From The
Sunday Times Travel Magazine Dec, 2007, issue
Outside our hotel was a holy man selling brilliant crimson medicine in old
vaccine phials. He sat under a vast rain tree, and every now and then, the
house crows would wander over to monitor his takings. Most of his customers
were rickshaw drivers, although none could tell me exactly what his medicine
did.
Such sights would be familiar to old India hands. But to me, it was all still
beautifully baffling. Within an hour of arriving in Cochin, the seaside
capital of Kerala state, I’d spotted a ‘Ladies Frisking Booth’, an
advertisement for a surrogate mother, some porters wearing shirts
embroidered with the words ‘NO TIPS’, and a supermodel digging a trench in
her sari. With all its robes and elephants and public works, I’ve always
imagined that India is what Ancient Rome would have been like if it hadn’t
been so… ancient.
But then, in the middle of this Neoclassical reverie – wham! – I found myself
falling down the great rabbit-hole of time, and ending up in the wonderland
that’s modern India: satellite launches, BMW factories, hip hotels and new
travel outfits – such as Jet Airways – whose names may be straight out of
Toytown but whose service is confidently slick.
It’s always been like this in Kerala, for millennia a gateway to the
continent. Its beauty, greenery and balmy climate brought early traders from
Greece, Arabia and the shores of the Caspian Sea, and it was Kerala, too,
that attracted India’s first Europeans. Pliny described it as the place for
teak and peacocks, and Columbus had been heading here when he bumped into
the Americas. Among the first to take it seriously, though, were the
courtiers of the Kublai Khan, who left behind their great creaking fishing
machines (‘The Chinese Nets’). A skipper invited me up to have a look, and
before I knew it, we were tottering around in the superstructure, high above
the waters of Cochin.
‘It feels like an elephant trap,’ I told the skipper.
He laughed. ‘All this, just to catch some tiddlers!’
Each of the great powers left odds and ends behind – and accidentally created
a place where Asia and Europe now seem to overlap. We found a Portuguese
fort, a Dutch Palace, a 16th-century Jewish synagogue and a whole street of
old British mock-Tudor clubs and ‘godowns’, as they call warehouses here. My
wife, Jayne, even spotted Vasco da Gama’s grave, into which he’d been
inserted by relieved locals on Christmas Day 1524. He was never the best
ambassador for Europe. He once made a curry out of Keralite hands and noses;
and when the local Zamorin leaders sent him an envoy, da Gama sent the man
back with his ears cut off and those of a dog sewn on.
The Keralite character survived the incursions intact, though. People here are
spiritual and sensuous: there are shrines to snakes, and the men go to
beauty parlours. We even went to watch some Kathakali, an eye-popping,
sinew-snapping dance unchanged for several thousand years. But, in every
other way, the Keralites are gluttons for innovation. They enjoy a literacy
rate of 90 per cent and – in India – they were the first Christians, the
first Jews, and the first Communists. They are also the most prosperous, and
the irresistible urge to work has now thrown their invasions into reverse.
These days there are around three million Keralites working abroad, most of
them in the Gulf.
I’ll remember their pungent, spicy old capital for its shady banyan trees,
dugout canoes, merchants in dhoti ‘skirts’ and a pair of exquisite brass
scales I bought for about 80p. But for every medicine man and purveyor of
magic beads, there’s a returning worker who’s built himself a spanking new
little Abu Dhabi. Judging from the small ads, even the local prostitutes
have undergone a little re-branding: these days, the only attributes they
ever advance are ‘hygienic’ or ‘English spoken’.
Modernity, it seems, is now galloping ahead at such a pace that often hotels
are forced to re-invent the past. Ours, The Brunton Boatyard, is a case in
point. It had started out as industrial premises in 1840, but shipbuilding
was never like this. We had four-poster beds, planters’ chairs, punkah fans
(with palm leaf-shaped blades) and spice chests (each the size of a family
saloon). It was all so tastefully antiqued and boutiqued, it felt like
wandering around in a sepia print. Only our dinner re-ignited a sense of the
present: plump prawns deliciously perfumed with spices, and served with
chilled Chardonnay (Indian, of course). In a country where ‘colonial’ used
to mean ‘the plumbing doesn’t work’ (and ‘historic’ meant ‘nothing works at
all’), here was unexpected pleasure indeed.
I wanted to travel further back in time – and that meant a drive up into the
Western Ghats. The higher our little car climbed, the more decades seemed to
fall away. First, the city broke up into tiny factories (with bizarre names
such as ‘The Infant Jesus Radiator Works’), and then we were in the
plantations. Our driver said that here forest people still wash their houses
out with cow dung (an early germicide) and consider it a sin to kill a
squirrel. They’d even believed in their Robin Hood for a while (although
when police finally chased him to Earth, he turned out to be no more than a
mountain rustler called Veerappan). These are simple, public lives
consisting of baths taken in the river and sheets dried on the grass. Up
here, the buses have names like ‘St Anthony’, and the only time we stopped
was to let a snake cross the road.
A small correction, Cochin is not the capital of kerala, it is Trivandrum.
MK, Toronto, Canada
Hi
Well written article. Very informative.
Regards
Nikhil
PS:Its Trivandrum that is the capital of the state
Nikhil Narayanan, Bangalore, Karnataka