Batu Caves

Batu Caves are limestone caves in Gombak, Selangor, cut into a 325 metre mogote about 13 km north of Kuala Lumpur. A mogote is a steep-sided residual tower of limestone, the last of a dissolved landscape, and this one has become one of the most important Hindu sites outside India.

The name comes from the Malay batu, rock. The hill was also called Kapal Tanggang, the ship of Si Tanggang, after the Malay version of the Minang folktale of Malin Kundang. In Tamil the complex is Pathu malai.

Its uses have turned over completely more than once. The indigenous Temuan people, a tribe of the Orang Asli, used the caves as shelter. In the 1860s Chinese settlers began digging guano out of them for fertiliser. The American naturalist William Hornaday visited in 1878. Then K. Thamboosamy, an Indian Tamil trader, promoted the caves as a site of Hindu worship, a temple to Murugan was completed in 1891, and the annual Thaipusam celebrations began in 1892.

That festival is now the reason most people know the place. Batu Caves is the focal point of Thaipusam in Malaysia, and the complex holds a 43 metre statue of Murugan, among the tallest anywhere in the world, at the foot of the staircase.

Development has been the pressure since. Housing spread around the hill through the late twentieth century, and non-governmental organisations have objected to the over-development of the area.

The climb is the other thing everyone remembers. The hill had to be gone up on foot at first; wooden steps went in in 1920, were rotting by the 1930s, and in 1940 the 272 concrete steps that are still there were built, to a proposal by Ramachandra Naidu. They were repainted in August 2018. The site is also home to numerous long-tailed macaques that have learned to depend on people for food, and access to the inner caves is restricted to protect the ecology, which includes a cave-dwelling cockroach, Pycnoscelus striatus.