What is lost, What Remains
The murals in Kerala are in different states of deterioration.
This is not an abstract statement about antiquity and time. It is a fact about specific walls, specific faces, specific colours — things that existed when the painter drew the unmeelanam and will not exist in their current form much longer.
This archive was built because of that fact. This essay tries to be honest about what it means.
What causes Deterioration
Kerala’s tropical climate is the primary agent. The combination of humidity, monsoon rainfall, and temperature fluctuation works against lime plaster in ways that are difficult to arrest. Fungal and microbial infections damage the pigment surface. Soot from lamps lit during daily worship darkens and obscures the paintings over time.
Human damage compounds the natural. Devotees smear sandalwood paste on the walls. Some scrape paint with knives. Additions — mustaches drawn on figures, wiring installed over painted surfaces — are not rare. Vandalism of the kind that prompted this research — a goddess’s face damaged deliberately — is not an isolated incident.
Conservation attempts have introduced their own problems. Synthetic pigments are sometimes used to retouch original organic ones — a replacement that M.G. Sasibhooshan regards as more damaging than deterioration itself, because it is irreversible and changes the character of the original. A mica sheet cage installed around the temple walls of Vadakkunnatha temple to protect the murals is described by Sasibhooshan as a disrespect to the temple traditions and architecture.
The murals at Thirunandikkara — one of the oldest mural sites in Kerala — have deteriorated completely, despite being a protected monument.
What Conservation Looks Like
The first step in any conservation intervention is to remove dirt and dust from the surface using cotton swabs — a process that also addresses, to some extent, oil stains and microbial damage. Where paint is beginning to chip, a solution is applied to prevent further loss. A mixture of PVA or polyvinyl acetate and toluene is applied as a final consolidant. Where walls have begun to fall, a mixture of plaster and white cement is used to prevent further collapse.
Conservation is expensive. Very few efforts have been made at scale. At the Kottaykkal temple, iron barricades have been installed to prevent defacement. Most sites have no such protection.
The broader structural challenge is that it is impractical for the government to declare all temples with murals as protected monuments. Most scholars agree that steps must nevertheless be taken — but what those steps are, who funds them, and who has the authority to implement them remains unresolved.
What Digital Documentation Does and Does Not Do
A digital archive preserves what is visible at the moment of documentation. It does not stop the deterioration. It does not restore what has already been lost. What it does is create a record — a high-resolution, metadata-rich, searchable record — of what existed at a specific point in time.
The Balarama mural at the Kadavil Thrikkovil Sree Krishnaswamy Temple in Thrippunithura, documented during fieldwork for this archive in 2026, shows prominent signs of deterioration: flaking plaster over the face and claws, surface cracks across the figure of Vishnu’s man-lion emanation. The documentation does not repair this damage. But it means that if the mural deteriorates further or is lost entirely, what it looked like in 2026 is no longer unrecorded.
That is a modest claim. It is also a real one.
The Tradition that Survives
What is fragile is not only the paint on the walls. It is the knowledge of how to make the paint, how to prepare the wall, how to recite the dhyana sloka, how to draw the unmeelanam — the entire embodied tradition of practice that took centuries to develop and is now transmitted by a small community of living painters.
The oral and practice-based transmission of artistic knowledge is becoming increasingly fragile. The gurukula system within which this knowledge was transmitted for centuries no longer operates in its original form. Four main centres now exist for formal instruction: Guruvayur Devaswom Mural Institute, Ernakulam Ravipuram Indian School of Arts, Kalady Sree Sankaracharya University, and Aranmula Vasthuvidya Kendra. What formal education preserves and what it changes is one of the central questions this archive’s video interviews explore.
New murals are being commissioned. New artists are being trained. The tradition is alive.
It is also in a condition that requires attention — from researchers, from temple authorities, from the state, from anyone who believes that what these walls contain is worth the effort of preservation.
This archive is one part of that effort. It is not sufficient. But it is a beginning.
