Walk through Kodinhi, a quiet village in Kerala’s Malappuram district, and you’ll start noticing something odd within minutes. The same face walks past you twice. A boy on a bicycle is followed seconds later by what looks like the exact same boy. Teachers in local classrooms have had to learn to tell apart not one but several sets of identical students sitting in the same room. A blue signboard at the village entrance announces it outright: “Welcome to God’s Own Twins Village, Kodinhi.”
It’s not a joke or a local legend. Kodinhi has one of the highest twin birth rates anywhere on Earth, and more than a decade of serious scientific research still hasn’t figured out why.
India, as a country, has one of the lowest twinning rates in the world, around four twin births for every 1,000 total births. Kodinhi’s rate sits at roughly 45 twins per 1,000 births, a tenfold jump over the national average, in a village with a population of only around 2,000 families.
By 2016, estimates put the total number of twin pairs in the village at over 400, up from 256 pairs recorded in an initial 2008 survey. The numbers have kept climbing every year since researchers first started paying attention, with as many as 80 twin pairs recorded in just the 0 to 10 age group alone at one point. Most of the twins born are female-female pairs, followed by female-male, then male-male, and the phenomenon isn’t limited to twins either, the village has also recorded a number of triplets and higher-order multiple births.
This isn’t a recent statistical blip. Twins have been walking the lanes of Kodinhi for at least three generations, with the oldest recorded pair in the village born back in 1949. The oldest living twin on record is Mohammad Haji, an 87-year-old former village school headmaster, while the oldest surviving twin pair are sisters Kunhi Pathuty and Pathuty, both 69.
In 2008, the Hyderabad-based Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology undertook a formal study of the village’s birth patterns and concluded that the cause was, in all probability, genetic. That was about as close to an answer as anyone has gotten. A more ambitious international study followed in October 2016, when a team of researchers from India, London and Germany travelled to Kodinhi and collected saliva and hair samples specifically to study the villagers’ DNA, running the same research in parallel across other twin-heavy communities worldwide, including Hung Loc commune in Vietnam, Igbo-Ora in Nigeria, and Cándido Godói in Brazil.
Even that expansive, multi-country genetic study came back without a conclusive answer. One researcher involved, Dr. Preetham, was candid about where things stood, stating plainly that the phenomenon had yet to receive a scientific explanation despite the data collected.
With no confirmed cause, theories have circulated for years, ranging from genetics and epigenetics to something specific in the local diet, water, or environment. Interestingly, Kodinhi isn’t unique in facing this kind of unexplained clustering. Igbo-Ora in Nigeria has its own unusually high twinning rate, which some researchers have tentatively linked to the dietary habits of women in the region, though no firm scientific consensus exists there either. The fact that several such “twin towns” exist scattered across different continents, each defying easy explanation, suggests this might be less a single mystery and more a pattern science simply hasn’t cracked yet.
Rather than treating the attention as a burden, Kodinhi has built an identity and a community around it. Locals eventually formed the Twins and Kins Association, known as TAKA, reportedly the only organisation of its kind in India, dedicated to supporting twins in the village and helping researchers studying the phenomenon. The village now holds annual twin festivals, drawing pairs of twins together for a shared celebration of an identity that’s become a genuine source of pride rather than just a scientific curiosity.
Despite appearing in international news coverage, academic journals, and segments by outlets like National Geographic, daily life in Kodinhi has stayed largely unaffected by the spotlight. It remains, as locals describe it, a sleepy, unprepossessing village, one that simply happens to keep producing an extraordinary number of identical faces, generation after generation, with science still several steps behind an explanation.
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