1891
Every year in August this village sets Our Lady on a car and takes her through its streets, and every year people come over the hills from Kerala to walk behind her. They were doing it long before anyone now living can remember. A church historian of Travancore, writing in 1903 about a feast kept here generations earlier, set it down as ordinary settled custom: the Assumption festival at this church, “where several inhabitants of Malabar are accustomed to go annually”. He was not a Catholic and had no reason to flatter the place. In 1891 the village built the car itself — a ther thirty-five feet high, carved by local sculptors out of jackfruit, teak and neem. It carried her through these streets for more than a hundred years, and rests now as the cradle of the Pilgrims' Mother; a newly designed ther has taken its road since 2014. The procession still goes out in the small hours of 15 August, and something close to a hundred thousand people walk with it.
What this source establishes
The jackfruit, teak and neem, and the local sculptors. This is the same Tamil sentence the souvenir carries — one witness with two printings, never two.
This is as much of it as we may lawfully print. The rest is at church.catholictamil.com.