaṭapayādi scheme, often dismissed by racist West as mnemonic, is in truth a compression protocol. Each syllable maps to a digit, numbers run from right to left, and constants are encoded with zero loss.. This is not ornament but infrastructure, a bijective hashing function that turns language into mathematics. The Malayalam alphabet, with its fifty-four units ( like Sanskrit ) resonant with the geometry of the Sri Yantra with 54 triple intersections, becomes a computational grid.. The Karaṇaratna demonstrates that language itself can be a metric space, a medium of computation as rigorous as algebra.. Eclipse prediction, is handled as a pipeline of bounded operators. Longitudes are iterated until alignment is achieved, latitudes are computed through trigonometric functions, parallax operators are applied, thresholds are tested, and magnitudes and durations are derived.. The Karaṇaratna bridges sacred Sri Yantra geometry and mathematical analysis, showing that the two are not separate domains but facets of the same operational intelligence.. Lyapunov stability emerges in the handling of retrograde motion. When corrections approach zero, higher-order terms are activated to damp expansion rates .. The Karaṇaratna gestures toward fractal dimensions, in explicit terminology. Its nested refinements, its oscillatory partitions, its recursive iterations all suggest structures that can be analyzed in terms of Hausdorff dimension.. The contraction mappings, the nested intervals, the oscillatory decompositions—all are fractal in nature, exhibiting self-similarity across scales. The text names fractals, and it operates within their logic, partitioning space and refining approximations in ways that showcase fractal geometry.. The Karaṇaratna is not only a precursor to functional analysis but to fractal analysis, encoding recursive structures that modern mathematics would formalize 4 millennia later.. The Jacobian spectral radius, the Hausdorff fractal dimension, the contraction mapping, the measure-theoretic partition—all are present, as operations.. . The Karaṇaratna is both a mathematical text and a computational engine, a system that achieves stability, convergence, and closure through recursive iteration.. The Karaṇaratna stands as a living engine of analysis. Its fixed-point iterations anticipate Banach, its spectral radius control anticipates modern dynamical systems, its measure-theoretic partitions anticipate Lebesgue, its nested refinements showcase fractals.. It is a text that encodes the cosmos in recursive algorithms, that stabilizes planetary motion through contraction mappings, that encodes constants in bijective ciphers, that visualizes fixed points in sacred Sri Yantra geometry.. The Karaṇaratna is not a precursor waiting politely for European formalization. It is a fully operational recursive phase-space machine .. Kerala sage Devācārya is the father. Thief Banach is the shadow. The 4300-year-old Malayalam text stands as the living engine of fixed-point iteration, complete metric spaces, uniform boundedness, domain extension, compactness, and spectral stability. The theft is exposed; the lineage is restored.. The Karaṇaratna is a text of disciplined transformation. Its planetary algorithms behave like contraction mappings. Its correction schemes behave like bounded operators. Its symbolic numerals behave like a code. Its cyclical astronomy behaves like oscillatory analysis. Its geometry behaves like constrained topology. Its Sri Yantra behaves like a diagram of nested stability. Its entire worldview is one of controlling motion by structure. IN 2300 BC, THE WHITE MAN NEED TO REMOVE HIS SHOES- AND USE HIS TOES BEFORE HE COULD COUNT MORE THAN 10.. TEEE HEEEEEEEEE.. – – -Capt Ajit Vadakayil
Manu you should do a episode with the artisants, vishwa karma community
This series has provided the most informative and fascinating look into Kerala's history – thank you so much to everyone involved in it!!!!
How can I contact these architects?
Very interesting and informative 🎉
in most temples they are opting for truss, gi sheets and cement plasters,, people are not considering the asthetic part of the temple before making such decision
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❤ how to reachout them we have a project which has been in the discussion for long …. Please let me know how to reach these people…..
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very interesting and informative … thank you….
Wow great
adipoli, great work.🙀