present day
Vadakkankulam is an overwhelmingly Catholic town, and a remarkably literate one: the census counts 9,220 people, ninety-four in every hundred of them able to read. The parish reckons some 10,500 Catholics in about 4,000 families, organised through Basic Christian Communities. The great August Perunkoor feast still draws close to a lakh of pilgrims for the chariot procession in the small hours of the fifteenth, many of them crossing over from Kerala; and through the rest of the year the parish keeps its people close by its magazine, Vadavai Matha Malar, and its own live broadcasts. The bells, when they ring together, still sound the way people here have always said they sound.
What this source establishes
The only external, non-parish witness to the living cult of this shrine — a major Tamil daily, reporting the crowd. It is the sole support for "close to a lakh of pilgrims", and until now it was not in the bibliography at all.
This is as much of it as we may lawfully print. The rest is at maalaimalar.com.