Key Points
A small municipal town known across the country for its cleanliness and immense tourism potential, Sultan Bathery in Kerala serves as the entry point for vacationers who prefer the lively and unique northern hill destination of Wayanad...
Primarily an agrarian town that supports pepper and coffee cultivation and strategically located at a tri-junction knot of southern states, it also acts as a stopover for travellers from Kannur, Bangalore, and Ooty among other cities.. Recently, it was in the news when K. Surendran, the BJP state president and the party's candidate in the Wayanad Lok Sabha constituency, announced that his party was keen to rename Suthan Bathery as Ganapathivattom (which translates to the Land of Lord Ganesha) if the BJP returned to power at the Centre in the Lok Sabha elections..
The change will reflect the town's well-known Lord Ganesh Temple and fulfil the long-pending aspiration of the locally powerful Wayanadan Chetti community, which is believed to have migrated to the region from Dharapuram in present-day Tamil Nadu in the 15th century..
The name Sulthan Bathery came about because this town once housed a battery or a store of weapons that belonged to Tipu Sultan, the Mysore ruler who conquered the area in the second half of the 18th century, according to Surendran..
Sahadevan, a former municipal chairman of Sulathan Bathery, who played a significant role in the municipality's achievement of numerous national recognitions for being the cleanest town in India in the last decade, asserts that this controversy is nothing more than an organised attempt to create black marks on its long history of inclusive and composite cultures..
