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Cochin - Where Spice was the Tragedy of Life |
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In Cochin, on the west coast, dawn is not often a thing of breathtaking beauty. Just a careless smear of tinted light where sea and sky unite.
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Day-break is full of indeterminate promise. A slow lividness at the mist-obscured harbor mouth meets the swelling untamed surge of the ocean.
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Cargo-laden barges and vallams or country boats move, ponderously slow, over the sprawling vastness of the Vembanad Kayal, Kerala's largest lake, which spreads full-bosomed and silver-grey in the sultry sun.
Piercing the quiet is the rasping lament of a ship's horn. Life stirs on the two bridges that straddle the Vembanad Kayal. They are the city' lifelines in its congested heart, often choked with traffic. From the bridges, the rising hulk of hulls, big and obtrusive, and the disarray of mast and sail against sky dominate the vision.
Though Cochin had been an important roadstead in days gone by, it became a natural harbor only when nature decreed it so. When ancient Rome had flourishing trade links with Muziris (present-day Kodungalloor on the mouth of the Periyar river) 40 kilometers north of what is now Cochin, the famous lagoons and backwaters were still in the process of formation. When a direct coastal route between Aden (today's South Yemen) and Muziris, on the Malabar coast, threw open trade in pepper and pearls, fine silks, cotton, muslin, honey, oil, betel, tortoise shell, cinnamon leaf, black pepper ginger grass, indigo…, geological changes were only beginning to shape Cochin's destiny. The laterite soil deposits from the Periyar, the tidal flow after monsoons and wind patterns led to a patient accumulation of mud, building a natural sandy breakwater to the lagoon system of backwaters. So when Muziris next door basked in smug superiority, Cochin languished in quiet contented obscurity.
And then during one stormy monsoon in 1341 A.D., it rained like it had never rained before. Immense winds whipped up the swollen waters of the Periyar and the river gushed into Cochin in great brown swirling tides, flooding the backwaters, which in turn breached the narrow sandy barrier, seeking urgent outlet into the sea. This was how the harbor was formed. A violent but providential birth that simultaneously threw up the Vaipin Island which was formed by the huge alluvial deposit brought down by the deluge. Its appearance coincides with the formation of the harbor at Cochin and is commemorated in Kerala by the commencement of the Puduvaippu (New Deposit) Era in 1341 A.D. The floods had meanwhile silted up the Muziris harbor-mouth and this rich ancient port was banished to the footnotes of history and the merchants of Muziris shifted to Cochin.
This is when the Queen of the Arabian Sea began her saga as a demure maiden with a lurking ambition for glory and an eagerness for new adventure. For centuries, Cochin was the battleground of European powers for the mastery of the lucrative trade of the Indian west coast. And pepper was to dictate the fortunes of political powers in Cochin. The Portuguese came first.
Tow years later, the adventurous mariner, the legendary Vasco da Gama himself landed in Cochin. It was he who had, in 1498, discovered the direct sea route to Calicut and revolutionized the old world's trading patterns. He got the Portuguese a permanent foothold for armed commerce on the Indian coast. The Portuguese erected a fort for the protection of their factory. Fort Manuel, or Manuel kotta, named after the King of Portugal, was the first fortress constructed by the Europeans in India.
Gradually, the monopoly of the pepper trade passed into Portuguese hands. There is pure astonishment in the words of the Ralph Fitch, the first Englishmen to visit Cochin in the 16th century. "Here grows the pepper, and it springs up by a tree or pole… The first bunches are green and as they waxes ripe, they cut them off and dry them". He goes on to describe the people. "All the inhabitants have very little houses covered with the leaves of the coco tree". That is how rural Kerala lives even today.
To the Portuguese must go the credit for the extensive scientific cultivation of coconut, ginger and pepper, backbone of Kerala's economy today. Tobacco and cashew nut cultivation was also introduced. Fruits too. The pineapple for instance is still called prithichakka in Malayalam, meaning Portuguese jackfruit. They were also responsible for today's burgeoning trade in coir.
The Dutch, "full of energy and zeal", were next on the scene. Using shrewd manipulative tactics they interfered in the war of succession in the Cochin ruling family, defeated the Portuguese and brought Cochin under their hegemony. Helped by a laissez-faire policy and a self-stipulated dictum of "at least a 100% profit", Cochin saw a great resurgence of trade.
But the Dutch never endured too, and it was the British who came in next to play out their role. A great milestone was the direct export of pepper to England in 1636 and once again, power flowed from pepper.
For a hundred years and more from 1795, Cochin received a gracious patronage of the British. Noble, but stillborn attempts at converting the harbour into a modern, full-fledged port and making Cochin the gateway of South India litter the pages of history. It was for long dismissed as a dream beyond the realm of hope for a rock-like barrier of sand blacked the approach to the port from the sea. No dredging proposition since the days of the Suez Canal project has aroused so much technical interest as the opening up of the Cochin Harbour.
It fell to the lot of an Admiralty Engineer Sir Robert Bristow to envision this "marvel of engineering". It was not an easy task for Brstow to construct a port in these serendipitous surroundings.
Cochin was declared a major port in 1936. With its opening, there was a complete re-orientation of shipping and commercial activities on the Malabar coast. With its year-round shipping facilities, it is the busiest port south of Bombay, lying as it does on the direct route to Australia and the Far East from Europe and serving the vast southern hinterland of industrial areas and plantations. It is a passenger port for the United Kingdom and America in South India. And it is one of the few ports of the world with all the three main forms of transport - land, sea and air, centred in the same place.
Cochin, the commercial capital of Kerala, is a four-in-one entity, full of quicksilver contrasts and provincial characteristics that co-exist in a spirit of good neighbourliness. Ernakulam, the centre of administration and education, has a patina of sophistication and a dignity frayed a bit by speedy industarlisation and ungainly growth. Passionately involved in the present, it has an older history than Cochin. Its origin is linked to the Shiva temple that stands alone in splendour in the town-centre. The shivalingam enshrined here, legend goes, was made by Arjuna himself (one of the five Pandavas of the epic Mahabharata) and brought here by Nagarishi, a wandering ascetic who discovered it at a place called Bagularanya.
He went on a pilgrimage with the idol to Rameswaram on the east coast. On his return, he is aid to have rested awhile at the present site of the temple after placing the idol securely near him. When he woke up he found the idol embedded to the ground and try as he might, it would not budge. It is said that he attained moksha here. A temple came up here and the place surrounding it was called Rishinagakulam, corrupted later to Ernakulam (kulam meaning swamp or pond). The place where the pond rose was once a marshy wasteland.
Today, land is at a premium here. Virtually every inch of it has been built up and a fringe of land has even been reclaimed from the lake to relieve congestion. Real estate commands an astonishingly high price too. "The only hope for Ernakulam is to make inroads into God's own heaven. Build high-rises". That is polite irreverence for you from Mani whose tea-shop, festooned with bright red flags, radical leftist literature, the latest Malayalam magazines and great bunches of the juiciest Kerala plantains, struggles for a tenuous toe-hold on arterial Mahatma Gandhi Road.
Willingdon Island is the seat of the naval establishment, the deep water wharf, the airport all bounded by the placid calm of the lake. And then comes Mattancheri. Here is the ancient market place in all its raw vigour the smells, the confusion, the hot humid struggles. Here is Kerala's treasury of spices heaped in multi coloured abandon on the narrow streets where man, cow, goat and bullock, hand-cart and gunny sack still jostle for primacy. The roads, incidentally, still turn into rivers when it rains and the palpable excitement of buying and selling remains unchanged.
Mattancheri has a predominantly Muslim population. But tucked away behind its tumult is Jew Town, a quiet cul-de-sac. A single street of old discoloured buildings. "Quaint houses of solid build" where the few surviving members of the oldest Jewish settlement in India live. Hounded out of Muziris by the Portuguese, they came to Cochin in the 16th century and found an unexpected benefactor in the Raja of Cochin who allotted them this land in the vicinity of his place and helped them build their place of worship. The Paradeshi Synagogue was built in 1568 with timber supplied gratis by the Raja who is said to have personally instructed the masons to mix mortar with coconut water for strong walls. One of the oldest synagogues in the world, it is a jewel of incomparable beauty with its brass columns, Belgian hanging lamps and exquisite hand-painted, blue-and-white Chinese porcelain tiles of which no two are alike.
The Dutch palace at Mattancheri was actually built by the Portuguese and presented to the Cochin ruler Vira Kerala Varma in 1555 as an act of expiation for the plunder and desecration of a temple near the Raja's palace by a hot-headed young Portuguese officer. The extensions of the east and south and the wooden ceilings of the Coronation Hall were incorporated by the Dutch and hence the name.
The real glory of the palace however lies in its wall murals, all done using the tempera process of painting. Forty-five scenes from tteh Ramayana adorn the long walls of the bed-chamber. They are known for their brilliant execution. Of these paintings elsewhere in the palace, o n is a large beautiful unfinished portrait of Lord Vishnu, a faithful replica of the image at the Poornathrayeesa temple in neighbouring Trippunithura. The story goes that Govindan Embranthiri, the painter, had a dream in which a divine voice ordered him to stop his work at once and leave the place.
And finally, Fort Cochin with its European, heritage; its air of genteel decay and stubborn self-absorption. Where history, like a friendly phantom, still stalks the lonely streets. Yet strangely, Fort Cochin has a density of population that is one of the highest in India! All of 1.01 sq miles in area where a vibrant past importunes even if the present is filled with poignant silence.
Those were years of violent life, but between political convuslsions there was still time for study and quiet contemplation. For imperishable master pieces. It was here in 1577 that India's first book in a vernacular language was printed. The Jesuits of Cochin issued The Rudiments of the Catholic Faith in Malayalam, the print-type for which was for the first time, cut out by Joannes Gonsalvez, a Spanish lay Jesuit. It is here that Garcia Da Orta worked on a pioneering study of the medicinal plants of India.
And it was here that Hortus Malabaricus, that monumental work on the properties of Indian medicinal plants was complied by the Dutch. The European have left random imprints in Fort Cochin. The massive buttresses which are so conspicuous a feature of the place were put up by the British to protect the houses that had been shaken by the force of an explosion that blew up the cathedral of Santa Cruz. In fact, they themselves had bombarded the church fearing a possible restoration of Dutch supremacy in Cochin. In spite of it all, the Santa Cruz Basilica still stands… in a spirit of study resistance.
The chief landmark though, is St. Francis' Church built in the early 16th century. It is the pirde of Fort Cohin. A sad, beautiful, unpretentious monument, immersed in a deep, almost reproachful hush. For the present is an unwelcome intrusion here. Its facade is smudged with the tell-tale marks of age and is totally devoid of flamboyant decorations. The most magnificent pageant enacted here was the burial of Vasco Da Gama in 1526. But it was to be a temporary resting place for this "armed interloper", as he has sometimes, perhaps rightly too, been called. Sixteen years later, his son Pedro da Silva Gama took away the mortal remains of his father back to Portugal.
St. Francis' Church is the oldest existing European church in India. From this choir for the first time in Hindustan, resounded the sonorous chants of Rome. The church began life as a wooden structure built by the five Friars who accompanied the Portuguese to Cochin in 1503. The Franciscans, followers of St. Francis Xavier who visited Cochin in the early 16th century, raised the present edifice.
The most enduring impression of Fort Cochin is the enigma of the Chinese fishing nets. Like totems from another age stranded in time, they perch along the backwaters. Curious clumsy things with no bright counterfeit graces. Arms and legs all askew, holding the thin film of fishing net in their stiff grip! The Chinese fishing nets are the most efficient means of backwater fishing and Font Cochin is full of them. Says Papachan, a withered fisherman of seventy who has worked on these nets for as long as he can remember…"why the Chinese prefix, no one knows for sure".
GETTING THERE
By Air
There are daily Indian Airlines direct services to Delhi, Bombay, Madras, Goa, Bangalore and Trivandrum.
By Rail
Cochin is connected by rail to most of the important cities.
By Road
Cochin is connected by road with several tourist centres in India. It is 565 kilometres from Bangalore, 223 kilometres from Coimbatore, 848 kilometres from Goa, 694 kilometres form Madras, 470 kilometres from Mysore and 312kilometres form Ootacamund.
WHAT TO SEE
Places worth visiting are the Mattancherry Palace, Gundu Island, Jewish Synagogue, St. Francis' Church, Fort Cochin, Santa Cruz Cathedral, Fort Cochin, Chinese Fishing nets, Fort Cochin, Bolghatty Island, Willingdon Island.
Courtesy : Discover India
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