History · People · 9 min read

The 'Hill Arrians': The Malayarayar of the Eastern Hills and the Missionary Who Wrote Them Down

In 1848 five men walked down from the hills east of Kottayam to ask a missionary for schools. What followed, the mission of Henry Baker among the Malayarayar, produced the first book about a Kerala hill people, and a record that is still argued over, from village churches to the gates of Sabarimala.

By GK Global, Adimali, Munnar · Trails & Tales by GK

In 1848, five men came down from the forested hills east of Kottayam to the mission house of a young English clergyman. They had walked for days, guided by a Syrian Christian trader named Kuriyan, and they had one request: they wanted schools for their children. The men were Malayarayar (Mala Arayar), the "lords of the hills", and the clergyman was Henry Baker Jr. of the Church Missionary Society. Their meeting began one of the best-documented encounters between a Kerala hill people and the outside world.

The people of the hills

The Malayarayar lived in scattered villages on the steep western slopes of the Ghats, some at about 3,000 ft. Nineteenth-century visitors described houses built high in trees or on cliff ledges, out of reach of elephants and tigers, and rope-and-creeper bridges across the mountain rivers. They cultivated hill rice and other crops in shifting clearings, gathered forest produce, and owed tribute and labour to the Rajas of Poonjar and to local landlords, a burden that, in their own oral traditions, was a heavy one.

They had their own priests and oracles. Missionary records mention an oracle called Thalanani and the hill shrines of the region, and the community's traditions tie its ancestors to the worship at Sabarimala and the surrounding peaks long before the temple came under Brahmin priests.

The mission of Henry Baker

Henry Baker Jr. was the son of one of the first CMS missionaries in Travancore. Educated in England, he was also a keen naturalist, a member of the Zoological Society. After the Malayarayar delegation came to him, he began work in the hills in 1849, founding a mission station at Mundakayam, where he acquired land, settled families and built a schoolroom that served as a church. The work spread northwards to Melukavu, Koottickal, Erumapra and Idakkunnam, with churches founded in the early 1850s. By 1858 the mission counted about 790 baptised members, by 1868 about 1,300, and when Baker died in 1878 he left some 2,000 Christians, eleven churches and twenty-seven schools in the hills. He was remembered as the "Apostle of the Hill Arrians".

At Melukavu, missionary accounts tell of a sorcerer known as Melukavu Achan who became a Christian and handed over the sword and image associated with the oracle. The Henry Baker College at Melukavu still carries the missionary's name.

The book

In 1862 Baker published The Hill Arrians of Travancore and the Progress of Christianity among Them. It describes the people's names, beliefs, rituals, food, funerals and marriages, and it is the earliest substantial written record of the Malayarayar. ("Arrian" was the missionaries' rendering of "Arayan".)

Reading the record critically

Historians value Baker's work, but they also read it with care. As the Malayalam historian writing in Utharakalam points out, the missionaries were also fundraisers: dramatic sketches of tree houses and elephant attacks helped raise money from congregations in Britain. Fellow missionaries, including Indian clergy, criticised Baker's ambition and the unhealthy places he chose to work. Missionary texts tend to present conversion as a simple escape from oppression, flattening a far more complicated story: many Malayarayar did not convert, some villages turned against the mission, and those who became Christians kept many of their family and social ties. And because the community left no written records of its own from that time, the missionaries' view is the one that survived.

Education and identity

The schools that the 1848 delegation asked for had a lasting effect. The Malayarayar are widely described as one of the most educated tribal communities in Kerala, with many teachers, officials and professionals, Hindu and Christian alike.

The Sabarimala claim

In recent years, Malayaraya organisations have asserted that their ancestors were the original keepers of Sabarimala. Leaders such as P. K. Sajeev of the Aikya Mala Araya Maha Sabha say that the community once performed the rituals there, offering honey before ghee replaced it, and lit the flame at Ponnambalamedu that pilgrims see as the Makaravilakku; they also claim shrines at Karimala, Nilakkal and Thalappara. The claim, pressed in 2018 during the controversy over women's entry, is disputed by the temple's priestly family and remains a matter of debate. The community itself is divided on several of these questions.

(Read also the tribal communities of Munnar, Kuttikkanam and Peermade and the settlers who made Idukki.)