The Other Walls
Kerala's mural tradition has never belonged to a single faith. The Christian churches of Kerala carry their own painted histories — absorbing the visual grammar of the Hindu mural tradition while telling entirely different stories. These murals represent one of the most striking instances of artistic exchange in Indian cultural history: a tradition born in temple sanctuaries, transplanted onto church walls, and transformed in the process.
Origins
The church murals of Kerala have a history of at least four centuries. It was after the 1599 Udayamperoor Synod that the significance of drawing murals on church walls was formally recognised. The murals that followed combined Central Asian Christian art style with traditional Kerala mural painting technique — the same methods of wall preparation, the same organic pigments, the same brush traditions that governed temple painting.
The artists who painted these church walls were the same artists, or the students of the same artists, who painted the temples. They prepared the walls the same way — lime plaster applied in layers, each layer ground and mixed with natural adhesives. They prepared the pigments the same way — laterite stones washed and ground, plant extracts pressed, lamp soot collected.
The one exception is notable: Lapis lazuli from Afghanistan was used for blue pigment in some church murals, brought to India by priests visiting from Damascus. In temple murals, blue was prepared from the juice of the neelamari plant or from thurishu — copper sulphate solution. The Afghan stone marks the point where the two traditions diverge most visibly.
What Changed
The church murals did not follow the thala system — the precise proportional measurement system that governed figure drawing in temple murals. Temple figures were drawn according to thala pramanas, a relative measurement system where a single thala is roughly the length of a palm, subdivided into twelve angulas, with different proportions prescribed for different deities. Church murals departed from this entirely.
The figures in church murals are more realistic, more colourful, and possess what scholars have described as a childlike simplicity — an absence of the decorative lines surrounding figures that characterise temple painting. There is no mashipoov border, no manimaala separation between scenes. The compositions are more open, the figures less stylised.
The themes, naturally, are drawn from the Old and New Testaments. Significant murals can be found in churches at Kottayam Cheriyapalli, Angamali, Muttuchira, Kunnamkulam, Kaduthuruthi, Kollam Kadeeshapalli, and Koratty, among others — all composed post-16th century.
Where the Traditions Meet
At St. Mary’s Church in Angamaly, a remarkable convergence is visible. The murals here show similarities with Christian art of Catholic Portugal and Spain — the Immaculate Conception, the Crucifixion, Heaven and Hell — while simultaneously incorporating lotus blossoms, makara animals, and regional fruits and clothing that are unmistakably Keralaite.
Scholars have noted a more charged dimension to this syncretism. Some church murals appear to have depicted Hindu Bhagavati — the village protector goddess revered by many Hindu converts — as a demonic figure. This can be understood as a deliberate theological warning to converts, reframing an object of Hindu devotion within a Christian symbolic order. The same visual tradition that rendered Bhagavati in power and beauty in temple murals was turned, in church spaces, to a different purpose.
A mural of historical significance at Kanjoor church documents the Travancore army defeating the Mysore troops — one of the few instances in the tradition where a contemporary political event becomes mural subject matter.
What the Church Murals Reveal
The church murals are not a footnote to the Kerala mural tradition. They are evidence of its adaptability — of a visual language so developed that it could be borrowed across religious boundaries, modified for entirely different theological purposes, and still remain recognisably itself.
They also complicate any simple narrative about what Kerala murals are. They are not solely Hindu. They are not solely devotional in the temple sense. They are the product of a region where artistic traditions moved between communities, between faiths, between centuries — absorbing and transforming as they went.
