On the canals of Kerala

The state of Kerala on India’s southwest Malabar coast is justifiably one of the country’s most popular tourist destinations. It’s got everything—palm-lined beaches, backwaters lush with tropical greenery, national parks with elephants and tigers, cool hill stations.

From the Western Ghats, the line of hills that forms the border with Tamil Nadu, the road to the lowlands twists and turns through tea, coffee and spice plantations that divide the hillsides into intricate geometric designs and shapes. After four hours, our Semester at Sea group arrived at the town of Kottayam where we boarded a boat for a three-hour trip along the backwaters to Allepey on the west coast.

Most of this area is below sea level and crisscrossed by waterways used to irrigate the rice paddies. Small houses on narrow levees fringed with coconut palms line the banks. Children were swimming and fishing, and women hanging out clothing to dry; in the middle of the waterway, men were digging sand and loading it into a boat. The rice harvest was under way. Men and women gathered rice stalks and carried them in huge sheaves to the canal bank, where machines separated and husked the rice. It was packed into sacks and loaded onto narrow boats for transportation to the nearest road junction; at one place, we saw men unloading a boat, using ropes and a pulley to move rice sacks to a truck.

Nearer the coast, we started seeing large houseboats. If you can afford it (even in 2003, it was $200 to $400 a day), you can rent a houseboat with a bedroom, covered dining area and other conveniences, and a two-person crew to pilot and cook. Most were occupied by couples, lazing in the late afternoon sun sipping cocktails.

On the bank of the waterway, a red flag fluttered high on a flagpole. In my years of travel in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia it was something I had never seen—the distinctive red flag of the Soviet Union with the hammer and sickle. Earlier in the day, I had seen a hammer and sickle painted on a wall. Later, as we traveled north by bus from Allepey to Kochi (Cochin), the road was temporarily blocked by protestors, again waving red flags.

Since India’s states were created in the late 1950s, largely along linguistic lines, Kerala has been alternately ruled by the Congress Party (the original party of Gandhi and Nehru) and by the Communists. The state has India’s best public health care system and highest literacy rate (over 90 per cent), with newspapers publishing in nine languages, mainly English and Malayalam. Because of Kerala’s tradition of matrilineal inheritance, where the mother is the head of the household, women have a higher standing in society and more legal rights than in other states. Kerala also a broad religious mix, with the largest number of Christians of any Indian state (about 20 per cent of the population). However, unemployment is high, reportedly because businesses fear red tape, state interference and labor stoppages. Indeed, the next day, most of the shops in Kochi were closed because the Communist Party (currently out of power) had called a general strike to protest the police killing of a demonstrator in a protest by indigenous peoples.

Cantilevered Chinese fishing nets have been in use in Kochi for centuries

Kochi was an important spice trading center from the 14th century onward and maintained a trade network with Arab merchants from the pre-Islamic era. It was captured by the Portuguese in the early 16th century, and the explorer Vasco da Gama died there in 1524. The Dutch captured Kochi in the late 17th century, only to be booted out by the British just over a century later. The city is a fascinating cultural mix: the oldest European-built church in India, which switched from Catholic to Calvinist to Anglican as the colonial rulers changed; a 16th century palace built for the local maharajah by the Portuguese in return for trading privileges.

The Jewish quarter, settled by descendants of people who fled Palestine 2,000 years ago, is now reduced (largely by migration to Israel) to a community of less than 20 with a street of shops and a 16th century synagogue. 

What's in a name?

One indicator of a country’s relationship to its past is how it deals with the reminders of colonial or foreign rule—the statues and plaques honoring administrators and generals, the chapters in school textbooks, the names of cities, towns and streets.

India has not been in a huge rush to remove reminders of its British colonial past. Since independence in 1947, more than 100 cities and towns have been re-named, but that leaves hundreds more that are still known by their colonial-era names. The changes have included: Mumbai (formerly Bombay), Chennai (Madras), Kolkata (Calcutta), Guwahati (Gauhati), Kanpur (Cawnpore), Kochi (Cochin), Mysuru (Mysore), Pune (Poona), Puducherry (Pondicherry), Shimla (Simla), Tiruchiapalli (Trichinapoly), Thiruvananthapram (Trivandrum), and Varanasi (Benares).

The most recent rash of official changes came in 2014 when the federal government finally approved new names for 12 cities. As usual, there was no way to hurry up the bureaucracy. It had been almost a decade since the government of the state of Karnataka had approved changing the name of Bangalore, India’s fifty largest city, to Bengaluru ahead of the city’s official 500th anniversary in 2006. 

A popular, although historically dodgy, legend has it that the place owes its name to a local king who got lost in the forest on a hunting trip. After hours of aimless wandering, the hungry and exhausted king spotted a hut inhabited by an old woman who offered him boiled beans because that was all she had. Impressed by the hospitality, the king named that part of the forest Bendakaalooru in memory of the meal; in old Kannada, the local language, benda means boiled, kaalu  beans and ooru town or city, making it literally the “city of boiled beans”).  Or perhaps the name is derived from Benga-val-ooru (City of Guards), a reference to the city’s military muscle from the 16th to the 18th centuries. When the British captured the fort in 1791, colonial administrators, perhaps struggling to get their tongues around the Kannada name, dubbed the city Bangalore, and that was how it was known for more than two centuries. During the public debate over reverting to the original name, some tourism and business officials fretted about the impact “the city of boiled beans” might have on the image of the country’s leading IT hub, but most on both sides of the issue expected that the similar-sounding name would be quickly adopted.

It didn’t happen quickly. Although the official signs, airport monitors and websites have been changed, some Indians, including Bengaluru natives, continue to use the old name. The same goes for Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata, although the latter (the Bengali name) is close enough in pronunciation to Calcutta that sometimes you can’t tell which name is being used. Indeed, many colonial-era city and town names were what the locals called the place, or how the name sounded to the British administrators. There aren’t many real English place names.

Street names are another matter. India’s municipal governments have systematically erased the names of colonial officials from signs and maps. The streets of Central Delhi were once a who’s who of British monarchs, prime ministers, generals, viceroys and colonial administrators—King Edward, King George, Allenby, Canning, Clive, Cornwallis, Curzon, Kitchener, Monto, Reading. They’ve all gone. Kingsway is now Rajpath, Queensway Janpath.

During visits, I try to be culturally sensitive and use the new names, but sometimes get puzzled looks. “Oh, you must mean Bombay. Why didn’t you say so?” My colleague Suruchi Sood, who returns to India at least once a year for work or family visits, reports a moment of panic when she took a domestic flight to Madras. She arrived at the gate and saw that the destination listed was Chennai. For a moment, she thought she was on her way to another city.