Pathanamthitta district, Kerala
Ranni
The Queen of the Eastern Hill Lands
The name Ranni is said to come from the Malayalam word for queen. The town is known as the Queen of the Eastern Hill Lands — മലനാടിന്റെ റാണി — and it sits on both banks of the Pamba, the river Keralites call the Dakshina Bhageerathi, the Ganga of the south.
We have been photographing this place for fifty years. It is worth saying something about it.
- 95%
- Literacy rate
- 1,091
- Women per 1,000 men — well above the state and national average
- 70%
- Of the taluk is forest
- Almost every
- Household in Pathanamthitta district has a member living abroad
Antiquity
A road through the hills
Settlement in these hills, around Sabarimala and Nilackal, is said to go back thousands of years. An ancient trade route ran through Nilackal between Kerala and the Pandya country to the east — goods, and people, crossing the Western Ghats long before there were roads.
18th century
The Ranni Karthas
Ranni was governed by chieftains remembered as the Ranni Karthas, kin to the Raja of Thekkumkoor. In the eighteenth century Marthanda Varma of Venad annexed Thekkumkoor, and Ranni passed into Travancore. Around the same period Knanaya Christian families migrated here and founded the St. Thomas Church of Ranni.
1964
St. Thomas College
The taluk got its first college. For close to four decades it was the only one, and generations of Ranni families were educated in it before anywhere nearer existed. Ranni’s literacy rate today stands at about 95 per cent.
1982
Pathanamthitta district is formed
Until then Ranni had been part of Kollam district, and before that part of Central Travancore. The new district put Ranni where it had always belonged geographically — in the eastern hill country, at the head of the Sabarimala route.
Today
Rubber, forest and river
Seven-tenths of Ranni taluk is forest — roughly 708 of its 1,005 square kilometres. The hills, the humidity and the rain make it one of the largest rubber-producing taluks in Kerala. And the Pamba, which is the reason the town is here at all, still floods it.
Pathanamthitta is one of the most emigrated-from districts in Kerala. On average there is a member of every household living abroad — in the Gulf, or in America, England, Ireland or Australia. The district sends more teachers overseas than any other in the state, and is second only to one for nurses.
That is the other reason we do the work we do. The photographs stay in the house in Ranni. The children who are in them live somewhere else now.