The Living Tradition
The tradition did not end. But it changed — and it is still changing.
What Survival Looks Like
A tradition survives when it is practised. Not when it is documented, not when it is studied, not when it is archived — though all of these matter — but when someone picks up a brush, recites the dhyana sloka, and draws the line on the wall.
By that measure, Kerala’s mural tradition is alive. New murals are being commissioned. New painters are being trained. The knowledge of how to prepare lime plaster, grind organic pigments, and draw according to the thala system exists in living human beings and is being passed on.
But survival is not the same as security. The conditions that sustained the tradition for a thousand years — the gurukula transmission system, the network of royal patronage, the temple walls built from materials that accepted lime-based paint — have changed substantially. What the tradition is surviving into is a world that requires constant negotiation between the old forms and new circumstances.
This page documents that negotiation, as this archive encountered it during fieldwork in Kerala.
How the Tradition is Transmitted Now
For centuries, Kerala mural painting was transmitted through the gurukula system. A student lived with and studied under a guru, learning not just technique but the devotional and ritual framework within which technique was embedded. The student learned to prepare pigments and brushes, memorised dhyana slokas, practiced figures by drawing and redrawing on floors and wooden planks until the patterns became imprinted in the mind. After years of apprenticeship, they accompanied the guru on commissions, assisting before gradually working independently — eventually, with the guru’s blessing, on their own.
This system produced painters who understood the tradition from the inside — not as a set of technical skills but as a complete practice, inseparable from its ritual and devotional context.
Formal institutional training now carries much of this transmission work. Four main centres for instruction currently exist:
Guruvayur Devaswom Mural Institute Established in 1989 under the Devaswom administration in Guruvayur, in direct response to the destruction of the temple’s murals in the 1970s fire. The institute represents the tradition’s most direct institutional response to a crisis of loss — an attempt to ensure that what burned could be relearned and redrawn.
Ernakulam Ravipuram Indian School of Arts Based in Ernakulam, serving the tradition’s geographic heartland in Central Kerala.
Kalady Sree Sankaracharya University Situated at Kalady — the birthplace of Adi Shankaracharya — bringing the tradition into formal university education.
Aranmula Vasthuvidya Kendra At Aranmula, connecting mural training to the broader tradition of Kerala’s traditional architecture and craft knowledge.
What formal education preserves and what it inevitably changes is a genuine question. The gurukula system transmitted the tradition as a lived practice — devotional, embodied, relational. Institutional training transmits it as a discipline, with syllabi, examinations, and academic credentials. Both are real forms of transmission. They produce different kinds of painters.
The Artists Met by this Archive
This archive was built partly through conversations with the people who keep the tradition alive. The video interviews in the Contexts section document three voices — a practising artist, a Fine Arts student specialising in Kerala mural painting, and a documentation of traditional pigment preparation.
What those conversations revealed — about the ritual obligations that serious practitioners still maintain, about the gap between what can be taught in a classroom and what can only be learned on a wall, about the experience of learning a devotional practice as an academic discipline — is documented there in their own words.
What can be said here is that the tradition, as encountered in fieldwork, is held by people who are thoughtful about its complexity. The practitioners who continue to work within the full ritual framework — the fasting, the prayer, the recitation of dhyana slokas before beginning — do so as a conscious choice in a world that does not require it of them. The students who learn within formal institutions bring their own negotiations between academic knowledge and devotional practice.
Neither the practitioner nor the student is simply preserving what existed before. They are making something — deciding, every time they work, what of the tradition to carry forward and how.
New Contexts, New Walls
Second-generation mural artists are increasingly utilising online spaces to disseminate their work — social media pages, e-commerce sites, YouTube channels documenting their practice. The murals appear in new contexts: as decorative pieces in hotels and commercial spaces, as part of textile design, as commissioned works in private homes.
G. Azheekode, in his work Chuvarchitrakala: Oru Sankethika Padanam, noted the emergence of female artists in the modern period — a significant departure from the historical pattern in which the tradition was transmitted almost exclusively through male lineages. This shift reflects broader changes in who has access to formal art education and who is permitted to practise.
The initially temple and palace-bound tradition has broken out of its constrained reverences. This expansion has brought Kerala mural painting to audiences — domestic and international — who would never have encountered it in its original ritual context. It has also, as Sasibhooshan and others have noted, introduced a process of commodification: murals increasingly produced for commercial value rather than ritualistic or religious purpose.
These changes are not straightforwardly negative. A tradition that reaches new audiences is a tradition that survives. But the question of what is carried forward — and what is left behind when the dhyana sloka is not recited, when the lime plaster is not used, when the unmeelanam is not performed — is a real one.
The Architectural Problem
The most structurally threatening challenge facing the living tradition is one that receives less attention than deterioration or declining patronage: the disappearance of the surfaces on which the tradition depends.
Kerala mural painting requires lime plaster walls — specific walls, built in specific ways, using specific natural materials. New temple construction increasingly uses cement and modern building materials that cannot support lime-based paint in the traditional manner. Renovation projects replaster walls that carried centuries of painting — sometimes destroying what existed to install a surface that cannot receive what would replace it.
A tradition of wall painting needs walls. The right kind of walls are becoming rarer. This is not a problem that documentation can solve, or that institutional training can address. It requires decisions by temple authorities, architects, and construction professionals about how new and renovated temple buildings are made.
Some temples are making those decisions consciously — commissioning new mural work on traditionally prepared lime plaster surfaces, maintaining the material conditions the tradition requires. These sites, and the relationships that make them possible, are among the most important things the tradition has going for it.
What this Archive Sees
This archive was built from the conviction that documentation is not preservation — but that it is a necessary condition for the kind of attention preservation requires.
The Kerala Mural Archive documents what exists: the paintings on the walls, their sites, their iconographic content, their conservation status. In doing so, it also documents — by implication — what is at risk. Every mural entry with a conservation status of deteriorating or damaged is an argument for intervention. Every site documented is a site whose existence is now on record.
The living tradition does not live in this archive. It lives in the hands and minds of the painters who continue to practise it, in the walls that receive their work, in the temple spaces where the murals are seen in the light they were made for. What the archive does is make the tradition visible — to researchers, to students, to policymakers, to anyone who did not already know it existed and now might care about whether it continues.
That is a modest contribution. It is also a real one.
