Two Varkalas on the Same Sand: The Sacred and Secular Life of Papanasam
At Varkala, a single strip of beach does two profoundly different jobs, and has done both for centuries. From before dawn, Hindu families descend the steps cut into the laterite cliff to perform last rites, scatter the ashes of the dead, and make offerings to ancestors on Papanasam Beach — a name derived from the Sanskrit papa-nasam, the destruction or washing-away of sins. By late morning, travelers from across Europe, Israel, and Australia are watching from cliff-edge cafe tables above them, ordering Kerala fish curry and espresso, a few meters of ancient rock separating grief from holiday. No other beach in India layers the two so literally, one above the other, on the same eroding cliff.
The Meaning of Papanasam
The belief encoded in the beach's name is specific and old. The waters at the foot of the cliff are not ordinary sea. Natural freshwater springs seep out of the laterite and sandstone formations above the tideline, delivering mineral-rich water directly onto the beach and into the surf. Pilgrims and priests hold that this combination — the spring water filtering through the ancient cliff, meeting the Arabian Sea — gives Papanasam its purifying power. A ritual bath here is believed to cleanse accumulated sin; scattering a relative's ashes into these waters is understood to free the soul and hasten its path toward liberation.
This is not purely metaphorical. The springs are real, their mineral content distinct from rainwater and seawater alike, and they are what drew sacred attention to this beach in the first place. The cliff is not just scenery for the ritual — it is the source of the sanctity. That the same geology that makes the springs also makes the cliff unstable and spectacular, and that the same cliff drew first pilgrims and then backpackers, is the central fact of Varkala's character.
The Janardanaswamy Temple and Its Bell
Directly above Papanasam, on the tableland at the cliff top, stands the Janardanaswamy Temple. Dedicated to Vishnu in the form of Janardana — a name meaning he who is petitioned by the people — it is counted among the 108 Abhimana Kshethrams, the set of Vaishnavite shrines repeatedly named in the Puranas and Itihasas as among the most sacred Vishnu temples. The inscriptional tradition at the temple claims roots approaching 2,000 years; the surviving stone structure is generally dated to around the 12th century. A long flight of steps climbs from the beach to the temple gate, and pilgrims ascending it move, in a few minutes' walk, from the funerary rituals on the sand to an active working shrine above.
The temple holds a detail that suggests how long this coast has been a place of transaction between the sacred and the outside world. A large bell hangs at the entrance bearing the date 1757 and names that sources record as Peter von Belson and Michelle Evarald. The story attached to it is that a Dutch ship captain, his vessel in distress offshore, prayed for safe passage and offered the bell to the temple in gratitude. Whether the story is exactly as told, the bell is genuinely there, genuinely Dutch, and genuinely dated — an object of European mercantile Kerala hanging in a 12th-century Vishnu shrine above an ancestral-rites beach.
The temple's Arattu festival, celebrated annually in the Malayalam month of Meenam (March–April), runs for ten days and culminates in a procession of five caparisoned elephants carrying the deity's idol through Varkala's streets, with Kathakali performances through the night. On the final day the procession descends to Papanasam, and the idol is ritually bathed in the Arabian Sea — the arattu rite, the god given the same purifying contact with this water that pilgrims seek for their dead.
Karkidaka Vavu: The Day the Beach Fills
The single highest-attendance event at Papanasam is not a temple festival but an ancestral one. Karkidaka Vavu is the new-moon day of the Malayalam month Karkidakam, falling in July or August, and it is across Kerala the appointed day for vavu bali — the ritual propitiation of ancestors, performed to help departed souls achieve peace and eventual liberation. Families gather at rivers, temple ghats, and beachfronts from before dawn, dressed plainly, carrying darbha grass, pavithram rings woven from the same sacred grass, sesame, and cooked rice.
At Papanasam, tens of thousands come. Outside Thiruvananthapuram city, this beach draws the largest vavu bali gathering in the district, second only to the Thiruvallam Parasurama Temple. The platform on the beach used specifically for these rites is the Bali Mandapam. Priests conduct the ceremonies on the sand at the water's edge, families wading in up to the waist to release offerings to the sea. The mood is not festive in the conventional sense — it is a mass act of grief, remembrance, and religious obligation, carried out with a quiet intensity that stands apart from the beach culture directly above it.
A section of the south cliff immediately beside the Bali Mandapam was partially demolished by the Thiruvananthapuram district administration in June 2024, following a landslip. The cliff that frames this ritual is itself in the process of failing.
Sree Narayana Guru and the Sivagiri Pilgrimage
A kilometer or so inland from Papanasam, on Sivagiri hill, stands one of the most politically significant religious sites in modern Kerala. The Sivagiri Mutt is the ashram founded in 1904 by Sree Narayana Guru, and it is where he died and is interred. Narayana Guru (1856–1928) was a philosopher, ascetic, and social reformer from an Ezhava family — a caste that, in the Travancore of his birth, faced systematic exclusion from temples, public roads, and educational institutions. His response was not protest in the conventional sense but a direct assault on the theological premises of caste. In 1888 he consecrated a Shiva lingam at Aruvippuram, an act only Brahmin priests were permitted to perform; when challenged, he said he had consecrated not a Brahmin's Shiva but an Ezhava's. He then built temples across southern Kerala and Ceylon that welcomed people of all castes and backgrounds. His maxim — oru jati, oru matam, oru daivam manushyanu: one caste, one religion, one God for humanity — became the defining phrase of the Kerala Renaissance and reframed what solidarity across caste lines could look like.
The Sivagiri Mutt became the institutional center of this movement, and after his death his samadhi there became a pilgrimage destination. The Sivagiri Theerthadanam pilgrimage was proposed in 1928, approved by the Guru himself before he died, and first walked in 1933, when five young men from Elavumthitta in Pathanamthitta District set out on foot on December 25, reached Sivagiri on December 28, and were reportedly mocked as yellow birds for their turmeric-dyed garments. The yellow dress is the pilgrimage's visible signature: the Guru's instruction was that any old white cloth dipped in turmeric water was sufficient — the cheapest possible garment, equalizing the poor and the comfortable in the same color. It was a practical anti-caste statement built into the clothing.
The pilgrimage now runs annually from December 30 to January 1, drawing very large crowds of devotees in yellow from across India and the global Kerala diaspora. At the same time, Varkala Sivagiri railway station — the point of arrival for both the Theerthadanam pilgrims and the backpackers heading to the cliff cafes — sees both crowds disembark from the same trains.
The Coexistence, Not a Contradiction
What makes Varkala's cultural situation genuinely interesting rather than merely picturesque is that neither the sacred nor the secular layer resents the other's presence in any organized way. The pilgrims performing last rites on Papanasam at dawn are gone by midmorning. The temple above is open to non-Hindu visitors in appropriate dress. The backpacker economy on the cliff runs on the aesthetic of the cliffs, the mineral springs, the Ayurveda, and the same spectacular geography that the Janardanaswamy Temple has occupied for eight centuries. Varkala's wellness reputation — the Ayurveda centers, the yoga shalas, the sense that this is a place where the body can be attended to — descends, at least in part, from the same mineral-spring logic that made Papanasam sacred in the first place.
The tension, when it surfaces, is not theological but spatial. The cafes and guesthouses on North Cliff sit on the same eroding laterite as the temple above the funeral beach. The geology does not distinguish between the sacred and the commercial. The Guru's pilgrims in yellow and the backpackers in linen share a railway platform. And Papanasam Beach receives both grief and sunbathing on the same strip of sand, separated by the morning hours.
That vertical geography — the dead honored at water level, the living eating above them, all of it balanced on a crumbling cliff — is not something Varkala chose. It is what the place is.
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