c.1684
The village stood on the old forest road, “a stopping place between Travancore and the Pandiyan kingdom,” where travellers going either way broke their journey. One morning Santhaayi was out gathering cotton when a priest came riding by. She ran to him and asked him to bless her house and the little cross she had raised beside her door, and he stopped his horse and did. His name was John de Britto, though the Tamils called him Arulanandar, the joy of grace. He had ridden as far south as this village, and no further. It was a hard country; only a year before, he had written that it was “unstable as the waves of the sea, shifting like the sands of the desert.” Yet the little cross he blessed that morning outlasted all of it, and everything the village would become began there.
What this source establishes
Besse's own explanation of why this village exists. A missionary judged the locality convenient as a staging post between the two kingdoms and resolved to build a residence there; “Such was the origin of Vadakenkulam.” It establishes the frontier road this moment opens on — and nothing else here: Santhaayi, the cotton field and the blessing are the parish's own account.
This is as much of the book as this site prints. It is named in full in the bibliography below.