A Globe-trotter’s take on History in the Making

Conversations with Henry Brownrigg--part 3  

HENRY LOVED to travel and also to tell tales about his travels. In Malabar, a long stretch of coastline on the south western India where I was  born and spent most of my life, he could talk about people and places as if he had lived here for decades.

He once wrote to me about the old part of the city of Calicut, where Arab Muslims had set up their businesses and lived in palatial tharavadu homes for many centuries. His great knowledge of the culture and traditions of Malabar Mappila Muslim community and their global links came through in this note:

“Mappila castes interest me. Am I right in thinking that the Kuttichira Mappilas are an endogamous community? I would like to understand more about the traders and shipowners living in the area between the railway line and the sea in Calicut, as well as the rather similar people in the bandar area of Mangalore and no doubt in other Malabar ports. In Malaysia and Singapore the word Tamil normally applies to low-caste plantation workers, but it also includes descendants of the merchant-seafaring community with used to handle the trade between South-East Asia and the Coromandel coast. They too are an endogamous community. In Penang and in Singapore there are mosques which have soil brought from the shrine at Nagore and believed to embody the barakat of the Nagore saint.”

Henry had spent much time and effort to visit and photograph the churches, mosques and temples in the south and south-eastern parts of Asia. Towards the end, he was thinking of how to preserve his work for posterity, as much of this great cultural heritage happens to be on the verge of being erased.

“I have a lot of photos, many of them old fashioned slides, of mosques which may well no longer exist as the Salafists are keen to replace traditional Kerala buildings with concrete domed structures which look as if they have been transported from Jeddah. So my photos are a valuable record of Kerala's unique Muslim architecture. I don't know what to do with them...I plan to leave them either to the British Library or the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at London University. It would really be better to give them to a museum or library in Kerala, but I am worried that they will not be properly looked after...

“I have also made extensive photographs of traditional wood mosques in Indonesia, Malaysia and South Thailand, as I was trying to see if there was a cultural link to Kerala mosques. The Kerala mosques are very interesting. If you ask someone what is a typical Indian mosque they will think of maybe the Jama Masjid in Delhi. But this is essentially a Mughal propaganda exercise intended to overawe the population with the grandeur of the dynasty and of its religion. Stylistically these big domed mosques have Persian and Central Asian antecedents. But the Kerala mosques were built in or soon after the Prophet's lifetime since the Arabs were trading in Malabar before they were Muslims. They were not built to impress people because the Muslims, like the Christians and Jews, lived at the mercy of local Hindu rulers who imposed strict rules on the size and adornment of buildings. So in elevation the mosque was a typical vernacular building. But their ground plan, unlike North Indian and Deccani mosques, was the same as the ground plan of very early mosques in the Hadramaut which were built in imitation of the Prophet's house in Medina. So there is a paradox in that these Salafi guys are destroying buildings which are witnesses to the first century of the hijira and replacing them with big mosques with domes, minarets and a courtyard which are much later and are essentially Persian rather than Arab.”

Henry felt at home in every part of the world.  Once we were discussing Pablo Neruda’s poem, The Heights of Macchu Picchu, and he had memories of his visits to Peru and the encounter with an absurd poet:

“I have twice visited Peru...One weekend I hired a car from Avis and drove into the Andes, but I only got to Tarma which is less than half way to Cuzco. It was the most terrifying drive of my life. The road twisted like a snake, and not only did the car´s brakes not work but nor did the windscreen wipers (a disaster since the road was muddy and the windscreen frequently quite opaque). I arrived back in Lima in a furious rage and burst into the Avis manager's office screaming abuse about the fact that he had nearly killed me.  "Oh you poor man", he said, "What a dreadful experience. You must allow me to buy you lunch as a very small compensation." We had a rather expensive lunch over which he explained that he was not by training or inclination cut out to manage a car hire company. He was actually Bolivia´s leading poet. But his family had been exiled by President Banzer, and his uncle insisted that he take this job to pay for his livelihood. He was an absurd person, but actually we became quite good friends, and I was invited home to meet his wife. Meanwhile the mortality rate among people hiring Avis cars does not bear thinking about.”

He had observed Latin American politics very closely. So when some of us in Kerala were excited about the rise of left politics in that far-away continent, he cautioned: “Those on the left have a very two-dimensional understanding of South America. They see its history as an unbroken anti-imperialist, anti-US struggle: Bolivar-Zapata-Pancho Villa -Fidel- Che- Allende- Chavez.  Of course this is one factor in the continent's history, but, when one goes there one realizes that it is just as complicated and multi-faceted as any other part of the world. When I was young the villains were pear-shaped colonels in dark glasses. But these days they are just as likely to be ideology-driven leftists who think that winning an election gives them an irreversible right to power however incompetently they exercise it. As somebody said, People's Democracy is to democracy what National Socialism is to socialism.”

Travel offers experiences; some of them funny, some traumatic and some surreal. The troubles he faced enjoying a prawn masala with a bottle of beer in a Kerala hotel: “For the foreigner who drinks in moderation Kerala presents a problem. I adore Malayali food, but because it is spicy I adore it more when accompanied by a bottle of beer. I remember one of my first visits where I was staying in a hotel in Thrissur. I ordered chemmeen masala and a bottle of Kingfisher. But alcohol was only available in the 'foreign liquor' bar, which was a dark, gloomy, noisy place full of men. The bar did not serve food. So what to do? Does one have a mouthful of masala in the restaurant and then run to the bar to take a gulp of beer? Or does one merely book one's next holiday for Sri Lanka?”

Then his encounter with Indologist Asko Parpola in the same city. It was surreal: “I once met him by accident over breakfast at a hotel in Thrissur, where he was accompanied by a Japanese Professor of Epigraphy. At the time it seemed a bit surreal for a Brit, a Finn and a Japanese to be all eating idli while discussing temple inscriptions. I then changed the subject to beekeeping, and Asko explained with great learning why the beekeeping techniques of the Toda are very similar to those used at monasteries in medieval Russia.”

Henry was a caring person, always considerate of others. Henry was  “ever loyal even to people whose behaviour he found distasteful,” according to a close friend. He liked helping others in distress. He told me this story about an English girl imprisoned in Kerala as she was found in possession of a little cannabis: “When Nayanar was First Minister I was involved in getting a pardon for a British girl called Samantha Slater who had been sentenced to ten years for possessing a couple of ounces of cannabis...The British high Commission was applying outside pressure for her release, which was totally counter-productive. I got Rubin's help in spreading Samantha's story in left-wing circles. She got support from the women's movement, and in due course Nayanar recommended her release...She was a nice and innocent girl, though not very clever. Her mother was a 'lollipop lady', i.e. she carried a lollipop-shaped sign outside a primary school telling the traffic to slow down to let the kid's cross the road. One cannot imagine a more proletarian job.”  

As usual Henry had anecdotes to tell about cannabis and his own encounters with the stuff: “When I was a student I was a fairly infrequent dope smoker, and I have bought cannabis from one of the hotels at Periyar...Kerala used to be pretty tolerant about it, since after all bhang is freely available in many temple towns, Then, like many South-East Asians countries, it went to the other extreme and introduced draconian penalties.”  

Talking about Kerala and its newly acquired puritanism with regard to various types of intoxicants, he asked a very pertinent question: “Sri Lanka produces double-distilled arrack, which is an expensive middle-class drink comparable to whisky or rum. But Kerala, despite having exactly the same toddy palms as Sri Lanka, does not produce this and must lose employment and tax revenue as a result. This is one of the mysteries of the Indian liquor trade, such as why is feni unobtainable outside Goa.”

Tony Shaw remembers how Henry found a way to get him out of the country when he got into trouble with some top guns in Pakistan. He successfully played the strings making use of his contacts with old Oxford friends in the Pakistani establishment. At the time Tony had a building contract work at Sehwan Shariff. “I met  [prime minister Benazir] Bhutto a couple of times and clashed with her husband Zardari who threatened to have me arrested. Henry and Samir [Iraq’s ambassador to the US in the post-Saddam days] worked through their contacts to have me leave the country without Zardari knowing...I phoned the minister of housing from the plane to Dubai. He was flabbergasted that I had managed to leave the country.”

There is so much to write, but these memoirs have already run into three parts. So I would leave out all those interesting things he said about his immediate family, his friends, his pet likes and dislikes... But I think I cannot bring this to an end without quoting from the series of notes he wrote to me just a few weeks ahead of his death, which I consider as his testament on history of our times and the future of our civilization. He wrote those  notes, in response to a few chapters  I had sent him of my book A Topsy Turvy World, dealing with the issues in the  21st century global politics and economy. At that very moment, he was also laying down meticulous instructions for his own farewell. He soon died, on December 22, 2016. The invitation of his memorial service, held at St. James Church, Piccadilly, on Thursday 23 March 2017, says: “Henry selected the hymns, readings and music for today’s service and requested a good send off “with the flambeaux flaming and good wine flowing.” All those who have attended his memorial service at the church as well as the reception at the Travellers Club, Pall Mall, testify his wishes had been dutifully carried out.

Now to his fnal letters. In the first of these, dated 28 September, Henry wrote:

“I think that a good approach would be to imagine how a historian would answer this if say it was an exam question set in fifty years time. Will the things which seem obvious today still seem obvious? To look at it from the other end, anyone of our generation has preconceptions formed by our C20th upbringing. Firstly, we assume the existence of a US-centric world, unavoidable whether you love it or hate it. Secondly, anyone from the global south has been formed by the anti-colonial struggle which is still relatively recent. Thirdly, until the late C20th the most influential political theory was Marxism, which is a belief rooted in us-versus-them dualism - cops vs robbers, cowboys vs Indians, poor vs rich, proletarians vs. capitalists, socialists vs. conservatives. Will all this still seem so central in 2050, or will the US just be one player among many in a complex multi-faceted world?

“Let us take the fall of the Berlin Wall as symbolising the end of the C20th and start of the C21st (give or take eleven years). What does one read into it? At one level it was just a rejection of Soviet colonialism not greatly different from the global south's rejection of Western colonialism a few decades earlier. In part it was an ideological reaction, but there was also a strong element of old fashioned nationalism. As with the global south the departure of the colonial masters left a vacuum. In some cases this was filled by genuinely democratic institutions, but in many places democracy failed to take root and instead there was a variety of authoritarian and in some cases repressive regimes.

“Optimistic Americans saw the fall of the wall as ushering in an age of international harmony, rising economic growth, and (normally understated) Western hegemony. Agencies like the IMF and the World Bank had always been intended to establish a framework for global development and to avoid a repeat of the disastrous mistakes which followed the First World War. The agencies were the velvet glove, though right-wing Americans made little secret that there was an iron fist inside it. However, in practice this blend of liberal democracy and market economics lacked emotional appeal for many people, even those living in places where living standards were improving. The need to fill this emotional vacuum probably helps to explain a sudden explosion of fundamentalist religion, particularly in the Islamic world but also in India, Israel, Russia and even in the USA itself.

“During the C20th most Muslim countries were led by people who were essentially secularist, the most notable examples being Ataturk, Jinnah and Nasser. Religion played second fiddle to nationalism or socialism. Islam itself was divided not just between Sunni and Shi'a but also by all sorts of traditional leaderships, of which the strictest was, paradoxically, the Wahabis of Saudi Arabia. Politically many of these leaderships had reasonable working relationships with the West. However, the early C21st saw the emergence of a much more hardline Islam manifested in quranic fundamentalism, salafism and, most critically, jihadism. All this had genuine roots in historic Islam, but it also meshed with anti-Western attitudes left over from colonial times. The extremists had varied success in destabilising existing Muslim governments, and, in addition to the West and Israel, their targets also embraced countries as diverse as Russia, India, China, Thailand and the Philippines. Attempts to establish a viable centralised political structure under al-Qaeda or the I.S.'s kalifat were not very successful, but their ideology had wide influence. The result has been not just actual wars such as those in Syria and Iraq, but a variety of semi-independent terrorist events perpetrated by informal militias such as Boko Haram or by jihadi individuals with a wide range of political and religious motivation. Although Western public opinion is shocked by this it has so far resisted the temptation to react in a violent way which would clearly be counter-productive.

“The USA is nothing if not hypocritical. It wraps itself in the language of democracy and human rights and expressed support for the so-called Arab Spring, but it simultaneously supports thoroughly undemocratic governments such as the Saudis and the Sisi regime in Egypt. However, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq both had special circumstances. The USA was understandably traumatised by the events of 9/11. Osama bin Laden's base was near the Afghan-Pakistan border, and America's nightmare was the thought that he might drive through the streets of Kabul to the rapturous cheers of his supporters. The US foolishly decided to preempt this by sending troops to support Karzai, ignoring the historic experience of Britain and the Soviet Union that foreigners who invade Afghanistan always live to regret it.

“In Iraq the USA had supported Saddam Hussein during his war with Iran, preferring a brutal secularist thug to a charismatic anti-Western leader such as Khomeini. But the invasion of Kuwait, Saddam's known fascination with advanced weapons, and provocations such as Baghdad's main hotel having a mat with President Bush's face on it which everyone had to tread on, caused the Americans to worry that he would place his forces at the service of al-Qaeda. This ignored the fact that his secularism was at the other extreme from their fundamentalism. The final outcome was that the West won the war but lost the peace, partly because the wholesale ousting of Baathists from the army and the civil service weakened the new government and strengthened its opponents.

“Throughout much of the world the first decades of the turn of the century saw a decline of trust in existing governments. In the Islamic world there was the Arab Spring, in the former Soviet bloc countries the 'velvet', 'orange' and other revolutions, in the USA a rejection of government from the old Washington elite, and similarly in Europe a rejection of the traditional polarity between Christian democrats and social democrats. Authoritarian governments such as Russia, China and Turkey, where the media and the political process were tightly controlled, were mainly able to outface their critics and hold on to effective power.

“In Europe the early C21st saw the unravelling of the main institution, the European Union. Originally a core of six like-minded democratic countries, this expanded into a much looser association of twenty-eight members. For reasons which were essentially geopolitical the EU absorbed most of the ex-Soviet countries of eastern Europe as well as Poland and the Baltic republics. Many of these countries were intensely nationalistic, some had little in the way of a democratic tradition, and many had economic problems, so both their interests and their instincts were very different from the original six founding nations. At its best the EU redistributed resources from its wealthier members such as Germany to poorer ones in the east and the south (so-called 'Club Med'). In practice not all these investments were well considered. The 'Club Med' countries tended to overspend, often on projects which had a political rather than an economic rationale. When things went wrong they expected the Germans in particular to pick up the bill, and this caused a predictably negative reaction from German public opinion. Greece was a case in point. Greek governmental overspending can partly be blamed on German and other banks, but other factors included bad planning and a culture of tax avoidance. To oversimplify, the tax-avoiding elite was able to load their assets onto their yachts and sail away, but the poor, and particularly public sector employees, were left in a situation of grinding poverty. The left-wing party Syriza started with a rather simplistic 'blame-the-banks' agenda, but under its charismatic leader Alexis Tsipras it reinvented itself as a more pragmatic party which has mended its fences with the Germans, the EU and the IMF, and is quite successfully making the best of an immensely difficult situation.

“Another major problem for the EU is the defection of Britain. Britain does not compare with say Germany as an industrial power, but the City of London is far and away the biggest European player in global finance. Britain's departure weakens the EU, and in particular Germany which shared its hard line on the EU's lax economic management and on the profligate spending of 'Club Med'. There is also the worry that Britain's departure will be seen as a precedent by other EU members. Enthusiasts for the EU have always taken the view that a bicycle stays upright so long as it keeps moving forwards but will fall over as soon as it begins to wobble.

“All over the world there has been a reaction against existing governments. One factor is the existence of widespread corruption, kleptomania, where politicians and their cronies milk the economy for personal gain. For instance President Xi Jinping of China claims to be cracking down on corruption within the Communist Party. But the leaked 'Panama Papers' revealed that Xi's own brother-in-law controls secret offshore companies said to have assets of hundreds of millions of dollars. Government censorship has effectively prevented any of this being publicly discussed in China. Transparency International publishes an annual table grading 168 countries by their perceived level of corruption. Of the 168 Pakistan ranks 154, Russia 117, China 83, India 76, South Korea 37, France 23, Japan and Hong Kong 18, Britain and Germany 10 and Singapore 8. The least corrupt country is Denmark, followed by Finland and Sweden.

“Latin America is seen as something of a special case. Founded in the anti-colonial struggle of Bolivar and San Martin it has a tradition of rebellion which can be traced through the careers of Zapata, Pancho Villa, Castro, Che and Allende. This is the image of the continent held by many outside observers, and it has been assiduously fostered by local politicians such as Hugo Chavez. In fact Latin America is much more multi-faceted, but the early C21st saw a surge of governments with a socialist and anti-American rhetoric. These governments met with mixed success, and in some cases it proved easier to elect them than to get rid of them once their democratic term had expired.

“Chavez/Maduro in Venezuela and Kerchner in Argentina were almost unbelievably inept and succeeded only in reducing potentially rich countries to a condition of abject poverty. This did not stop them continuing to find apologists among those to whom being anti-American is the only thing which matters. Morales in Bolivia has been successful in giving effective power to indigenous people who had been marginalised by previous white-dominated governments. In Brazil the Lula government seemed for a time to have achieved economic lift-off, but this has foundered among mutual accusations of ill-considered investment and rampant corruption. Perhaps the most successful country has been Colombia which negotiated an end to its long-running conflict with the leftist guerillas FARC, and which has successfully expanded its economy despite the damage inflicted by a low oil price. But Colombia is not anti-American, so its achievements are rather under-acknowledged.

“As a former Mexican president put it, 'Poor Mexico. So far from God; so close to the United States'.”

In a later mail, Henry was critical of my line of thinking which he thought was fixated in the past: “Your analysis of the post-Bretton Woods system does not stoop to understatement:- 'immoral system of modern day colonialism', 'global loan shark', 'serves the West and Wall Street', 'flawed development model', 'institutionalised global inequality'....  Is this what a historian in 2066 will be saying? It is far too early to tell, but I think that you should make some attempt to give the IMF/World Bank's side of the argument.”

 And then a final word of advice to a younger person trying to figure out the world:   

“To sum up, you should ask the questions I suggested at outset. Am I being as forensic and dispassionate as if I was writing a dissertation on physics? And how will this read to a historian in 2066? To be frank, I think that you are still too rooted in the age in which we happen to be living and are too inclined to see capitalism and its supporting institutions as the big bad wolf. But who knows? Perhaps our 2066 historian will be saying that the global economy only really achieved fairly distributed growth when the age of American hegemony gave way to the age of Chinese hegemony.”

These were the last words in a long mail I received from Henry, dated October 19, two months ahead of his death. I know I will not be around at the mid-century point where he envisions his new world. But two years after these conversations, I think it is evident which way the wind blows, with a trade war already on between the two super- powers with China digging its heels to face it. And America taking blind swipes at its more agile adversary.

So rest in peace Henry, it was a pleasure to have known you for all these years. Good Bye.

(Concluded. Photo courtesy the Brownrigg family, UK.)

Culture and History? Go to Trash Heap...

Here is a note submitted to the Cultural Affairs department of Kerala  government with regard to restoration of some 16^th-17th  century Portuguese gravestones, now dumped in a government museum  in Trissur. It was submitted to Mr K C Joseph,  Cultural  Minister, on April 17, 2012 and so far no action has been taken, though the government  had promised to do so.

WE the undersigned, Dr John Cantwell Roberts of New York and N P Chekkutty, Calicut, have been working on a project for the proper recording and analysis of the European gravestones and cemeteries in the erstwhile British Malabar and Nilgiri districts for the past two years.  Dr John C Roberts is a retired social anthropologist who has served in various centers of learning including the universities of Oxford  and  Columbia and is the author of scholarly  articles and books like the Early Cantwells in Ireland, a major work on medieval European prosopography. N P Chekkutty has worked in India for almost three decades as a journalist. Two books —Malabar:  The Christian Burials and Memorials in Kannur,Thalassery & Mahe 1723-1950 and The Nilgiris: Christian Burials and Memorials in Gudalur, Ootacamund, Wellington, Coonoor & Kotagiri 1822-2000, will be published by the British Association for Cemeteries  in South Asia (BACSA), London, later this year, as part of our work.  We are now working on the European burials in the rest of old Malabar, comprising areas from Calicut to Angengo in the south.

The present work has academic as well as economic aspects:  As we try to restore the genealogy of the families and individuals buried here, we are also providing a handbook for potential tourists who are looking for details on the final resting place of their ancestors who died in India in the centuries past.   There are tens of thousands of such people buried in the Malabar coast, who came from all parts of Europe, dating back to early 16^th century. Some of these monuments are of great historical value and ought to be preserved for the benefit of future studies.

In this connection, we would like to bring your attention to half a dozen gravestones of Portuguese origin, removed by the authorities from an old graveyard near Kodungallur and now stored in the Government Murals Museum, at Chembukakvu, Trichur.  We are sorry t o say that most of these gravestones of some historical significance are dumped one over the other in the courtyard of the museum and are handled in a most deplorable manner. Of the six gravestones we could identify with the help of Prof. Rafael Moreira of the New University of Lisbon, Portugal, only one is in a good condition while all others are broken into pieces, covered with mud and slime making them quite illegible, thanks to insensitive and rough handling as they were transported from place to place after being pulled out of their original resting place. 

Of the six gravestones, we could properly identify the one that belonged to Felipe Perestrelo, who was vicar and school teacher in the region in late 16^th century.  His life and family connections are most exciting and evoke historical memories of the period, as he came from a noble Italian family that was related to the Portuguese crown as well as to Christopher Columbus, the great navigator who charted a new route to the Americas in 1492 opening up a new chapter in world history. Other interesting finds in this collection, though broken, include the coat of arms of the Costa family, the burial stone of a navigator who sports the intriguing insignia of the skull and cross bones, a late 17^th century symbol that denoted sea pirates.  This must be one of the earliest such symbols ever used and hence of great value in the study of the history of navigation and piracy.

We earnestly call upon the Government of Kerala to take notice of the manner in which these historical relics are handled making them almost inaccessible to scholars and visitors. These stones need to be properly cleaned and mounted, using concrete base fixed with iron bars which will hold the broken pieces  in a proper shape so that visitors and scholars can inspect them at their leisure. You can see that it would cost next to nothing to the exchequer while it would attract large numbers of new visitors to the state.

We do hope the government will take steps for their proper upkeep and we assure every help from scholarly community in India and outside for the restoration of these gravestones.

With sincere thanks,

Dr John Cantwell Roberts, New York

N P Chekkutty, Calicut. 

Bab-al Bahrain

THE ships came unannounced
dancing on the waves big and small;
laden with wares rich and rare
they entered the souk
through the arched gateway;
beneath its high dome
a world rich and glamorous.

He was weird and with a beard,
she laughed at him for his looks;
she hid beyond the Venetian blinds
of Awal; around him shops
glittered, and bright windows
glowed with gold and pearls.

In the desert and the scorching sun
love struck him like a thunderbolt;
a lonely wanderer all his life
it struck him mad; it made him blind.

Where did I hear the playful laughter
that cuts like a razor sharp?
Where did I hear the distant sigh
that moves the mountains high?
From Jishanmal's narrow streets
to the wide expanse of golden
sand on the way to the Tree of Life
he prays for a fleeting glimpse
of the divine form, etched in soul.

At the high-domed grand mosque
a prayer goes up in heavens,
Ya Allah, show me the way
to the divine presence.
To the one who prayed on her
knees, for the beloved
who wandered far and wide.

For whom the battles raged
in mystic Dilmun days?
For whom the pearls longed
in their sleepy oyster homes?
For whom the Barbar temple
offered beasts and birds?

She remains hidden in the shrouds
of history; her golden neck unadorned,
her lovely limbs un-massaged;
her lazy locks unfastened;
the sheets in her bed longing for
the day her man will come with
a sweet and mesmerizing smile.

Wafa Manama, 03.10.2012.

(Dedicated to Dr Maria Bernadette Gomes, who told me about the romantic charm of Bahrain past, opening my eyes to a life beyond the malls and marts in the deserts.) 

A Guide to the Calicut City: Letters to a Visiting Friend

Dr Bina Thomas, a historian and archeologist, was visiting the city of Calicut, for the first time. As her host in the city, I kept worrying what could be of interest to her and what not; and hence I ended up writing a series of mails to her trying to introduce this city and its surrounds to her. Now that her visit has been successfully concluded, I suppose I could release these mails to my readers who might wish to visit our city:

Hi, I am glad finally you have taken the plunge and decided to visit Calicut. I am hopeful your visit could result in some good and perceptive notes on the city and its life for your travel series.

I do believe that this city has quite a lot to offer a visitor, though often visitors may fail to see even a fraction of it. I have lived here for many decades and even today I know there are many things which I have not explored.

Its history and its long and complex relationship with the external world-- Arab, Greek, Roman and modern colonial powers, is well known. But what is so fantastic about this city is that even at this moment it is in a constant flux and keeps on changing and its changing facets are visible to people who take a stroll around the city and its living quarters.

Go to the beach any evening and you see this for a fact. It is a mix of all kinds of people, colourful and complex: Young women in jeans to those in total veil are around and all of them seem to live in their own special world though without causing friction or irritation to the others. I have never seen another city which has taken this new-found fixation for full veil without much bother as I see here these days. It seems just another season for fashion shifts.

This contrast between perceptions of bigotry and religious fundamentalism ad the reality gets much more pronounced as one goes to a textile shop, where new fashions are eagerly examined, or a hotel where spicy hot biriyani is served and witness how voraciously people take to the pleasures of life from behind the veil. It is a celebration of life I see here.

As a woman traveller you might get a much better and closer view to their life behind the front door. Try to visit a Muslim family house and take a look at their Ara, or the inner room where their Puyyaplahs-- even a man married for decades to the family is still a puyyaplah here!-- are feted.


From Varakkal beach in the north to the South Beach road at the southern end, where the road turns east leading to the old city of Arab influence-- Kuttichria, Idiyangara, Kundungal and Kallai-- one comes across quite a lot of historical facets. Of course not in a chronological order, not in a clean vertical or horizontal perspective; but with plenty of criss-crosses and inter-junctions. But this confusion of street names, histories and connotations and historical connections illustrate the symbiotic relationship of these various groups of people who came and got entangled in its long history.

Varakkal is part of the ancient past, the place of Varakkal Nambi, vassal of Zamorin, and a sacred place for Hindus who pay obeisance to their ancestors. As one reaches Vellayil beach, Customs Road and Lions Park, one enters the nerve centre of civil life in colonial times as most of the civilian habitations in the British period were located here. You still see remnants of it, at the Kerala Soaps & Oils premises near Gandhi Road, which used to be a famous factory of sandalwood soap that was exported even to London, for the Crown's use, and the brand then was known as the Imperial Soap. Watch those old buildings and you see the influence of colonial patterns, as in the old Corporation building and the Beach Hospital nearby.

Towards the South beach, it is a wonderful mix of all kinds of racial and cultural heritages and traditions ranging from Arab, Jain, Gujarati, Marathi, etc. You see the pandikasalas or trading houses in plenty, on the Beach Road as well as the Big Bazar nearby, and the Gujarati Street and the Silk Street with living quarters of most of these ethnic groups tucked inside. There are mosques (the oldest dating back to 14th century, called Miskal Mosque), temples and a Jain temple besides a Gujarati school in this small area, and I am told there used to be a China town also somewhere there in the past.

This particular street reminds me of how history has been such a wonderful and unceasing process, with many people coming and going, getting closely interlinked and generating new energies and of course animosities in the process.

I do feel this particular street and its past is something that strongly revolts against the concept of uni-dimensional and exclusivist painting of history that is being attempted in our times. The very atmosphere, the very smell of these places do transport you to something quite different, something more cosmopolitan. I think Romila Thapar's book, Somanatha: Many Strands of a History, captures such an image of a place up north, but somebody should write about this street and its environs down south which is much more evocative in its assertive cosmopolitanism.

Well, I have other parts of this city to describe but I think before one embarks on a walk down there, the best thing one can do is to go to Google Maps and examine this part of the city to see how history has been made in such a small stretch of land.


Those who visit the city today will surely feel the Mananchira Square is the centre of the city. It indeed is, but only a decade ago the landscape in this region was completely different.

N M Namboodiri, the historian of Zamorin's city, has described the city and its main points as per the Calicut Granthavaries, the records of the local rulers, and it appears the main palace-- burnt down in 18th century as the last Zamorin committed suicide setting fire to the palace-- was somewhere on the eastern side of Palayam (where the bus stand is), the main market even today. Palayam is something like Chandni Chowk to the Red Fort in Mughal Delhi.

As a Hindu ruler, Zamorin had traditional architectural or Vastu patterns to follow. His immediate surroundings were set apart for his closest people, according to their ranks and castes. Thus, to the south east of Palayam, we have the Tali temple, the Zamorin's main deity of Shiva, and then next to it the Tamil Brahmin settlement. (The Namboodiri Brahmins stuck to their illams and settlements and never uprooted themselves for the convenience of even the king. Thus the tantris of Tali and Valayanad temples lived in their illams many miles away, somewhere in Nediyirippu, in the present day Malappuram district.)

The main vassals and chieftains also lived here, in Tali, Chalappuram and Panniyankara areas. These are Eradies and Nairs, mainly.

On the northern side of this area is a goshala, which used to give milk to the palace and today, if you take a trek to the interiors of Palayam you will see narrow lanes with old houses still keeping cows and buffaloes.

On the north-western side, we have the major centres of power and administration: the Mananchira tank, the Muslim mosque for military men, Kottapparamba (camp for armed forces), and city’s own the raj path that leads to Palayam. On the right side of the junction, just opposite the old palace, you have the Moideen Palli, the mosque (remember Zamorin's offer to Muslim chief Shah Bandar Koya that he would occupy the right-hand position at Mamankam), and on the left side, the Mariyamman Kovil (which almost shares a wall with another mosque) and then a number of other temples besides the famous Tali Shiva temple.

What is unique about this few kilometre-radius of land, is the seamless array of various sites that speak of the history through many centuries: The temples speak of the king and his vassals, the mosques of Arabs and their flourishing trade, the churches (the German style CSI Church is the most prominent in the heart of the city) of its dalliance with the west and the military mosque about the arrival of the Mysore powers to Kozhikode, which ultimately led to the suicide of Zamorin and at the far corner of SM Street the Parsi place of worship, and then a bit to the west on the beach, the Jain temple...

Karkidakam and the Memories of a Lonely Past

IT HAS been raining all day and night for more than a week now. It is a wonderful experience to listen to the song of the rain, the incessant pelting of rain in the grass, in the paddy, in the rocks and everywhere coupled with the croaking of frogs, the muted noises of birds…

People say the northern parts of Kerala received one of the heaviest rains in recent years in the past few days and as I travel on the city roads and elsewhere in the villages, I see most of the roads inundated, the vast stretches of empty lands on the sides of the new bypass full of water, the Connolly Canal overflowing into the roads and the whole city looking like a vast expanse of water with hundreds of high-rise buildings jutting up like a ship’s mast and the small huts and lonely houses often partially submerged in rising waters, their occupants seeking asylum elsewhere.

The monsoon is a season of nostalgic memories, colourful experiences and immense pain and miseries. It is a season of desolation for those who are trapped in the islands surrounded by rising and flowing water; of heroic acts by those who reach out to them to rescue them to safety; of apathy of the government which often wake up to the miseries quite late and the bold initiatives of local people who always come to the aid of neighbours trapped in their lonely houses surrounded by their flowing household articles and struggling domestic animals…

People talk about the charms of the rains and I have seen many friends from other parts of the world coming to Kerala during monsoon to enjoy the lush rain in all its glory. I did realize that there is something charming in this misery when I was away from my home, living in a small room in Hyderabad where you have little rain and again in Delhi where at times the roads are flooded and then you find not even a rain cloud for months together. Then you start thinking about Kerala, where it comes regularly every June, raining off and on till August when Karkdiakam will give way to the sunny Chingam, the month of Onam, the festival of spring.

Now these are the early days of Karkidakam; the time of penury and hard life for the poor folks; the time for rejuvenation and ayurvedic treatment for those with wherewithal; and the paucity of food in rural households and the special dishes that mothers prepares using leaves of yams and tubers in the yard and the seed of jackfruit, as there is nothing else to eat at home. That used to be the past and I know that must be the reality for many Malayali families even today.

Shared Traditions, Shared Fortunes: Exploring the Cultural History of Kozhikode

EARLIER THIS week came two of my best friends, John Samuel of Action Aid from Bangkok and Bobby Kunhu, a human rights lawyer from Pune. Bobby has his roots in Kozhikode as he is the great grandson of our best-known freedom fighter E Moidu Maulavi though he has been born and brought up in Tamil Nadu. John has been a globe-trotter ever since he left his village in south Kerala and he is one of the most effective leaders of the global civil society movement.

This visit has been pending for almost one year and ever since John expressed his desire to spend a day or two in Kozhikode, I was thinking about what should I show him and where should I take him. It was not an easy thing to decide, because John being as familiar as a fish in water in the first world charms in Washignton DC and the exotic pleasures in Malawi's villages or Bangladesh's marooned mangroves, what could I single out in this most familiar city of ours where a normal visitor cannot find anything particularly exciting?

Then I remembered about our history; our long, variegated and rich history that transcends many centuries, numerous historical phases of our global human heritage, where it freely mixed and interacted, giving rise to an exotic, original culture which seamlessly accommodates various streams within, which nowadays people describe as a syncretic culture. In a world of ethnic cleansing, a world of racial hatred and mono-cultural prejudices, I realized that we do have something unique here, something wonderfully original, something about which we should be proud of.

Thinking about it I could see that everyday as I traversed this city's length and breadth, concerned about nothing more sublime than my own bread and butter, I was moving through exquisite realms of history, through rich streams of cultural and civilizational give and take, an unending process of aadan-pradaan to which I never spared a moment all these years...! (That again reminds me of the story of the donkey who used to carry most exquisite flowers on its back to the temple every day, but he had no nose for its rich smells...)

It was like rediscovering my own identity. In my school days history was my favourite subject and I marvelled at the great past of Rome, of Constantinople, of Delhi and so many other cities I had not had a chance to visit. I have read Orhan Pamuk's wonderful book on his city, Istanbul, and often dreamed about its picturesque streets and buildings, ruminating about the beautiful and expansive Bospherous, all the time forgetting about my own city's thousand years of history that is written in its temple walls, five hundred years of heroic struggles against alien invaders etched on its sea-front battlements and charred remains, its unique dalliances with the ebb and flow of human civilization that is marked in its every inch...

I made an attempt to fill my guests with this unceasing cascade of history that permeates every part of this city as I took them on a quick trip from north to south, from Panthalayini or Fandarini in Arabian records which is a small port north of Koyilandy, some 30 km away from Kozhikode, to Beypore, on the southern tip.

Panthalayini, a natural port, was famous in the ancient world and Arabs used to anchor here over a thousand years ago. Historians say it was here Vasco da Gama actually landed though his ship was later taken to Kappad or Kappakkadavu, a little to the south. Panthalayini keeps its historical memories fresh with place-names that remind you of the trade that flourished here, the streets where Arabs and even Chinese set up camps. Even today there is a place called Cheenatheru, or China street, in this place, say local people.

Travelling southward, one comes across the temples of Puthur and Varakkal, both Devi temples, mentioned in Portuguese records as Gama was taken to both these places of worship by his local guides and he obviously thought they were churches of Mary the Immaculate, and did not hesitate to offer his prayers there.

Then you suddenly enter the world of colonial English who came to Malabar in 1792. With Arthur Wellesley and his English East India Company taking over the region, it is a new age of colonial rule with the Portuguese, French and others either sidelined or pushed to the peripheries like French Mahe some 60 km north, or even Goa, further up in the Konkan coast.

West Hill and East Hill still retain a colonial ambience, with a number of British buildings that include the two early 19th century tiled and slanted-roof structures atop the eastern hill, that today serve as the Pazhassi Rajah Museum and the Ravi Varma Art Gallery. The main building used to be the camp office of the Malabar Collector in colonial days and it was here Conoully, who dug the Conoully Canal that links the city from south to north, was done to death by Mappila rebels. The 19th century was a period of long and bloody confrontation between the British rulers and the Mappila rebels in south Malabar, and the Mappilas were officially termed a criminal community, their movements were strictly controlled, the ubiquitous Mappila knives were banned, and the Moplah Outrages Act was brought in to punish them and the Malabar Special Police, the notorious MSP, was set up to crush them.

On the way to East Hill stands the old Bank House, now known as Express House, after Indian Express took over the colonial villa that used to be the residence of the manager of the British- owned Chartered Bank, the only imperial bank in the city for long. Even after most of the old British buildings were pulled down in the city, this beautiful two-story building that has large rooms and open windows and verandas on all four sides remained in a 70-cent plot with scores of mayflower plants giving it shade, and an atmosphere of explosive colour of red in the summer seasons. It had two massive rooms in the ground floor and two huge bed rooms surrounded by a long veranda on all sides at the upper floor, with spacious bathing tubs done in exquisite tiles. (It was in 1990 that Indian Express took it over and since I was the representative of the newspaper in the city at that time, it was my residence for over a year. From the loose tiles I saw there, I conclude that it was built in late 19th century or early 20th century by A P Chirukandan, a famous contractor, as the mark APC is seen on the rear side of floor tiles. The building today has changed beyond recognition, all its trees cut down and the entire compound converted into a printing press since 1992.)

(This is the first part of a series on history of Kozhikode. The second part will appear next week.)

Laughing Gas

Indian airline companies slash airfares: news.

India flying high...!

White Mughals in South India: The Life and Times of East India Company Officers in Malabar

WILLIAM DALRYMPLE's The White Mughals is a book which describes the fascinating life of the early British officers who came to India in the service of the English East India Company in 18th and early 19th centuries. Many of them fell in love with this exotic land of orient and became a unique society that was a heady mix of the east and the west.

There were so many British officials who came to South India during the same period, as the conquest of India started with the many wars they waged in the south, mainly against Hyderali and Tipu Sultan of Mysore.

After the second Anglo-Mysore War, Malabar, then under Tipu Sultan, fell to the British control in 1792. One of the fiercest resistances they faced then was from Pazhassi Rajah of Kottayam. It was Thomas Baber, the commander of British forces, who defeated Pazhassi Rajah. One of the natives who helped him was Pulapre Karunakara Menon who identified Pazhassi’s body.

Mr. Nick Balmer is a descendant of Thomas Baber and he was in Kozhikode recently visiting the places where colonial history was made. He has written extensively on this in his blog, Malabar Days. (malabardays.blogspot.com.) He recently wrote a few letters to me about the life of his great ancestors, and other things that came to him through the large collection of private letters he has seen.

I paste an edited version of his letters which are of immense value to an understanding of the life and times of the early British who came to our region a few centuries ago:


Dear Mr Chekkutty,

As an Englishman I feel that I should be very careful about interfering in India's affairs, and I can well understand that many people there must have very mixed feelings about things associated with what must appear to many as a dark period in India's existence.

But I believe that things like that palanquin [donated by EIC to Pulapre Karunakara Menon that was missing from Calicut University for some time] point to another side of those events a long time ago.

K Menon [Pulapre Karunakara Menon, an official with the English East India Company] was obviously a very effective individual, and he would have been an outstanding leader even if the British had never been there. As it was he worked within the British system to protect his community. It is very telling that in all the correspondence (several thousand letters) I have read he is almost the only Indian mentioned apart from criminals, rebels or rajahs.

He was also deeply respected for his abilities and knowledge by people like T Baber, Sir Thomas Munro and Graeme. They turned to him to explain how societies worked in Malabar.

Influenced by Menon they were trying to design systems of governance to enable the laws to be re-written to suit the local conditions. It was very sad that Sir Thomas Munro died of cholera before he could implement many of the reforms. That cholera bug set back India considerably.

Sadly most Brits were never able to get close enough to the local societies to become able to appreciate its good points. The generation of EIC civil servants who went out in the 1790s and early 1800s were quite different from the later 19th century ones.

I am afraid that my 4 x great uncle is responsible for a lot of the Malabar material in the British library, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. His brother, my 3 x great grandfather was Keeper of the Printed Books at the British Library from 1809 until 1835. He was a Vicar and was very interested in religious texts.

Thomas brought home at least 27 Granthams that he presented to the library. I cannot read Malayalam, or date Granthams, but a very kind and erudite lady from Cochin went with me to look at two of these Granthams. She thought they were of 16th century, and of the highest quality.

I don't know if he was given them, or if he acquired them by fair means or foul, but I do know that he was very interested in old Malayalam texts and spent so much time in Tellicherry temples that these temples hold a belief to this day that he became a Hindu.

I think that is one step too far, but he certainly had a great interest in Hindu texts. It would be surprising if he didn't, his father, grandfather, and especially great grandfather all had very big libraries. His great grandfathers took 11 nights to sell [the books] at auction in 1766, and was catalogued as being the largest collection of Spanish and Italian books in England, although it had Latin, Greek, French as well.

Thomas also appears to have collected and preserved many of the best of the weapons his men confiscated from the Pazhassi Rajah’s forces as well as the other insurgents (freedom fighters) he fought against. Many of these survived until 1924 in his house at Tellicherry. I held the last remaining spear when I was there. The rest went into a river to avoid there being used in the revolt.

However in 1832 he presented the best of his collection to the Royal Asiatic Society. I have discovered a list of these weapons with a very detailed description of each weapon. These went to the Victoria and Albert Museum in the 1880s. I am currently trying to find the time to go to the museum to see if I can track them down.

It is very likely that they are in the reserve collection there.

Thomas commissioned portraits of many of the Nambootiris who taught him about Hindu culture.

I really enjoyed my trip to East Hill and the Collectors building. I spent several hours in the building which is very interesting for what it tells me about the mindset of the original builder. I don't know for definite who he was, but it could well have been Mr.Pearson.The bungalow and court appears to be built on a model derived from Classical Roman ideas, possibly to work like a Roman villa. At that time Rome provided the inspiration for many buildings in Britain and indeed across the world being built by these classically educated British.

I have contrasted it with the entrance room at Thomas Baber's house at Pallikunnu. The East Hill building was built 5 to 10 years before Pallikunnu. I believe Thomas Baber had visited East Hill, but I believe he understood that Roman, and indeed British law was not entirely applicable to the Malabar.

I have some very vivid accounts of Connolly’s death. He seems to have been a man with a genuine interest in the welfare of the villagers, and appears to have put great effort into developing teak plantations. I expect these must have affected many villages, and perhaps the villagers didn't like that.

I have a copy of a very interesting account of a trip made from Calicut in the late 1820's by Thomas Baber to Sullivan near Ootty. In it Thomas Baber describes and compares the landscape he is passing with its appearance when he had previously been along the same route in about 1803. It clearly shows that there had been a tall canopy forest over much of the route in 1803, but that forestry had removed most of the canopy trees by the late 1820s. If that was the case, there would only have been low re-growth scrub over much of the area formerly before 1803 covered by tall jungle.

It is odd that we think deforestation is a modern issue, but it exercised many minds as far back as 1820. But of course we never really learn.

Regards

Nick Balmer

A Visit to Al Jazeera and Search for Media Alternatives

AL JAZEERA's studio and office complex in downtown Doha is an imposing structure. It is a sprawling campus, its glass and concrete buildings providing a cool and professional ambience for an international news media organization.

My friend Ajit Sahi of Tehelka and myself were there for a short visit last week, and when I was entering through the guarded gates, I was thinking how different it was from the poorly lit, badly furnished, poor and shabby two-storey building back in Kochi, where we built up the news division of Kairali Channel eight years ago. Still, both belonged to a class of organizations which sought to challenge the western media monopoly in our times. Of course, they won and we lost.

It was Sunday afternoon, a working day in Doha. Dr Jaffer, who works in the major government hospital in the city, was so keen on his excited debates as he drove the car that often I wondered how his swanky Ford car manages to avoid having friendly encounters with the ones moving in front and the sides. The Doha roads in the rush hours looks like any other city: A relentless stream of cars, inside them solitary figures trying to manipulate the heavy traffic.

At Al Jazeera too, it was a busy day for them. It was the day of the state visit of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, on a tour of West Asia to persuade the rich sheikdoms to part with their money to help the struggling financial sector back home and in Wall Street. For Al Jazeera, it was also the occasion of the 12th anniversary of the channel and they were organizing an international seminar on human rights as part of a new division they were launching on human rights with Sami Al Haj, as its head.

At Hotel Sheraton on West Bay, Ajit and Rasheed Bhai had a brief chance meeting with Sami Al Haj the previous day. Sami is a dark and lean man from Sudan, who had spent six and a half years at the Guantanamo Bay, after being arrested by the US troops in Afghanistan. He was a camera-person with Al Jazeera who went to Afghanistan to report on the lives of the people there but ended up being news himself. Released a few months earlier, he was now back in Al Jazeera, trying to rebuild his life and that of millions of others in every part of the world whose lives have been shattered by the bullies.

Most of the people we met in Doha had some India connection. Among Qatar's expatriate community, Indians are perhaps the largest in numbers and most successful. Sami too has an India connection because he went to college in Pune. Like Doha, Al Jazeera too is an an example of cosmopolitanism at its best. Its staff members are drawn from 40 nationalities, said Sarah Mahmoud Taha, a slim and darkish Arab girl who was our host in the channel.

Sarah, who is the international relations coordinator at Al Jazeera, too was very busy that day, but she took us around and answered all our questions. We first had a look at the Arab channel premises which is now 12 years old. Its Iraq bureau is also functioning from the Doha headquarters as after the US bombing of their bureau in Baghdad, they were not allowed to function in that country. Sarah too has her own India connections. Her father, a scientist, went to college in Mysore. I told her Mysore is close to my home town, Kozhikode, and Jaffer remembered one of their slain staff members in Baghdad bombing too went to college in my home town, at Farook College. She was very pleased with the information.

The premises of the English channel, launched two years ago, are close by but definitely much better and glittering. It is a world of glamour, glitter and technological prowess as the Emir whose rich oil fields finance the channel has not spared any expense to make it world class. Before leaving, we had a meeting with Satnam Matharu, a pleasant young executive who heads the international division. A person of Indian origin, his family migrated to Canada from Punjab.
Al Jazeera, though a representative of the new forces challenging the west, seems not to be very keen on covering India and other developing countries extensively. He said they do not have any office in India right now, except some arrangements for news coverage.

The concerns about media, its lopsided coverage,lack of sympathy for the live issues of the poor, dispossessed and oppressed were the major themes in the the three public functions we addressed in Doha. All of them were well attended and there was a lively exchange of ideas as the audience raised several sharp and very pertinent questions. The point I wanted to drive home was that it was futile to complain about the way mainstream media behaves. They are controlled by their class interests. If you want to raise your voice, then try to develop your own media organizations. Like Al Jazeera, like Tehelka and like our own three-year-old daily newspaper, Thejas, which I represented at these meetings. We have a new challenge here and great opportunities offered by the wonderful tools made available the new technologies, the high levels of public consciousness and the effective way resources could be raised from a vigilant public for a noble cause. What we needed to answer the challenge of monopoly media was determination and faith in our own strength.

Here We Go to the Moon...!

India's Chandrayaan-1 blasts off; ISRO says will land an Indian on the moon by 2015: news.

Surely we would have loved a vehicle that would launch us to the seat of power...!

S K Pottekkad and his travels: A reminder from the past

IN CHARLES Dickens’ Hard Times, there is a poignant scene: Her father’s beloved dog returns to Liz one day many years later, reminding her of the poor father, who was no more…

S K Pottekkad launched forth on his travels all over the world from the little world of Athiranippadam in Kozhikode, which he immortalized in his book, Oru Desathinte Katha, the story of a desam. The street a few furlongs away, which had been his regular haunt from early childhood and whenever he was in his city, the S M Street, also became famous through his novel, Oru Theruvinte Katha, the story of a street.

Today, SK’s statue overlooks the street and both the writer and his beloved street are eerily looking out of place in a city that is fast outgrowing its past, metamorphosing itself into a modern metropolis. For those who are familiar with the old Kozhikode, a city that has been the place for great writers and artists, who lazily spent their time in the environs of Mananchira, the tank that the old Zamorin built for his subjects, all these are part of a cherished memory.

Luckily a part of this history came back to me a few days ago, when SK Pottekkad’s first passport which took him to all parts of the world, suddenly came to us as a reminder of this past. It was 16 years after the death of the great writer, and almost everything that belonged to him had been consigned to oblivion, that this little dog-eared document that accompanied him everywhere suddenly popped itself up into our midst.

It was a passport issued to Sankarankutty Kunhiraman Pottekkad, Chandrakantham, Puthiyara, Kozhikode, Malabar, on March 16, 1946 by the Government of Madras, then part of the British colonial administration. It was lying in the possession of famous theatre activist and revolutionary writer Madhu Master all these years and his son, Thejas photographer, Vidhuraj, fished it out.

Three years later, after India became independent, on May 2, 1949, that SK set out from Bombay on a passenger ship to Italy. He returned after a few weeks and then on May 29 took another ship to Rhodesia and from there moved to other parts of Africa. In June he went on to Mozambique and then to Portugal.

In 1950 he passed through the Suez Canal, at a time when the canal was at the center of a global confrontation, and reached Switzerland. Two years on, he was in Malaysia and next year, in 1953, he traveled to Indonesia and then to Egypt. The story comes to an end on March 16, 1954 when the term of the document comes to and.

But SK continued his travels and through his dozens of books that gave a graphic description of what he saw in all those places took Malayalis to all those exotic locales widening our universe and making us a people quite at ease with the wide world outside.

The importance of hartal as non-violent, eco friendly form of protest

I LIKED the accompanying cartoon which shows Kerala’s home minister cum tourism promotion minister Kodiyeri Balakrishnan trying to woo tourists to our home state with a hartal special package.

The humour is accurate and hard hitting because in the present circumstances what an home minister who has, anyway, failed in his duty of maintaining law and order can do but to try and bring some result at least in his other charge, tourism?

So you see the minister running after the tourists like porters in most of our railway stations and bus stations, soliciting work.

The thing is that hartals have become a really marketable commodity in Kerala. Just like an archaic form of communism, which deifies characters like Joseph Stalin who has been abandoned even in his home turf, Kerala also keeps up this long abandoned method of protest which Gandhi called a hartal.

Last week, the state’s capital city had two hartals in a week and the other districts one, two or more according to the convenience and whims and fancies of local politicians. Recently I came across a report which said that in a normal year the state observes as many as a hundred or more hartals, based on issues ranging from national, international, local, regional, religious, political, parochial, civic, communal, etc. Hartals come in various sizes and packages, like state wide, district wise, pachachyat only and the durations vary from 12 hours, 24 hours, 48 hours, etc. So you have the freedom to pick and choose as per your requirements, tastes and paying capacity.

And what is more, you don’t come across this unique style of protest anywhere else in the world. Coming to think of it, it is the most comfortable, eco friendly and post-modern technique though it was originally thought up by Gandhi as a form of protest against the British rule.

It is comfortable because hartal means an enforced holiday, to be enjoyed with friends or family; it is eco friendly because vehicles are off the roads and hence no pollution, and it is post-modern because in a modern world of violent forms of protest you see a totally harmless way to protest being home and enjoying a peg or two turning your back against the world outside. Even Henry David Thoreau would have approved.

Kanjikuzhy Leads the Way for Rural Kerala

Travels in Vasco da Gama Country --part two


By N P Chekkutty

IT WAS at Kanjikuzhy, a small village on the Alapuzha coast, that I met Saswathan, a 75- year-old farmer. We were on a mission to check out what goes on in villages as Kerala grappled with the difficult task of negotiating with forces of globalization and maintaining an egalitarian society that ensured minimum livelihood to its people. Kanjikuzhy is a panchayat on the Arabian Sea coast, tucked between Muhamma in south and Mararikkulam North in the north. It has a predominantly farming economy supported by other traditional trades like coir products. Most of the 1200-odd coir unit owners are part-time agriculturalists also. Kanjikuzhy, at the same time, is at the centre of new economic transformations that were brought in by globalization and its beaches are now booming health tourism spots and its coir products highly prized items exhibited in multinational retailing chains all over the world.

On the highway, we saw the decently decorated outlet run by the Kanjikuzhy Panchayat Primary Development Society (PDS) which displays all kinds of fruits, vegetables and other farm items besides a variety of coir products. The farm products are collected by the society from the village farmers who supply them on a regular basis. They get paid in cash and no middlemen are involved. Saswathan had come there to sell his vegetables. He looked happy as he got around Rs. 200 for the few items he had carried to the retailer in the off-season. He was one of the scores of farmers in the village who regularly sold produces in the PDS outlet, who accepted everything the peasants had to offer, even those items usually discarded when they sell to private businesses. Saswathan said the PDS outlet accepted not only banana, but its leaves and fiber too; besides all kinds of vegetables, coconut, melons, etc. The day’s fixed price is displayed on the board and there is down payment in cash.

Santhosh, a pleasant-looking young man in his early thirties, is the president of the primary development society (PDS) for vegetables and he gave an account of how they built it up and how it functions. The panchayat had only a few families in farming as it s a predominantly coastal region focusing on coir an cottage industries, and it was only a decade ago that they decided to attract youngsters into farming activities in a big way. They organized groups of farming communities in each ward and started planting seeds in leased lands. It was a political movement as the community leaders were worried about the way farming was becoming a “lost career” in Kerala.

It was a success, asserts Santhosh; and Saswathan agrees. Production started booming and then the question was how to sell all the vegetables and fruits they produced. It is a perishable item and traders used to undercut farmers when production was in plenty. In the past there were scores of small private vendors who used to set up their stalls on the highway, took the products from farmers at their own terms and the prices were fixed at their own convenience causing much hardship and losses to cultivators.

It was then the idea of marketing came in. Dr T M Thomas Isaac, now finance minister of Kerala, who represents Mararikulam which includes Kanjikuzhy in the Assembly, gave the lead by initiating and supporting the effort to organize what is now widely known as the Mararikkulam Marketing Company Ltd, a society registered for production and marketing of local items. They got support from UNDP and Union Government’s rural development ministry for developing infrastructure. Now the company has its own production units making a variety of items like jams, fruit juice, notebooks, soaps, umbrellas, pickles, fish and other marine products, coconut and coir products, etc. They employ a number of local people in various units, most of them women and their various products are marketed throughout the state in the ‘Mari’ brand-name.

I went to see Saswathan’s family, who lives a kilometer away from the PDS sales outlet. It is a small thatched house, and he lives there with his wife and younger son. He has three children and the eldest son is a toddy-tapper and he works a dozen coconut trees which gives him a daily income of around Rs. 400. He said toddy, the natural brew from coconut palms, is much in demand, and he works on his trees twice a day: in the mornings he brings the brew down as the earthen pot gets filled up in the night, and in the evenings, he has to work again tapping the tender leaves for excellent yield. “It is like milking a cow,” said Saswathan who also used to work as a toddy-tapper in his younger days.

Saswathan said he has been able to get a decent income from his two-acre plot in which he cultivates paddy, vegetables and bananas. He said he goes by the organic farming methods though when there is a severe attack of pests he has to apply chemical pesticides. For manure, most of the peasants here depend on natural sources like compost, ash, cow dung, etc.

The village has around 80 full-time farmers now and they are divided into various groups focusing on different farming operations. Paddy cultivation is carried out as a group activity as it helps them sort out the acute problem of labor shortage, as it is a labor intensive activity as the sowing and harvesting has to be done in a few days’ time based on the agricultural calendar. There are two types of paddy based on the time it takes to harvest; the virippu needs only four months to get ready for reaping, and the mundakan, a more hardened variety, would require ten months to mature. The self-help groups carry out the operations in unison and all members -- generally a group has 15 to 20 members-- are eligible for an equal share. All members have to take part in the operations and if anyone opts out they would have to pay a fine, said Santhosh.

The self-help method has taken deep roots in this village, with palpable impact on the lives of people here. Already there are as many as 242 self-help groups in this tiny village: 36 in coir, the most important activity in this coastal village, paddy-16, floriculture- nine, coconut 11 and the rest in a variety of other activities in trade, industrial production, etc. Since the PDS sales outlets were opened in February, 2007 with a view to help producers get maximum income and keeping middlemen out, the private vendors have practically gone out of business.

The elimination of middlemen who were fleecing the producers had the greatest impact on the coir sector. In this village almost all houses has a coir-making machine, locally known as thari, which produces various kinds of coir products like yarn, mats, carpets, packing materials, etc. Women and children work on the machines in their spare time and men also help them out. But the coir products are generally exported and the business was monopolized by a group of firms known as depots who were private outlets who used to collect these items from the small manufacturers and supplied them to exporters. Four years ago the struggle against this exploitation reached a critical stage when Dr Thomas Isaac and others launched the coir PDS which took over the collection of coir items for a more transparent business model. Dr Thomas Isaac said the Coir PDS, which started its operations in 2003, had done a business of over Rs. 22 crore, which meant that more than Rs. 2 crore was additionally made available to the producers as the middlemen used to take ten percent of the proceeds. In fact the struggle against the strangle-hold of the depots who controlled the coir trade was a long and difficult one. Almost all the small producers were indebted to them as most had taken money as advance, and then the struggle had to be waged on a global level with direct communication to the global outlets and consumers groups, through a campaign over the internet about how the original producers are being fleeced by middlemen. That had a great impact as the exporters, under pressure, started negotiating with the small producers through the PDS in coir sector, said Dr. Isaac.


As a people’s initiative, Mararikulam experiment is a grand success. However, it depends on the volunteers who are dedicated to a political and social cause. Jalaja, the block panchayat president, and Santhosh, who heads a successful PDS, are examples of the selfless volunteers who are leading these efforts. But it is an island of hope in a sea of desperation, as in most other panchayats in the district the Mararikkulam example is not being followed. The reason is a lack of leadership and enthusiasm.

Can’t you convert this into a professionally run business, I asked Santhosh. He said it would be disastrous. The Mararikkulam example is strong because of its political content. Once a bureaucratic setup comes into place, this unique experiment would simply go astray, he feared.

Mararikkulam looks like a promising example for the people everywhere to emulate, provided they have such an excellent leadership as this village has. But that is not the case everywhere and in most places even local politicians seem to be working as agents of the big money business in their effort to grab lands and farms. Still, there are efforts to copy the Kanjikuzhy model and in the neighbourhood panchayats of Muhamma, Aryad etc, are setting up similar groups, mainly in the coir sector.

(This is the second of a three-part series on Kerala. for part one see blog archive, February 2008. The final part will examine the impact of global economy in the cash crops in the Kerala interior.)

Courtesy:infochangeindia.org

Eating Fish and Sanyasa: Vivekananda’s Travels in Travancore

THE OTHER day, I came across a very interesting document, an account of Swami Vivekananda’s visit to Thiruvananthapuram in December 1892. It was written by K Sundarama Iyer, a senior officer in the education department who was a tutor to the crown prince Marthanda Varma, almost 20 years after the visit. The long narrative, named Reminiscences of Swami Vivekananda, is appended to the four volume book, The Life of Swami Vivekananda, published by Advaita Ashramam, in 1961.

It is a long narrative, a very fascinating and evocative one, as it brings to life not only the personality of this great sage but also the life in Travancore at the turn of the 19th century; its pet concerns and topics of high society discussions, its aloofness from the world at large, its court life and caste prejudices, its uneasy encounters with modern ideas of the time.

The Swami was on his tour of south India, as every monk from time immemorial used to do, going from place to place, immersing themselves in the sacred waters in four corners of the country, visiting pious householders, accepting their obeisance and giving them advice and then moving onto the next place…

So one day, the Swami accompanied by a Muslim peon in the Cochin state service, arrives at the gate of Sundarama Iyer, unannounced. Iyer’s 12-year-old son took the visitors to be Muslims because of the peculiar kind of dress the Swami had, and told his father so. The peon was accompanying the sage from Cochin as a guide on his trip to Travancore.

They had left Ernakulam two days earlier and on the way, the Swami had not imbibed anything except for a little milk. It is not clear which route they took, whether they traveled by foot or took a boat as a major part of the route is easily covered by water. Both travelers were weary as they reached Thiruvananthapuram but the Swami insisted that his attendant be cared for before he took anything from the household. By our standards, it was an unusual journey because the Swami came unannounced, as a complete stranger, without making any arrangements beforehand for his stay or meetings.

During his nine-day stay in the city, Vivekananda made many acquaintances, met many people and addressed many small gatherings. His meeting with the elite of the city at the Trivandrum Club and his audience with the Maharajah are very interesting episodes. At the club, he had an encounter with a Brahmin dewan peshkar, a middle level revenue official of the principality, who took objection to the way the Swami had returned his salutation merely uttering ‘Narayana’ as is customary with sanyasins. But the Swami who had noticed the way the man had returned the salutation of another officer of a lesser caste, showing off his caste supremacy, asked him how he could discriminate against another person and then demand equal treatment for himself: the man had no answer…

Then there was the meeting with the Maharajah himself. The Swami in his tours had been the guest of many an Indian prince, and had a wide experience meeting them, talking to them and advising them on statecraft and other matters. But in Travancore, the meeting with the Maharajah lasted just two or three minutes as the author tells us and he continues, “the Swami was a little disappointed”.

The Swami’s Travancore visit was a few months ahead of his historic visit to Chicago where he addressed the Parliament of World Religions in September 1893. Curiously, the Swami was reluctant to address public meetings and all his meetings were either dialogues or conversations in small groups. Sundarama Iyer says that he once requested the Swami to address a meeting to which he replied that he had never before spoken in public and would “surely prove a lamentable and ludicrous failure.” But in spite of his reluctance to address public gatherings, Vivekananda was preparing himself for the coming address and when asked how he would face the gathering at Chicago, he cryptically remarked that “if it was the will of the Supreme that he should be made His mouthpiece and do a great service to the cause of truth and holy living, He surely would endow him with the gifts and qualities needed for it.” Surely Sundarama Iyer thought Swami was being evasive (if God could help him in Chicago why not in Travancore…?) May be he was not willing to address a meeting at Travancore, that was all.

On the third or fourth day of his visit, the Swami made inquiries about the whereabouts of Manmathanath Bhattacharya, an officer of the Madras Government who was on an official tour to Travancore. As the Swami expressed a wish to shift to the fellow Bengali’s place, Sundarama Iyer was naturally reluctant to let him go, and the Swami pacified him saying that “we Bengalis are a clannish people.”

He also told him that Bhattacharya was a class-mate and that his father Pandit Mahesh Chandra Nyayaratna was a famous scholar in Bengal. But there was another, perhaps more pressing, reason why the Swami wished to go to the place of Bhattacharya. Ever since he left Bengal, especially during his long south Indian tour, he was staying with Brahmin households where fish and meat were anathema. A quintessential Bengali, the Swami thought a little rice with fish was a welcome diversion even for an ascetic like him!

When Sundarama Iyer, a Tamil Brahmin of orthodox ways, heard this, he was flabbergasted. But the Swami pointed out to him that ancient Hindus were used to eating meat and they were also used to kill cows for their yagas and yajnas. He thought it was the habit of avoiding meat, which came with the rise of Buddhism, that made India lose her strength and paved the way for foreigners to conquer her. This line of argument, interestingly, resonates with the advice given to a young Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi by his Muslim friend in Rajkot, that to gain strength one should eat meat and encouraged him to do so…

Those nine days were eventful in a deep way, though surprisingly Sundarama Iyer or his other scholarly friends, who were engaged in long and passionate conversations with the Swami, never thought it necessary to keep written records of these daily meetings. In fact the author says he was writing from memory after a lapse of two decades and he confesses that many of the deep metaphysical discourses the Swami had been engaged in while in Travancore, were lost to posterity.

Perhaps that particular lapse speaks much about our lack of a sense of history…!