BackFort Kochi, Kerala | Remains of a spice coast
Centuries-old houses and a breeze spiked with spice are reminders that the past is a living thing
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“You can get there by road or by ferry," said the man I asked for directions on National Highway 17, outside Kochi city.
An hour later, my car was rolling off the ferry that had just dropped me in Fort Kochi. Soon, I was driving past houses with flaking paint, and big teakwood windows and doors bound by moss-smudged walls. These houses were unlike the malls, glowing signboards, high-rises and soaring urban ambitions of Kochi city that lay across the water.
I was walking past vast 200-year-old houses that surrounded the Parade Ground’s vociferous tennis-ball cricket matches. A few blocks away, hushed prayers echoed in the around 500-year-old St Francis Church and 400-odd year old Santa Cruz Basilica. A few hundred metres away, children in uniform played in the compound of the 200-year-old former warehouse that’s now The Delta Study high school. Grand mansions turned heritage hotels rubbed shoulders with one- and two-roomed residences, transitory tea stalls and vendors’ carts. After spending my first 2 hours in Fort Kochi driving and walking around the streets, I headed to my hotel.
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Traders panicked and scrambled to find ways to keep their flow of money and goods intact. They used the Kozhikode harbour some 170km north for some time. But Kodungallur harbour showed no signs of opening up. There was no way these traders could bank their ships there.
One day, one of these traders’ scouts came panting into their camp, and reported that he’d discovered a new harbour just some 40km south. There was no harbour there before, but the flood that had closed up Kodungallur had opened it up. Instead of moving their trade and headquarters 170km north to Kozhikode, these traders decided that the new harbour would be far easier to use.
Consequently, much of Kodungallur’s trade shifted to this new harbour, today’s Fort Kochi. Thus Fort Kochi became one of the major centres of the world’s spice trade, with Chinese, Arabian and European traders making it a major base for their operations.
As European powers sought to set up outposts in India and the Far East, Fort Kochi became a crucial location in world geopolitics. The Portuguese, led by Pedro Álvares Cabral (in 1500) and Vasco da Gama (1502) set up a colonial town here. The Portuguese were supplanted by the Dutch in 1653 and the British in 1795, as all of them sought control of the spice trade and the resultant riches.
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The most recent foreign influence on Fort Kochi, of course, is that of the British, who lent names like Princess Street, Napier Street, Rose Street and Peter Celli Street to the roads here. Indeed, the British influence lasted until very recent times.
In Tanya Abraham’s book Fort Cochin: History And Untold Stories, former Fort Kochi resident Diarmuid McCormick says that when he first arrived in Fort Kochi in 1957, recreation included “cricket at the parade ground, golf at the Bolgatty Palace, croquet, bowls, snooker and tennis at the (Cochin) club". Abraham writes “the town had turned itself into a wonderful little English village…"
The owner of the restaurant where I had my breakfast of puttu and kadala the next morning told me that she remembered the parties and balls, and the sounds of pianos and violins that resounded from Anglo-Indian houses at nights till as recently as in the 1980s.
“That whole way of life has now disappeared. Anglo-Indians migrated, Jews went off to Israel. Right now, there are buildings and structures, but the soul is gone," she added.
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The thick odour of clove and cinnamon hit my nostrils the moment I walked into Jew Town, for there is still a spice market here, much like centuries ago. I walked past the trinket-sellers towards the Paradesi Synagogue in Mattancherry that was built in 1568, which is today one of the oldest synagogues in Asia.
Inside the synagogue’s main hall, five other people sat silently on the fading-brown wooden benches. Hand-painted blue tiles were spread on the floor, around a brass pulpit. Belgian chandeliers crowded the ceiling. In the noiseless cool of the hall, a rabbi held a hushed conversation with a bespectacled young woman.
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Over the next few days, walks on Princess Street or Tower Road took me to the waterfront and back. Beside the we-catch, you-pick, we-cook-for-you fishing stalls, I saw the meshes of Chinese fishing nets (among the few non-Indian, non-European fixtures here) ascend like a curtain going up on a stage as the waves of the Arabian Sea broke next to me.
On my third and last evening, I walked to the end of the promenade past the Old Lighthouse Bristow Hotel, and turned inland from the sea and towards the nearby art gallery-cum-café David Hall.
There, I sat down at a table under a jackfruit tree for some tea, passion fruit and conversation with the curator.
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