Kerala Recollected in Melaka

The Way In     Source: ബരഗുല്‍

I have been organising my thousand-odd photographs from Kerala. Memories have been returning, as well as recollections of places, faces, and landscapes. In fact Kerala is not only part of India. It is a country on its own.

The first thing that strikes me is the early modernity of Kerala. That is especially visible in  Trivandrum. The colleges, schools for both boys and girls, the public libraries, the arts institutes, music schools, public parks, museums, and so on and so forth. Everything was already in place by the 1920s, and some times the roots of those institutions go deep into the nineteenth century. Women attended college in largish numbers at a time when their presence in British colleges and universities was still extremely modest. Social movements existed that were not necessarily found in all of India, such as the movement to allow the lower castes and the untouchables to enter temples, work for public administration, and so on. The literary scene alone is so lively and wide-ranging that I believe probably no Southeast Asian nation of the time had a counterpart to it, perhaps not even Siam. This effervescence then culminates in Indian independence, which Malayalees fully supported (their two kings included), and the creation of postcolonial Kerala bringing together for the first time in a thousand years or more two pre-colonial kingdoms (Travancore and Cochin) and a directly administered colonial territory (Malabar - they also had kingdoms there but these were destroyed during Tippu Sultan's invasion and the ensuing British conquest). It remains a place with a very strong local identity, fully part of India but also fully culturally autonomous too. Also, Malayalees don't waive cultural flags as people do in neighbouring Tamil Nadu. Mayalees by comparison seem fairly secure and satisfied in their own domain.

Waiting for the ferry      Source: ബരഗുല്‍

I guess this says bookloads about myself, but the only place in Kerala that I felt was pleasant enough in the way Melaka is is yet another former colonial town, namely, Cochin. Interestingly, just as Melaka Cochin too is a former Portuguese, Dutch, and British enclave. It used to have a very important Jewish minority in the past, and it still has a substantial Muslim one. It feels very different to Melaka, however. It is much smaller (it is part of an island together with Mattanchery); and tourism weighs even more heavily on it than it does on Melaka. I found it overpriced and too full of tourists. However, the old charm is still there, especially as it looks mostly poor and derelict - that means fortunately the destruction wrecked on it has been less than that wrecked on Melaka. Ernakulam - a Indian colonial city just opposite on the coast - is Kerala's largest urban hub (it also has one of India's busiest airports. There are daily flights connecting Kuala Lumpur to it as well as Trivandrum). It is a very upbeat and dynamic place compared to village-like Cochin just across the water. It is also a ghastly urban place where walking by the seaside is almost the only respite. I loved Cochin - and Mattanchery - but I also regretted the overwhelming presence of tourists. Melaka has a life of its own minus the tourists. Cochin barely has one. Nonetheless, the attractiveness of the place is still very great, even compared to Melaka. It is an old Indian Ocean port of pre-colonial origin just as Melaka, and in the fourteenth century it was already an important harbour, again just as Melaka. Differently to Melaka, however, the kingdom somehow survived all the vicissitudes of the colonial era and only ended just before Indian independence. Also, royal power was historically very important in the maintenance of religious tolerance in an island that has always had both Jewish and Muslim minorities as well as Christian ones. Historically perhaps only the Portuguese presence posed a major threat to that tolerance because of religious persecution. It can be argued in fact that the Portuguese time saw a redrawing of the religious map of Kerala as Syrian Christian groups had to flee inland to escape persecution and Muslims had to rely on the rival king in Calicut for protection.

Chinese Fishing Net      Source: ബരഗുല്‍

However, just as Melaka, Cochin is part of a pre-colonial past. Melaka is just across the straits from old Srivijaya and Cochin is in fact next to Kodangallur which traded with the Roman Empire a couple of centuries before the birth of Christ and after it. It would only be the destruction of its harbour through a natural catastrophe that would ensure neighbouring Cochin's rise to prominence. Therefore, both Melaka and Cochin came up as important trade hubs - Cochin in the fourteenth and Melaka in the fifteenth centuries - because they were located in a region that already had a long previous history of maritime trade and far-flung international contacts. However, Cochin has perhaps a more important link to its hinterland than Melaka, which was more of an oceanic harbour. Namely, the Romans, Arabs and Chinese come to Cochin because of the spice trade: pepper, ginger and cardamon. Cardamon is in fact indigenous to Kerala (and neighbouring Karnataka). Spices are still traded to this day in Mattanchery. Melaka in comparison has had a different economic history as Penang and Singapore rose to prominence in its stead. Namely, its maritime trade is now long dead. In Kerala, Ernakulam - created about two hundred years ago on the coast opposite Fort Kochi - is in reality today Kerala's economic hub, much in the way Kuala Lumpur is in Malaysia. It is also one of the more dynamic cities in India. Cochin and Ernakulam are one and the same city today, whereas Kuala Lumpur and Melaka are not even in the same state though they are very close to each other. In a way however Melaka stands to Kuala Lumpur as Fort Kochi does in relation to Ernakulam. Nonetheless the spice trade is still alive in Fort Kochi (the spice exchange however has now gone online), whereas the only trade that seems to be alive and well in Melaka nowadays is the souvenir trade.

Padang, jogando bola    Source: ബരഗുല്‍

The Portuguese community in Cochin however is much less visible than the one in Melaka. It has more or less melted into the general population though it survives somehow around the Catholic churches. Also, Cochin is a much larger city than Melaka. I find it interesting that in Melaka many of the groups that made up colonial and even pre-colonial society are still very much present in the city's fabric. In Cochin the Jews are almost entirely gone (they mostly immigrated to Israel in the postcolonial era). The Catholics and Muslims are still present, also in Fort Koci itself. In fact, Fort Kochi also has a Jain temple. I find it intriguing however that the language variety of Melaka seems somewhat more subdued in Fort Kochi. I guess Arabi Malayalam is still present somehow, but Hebrew Malayalam is now gone. The community that used to speak Kochi Creole Portuguese is no more (a Portuguese researcher from Macau, Hugo Cardoso, found only about half a dozen speakers left. That must also be the number of Jews left in town). In fact, of the half a dozen or so varieties of Creole Portuguese spoken in Kerala, all are now extinct. Diu in Gujarat is the only former Portuguese outpost in India which still has a community of speakers of a form of Creole Portuguese (in Goa people either speak Portuguese - this is increasingly less spoken however - or else speak Konkani, Hindi, Marathi, or English). Sri Lankan Creole Portuguese still lingers on, but only just. Therefore, Fort Kochi is a counterpart of Melaka in some sense but it is also different in several important ways. It is hard to say there are Peranakan communities there, though all communities are in fact Creole somehow. Namely, they usually have roots in the ancient past of the port city. Intriguingly, both cities started life as Hindu harbour polities living off international maritime trade. Also, both cities had diverse populations almost right from the start, though the mix has been different across the centuries.

Dutch-built Royal Palace, Mattanchery      Source: ബരഗുല്‍

Just as Melaka was the first Catholic outpost in today's Malaysia, so was Cochin. It was the first European settlement in the whole of India (founded in 1503, a date that compares to Melaka's conquest by the Portuguese in 1511). Funnily enough the same Portuguese captain, namely the (in Brasil) famous Pedro Álvares Cabral, and in the same trip he did to both Brasil and Kerala, and in the same year, namely 1500, signed the first treaty ever between Portugal (or any European country) and an Indian polity (he supposedly arrived on the coasts of Brasil by accident whereas his destination was Kerala). Cochin had however pre-colonial Syrian Christians as well as Jews, whereas Melaka has never had any of those groups to my knowledge (I suddenly realise I know virtually nothing about the history of Jews in colonial Malaya. Nowadays Malaysia has no ties to Israel. Therefore, whereas Thailand is full of Israeli tourists, and Kerala has them too, Malaysia has none). There were Chinese in Cochin, though I don't know whether they made up a permanent community at any point. At any rate they never seem to have been so influential as in Melaka. The famous Chinese fishing net is however still found all over Kerala, and was found in Macau as well until very recently (the fishing industry is moribund there, whereas in Kerala it is also moribund but strangely lingers on though it is economically unprofitable). Interestingly, Cochin's pre-colonial history, though less obscure than Melaka's, is also not terribly clear from the records (in fact, there seem to be no royal records before Portuguese conquest in 1503. Local oral traditions however place the beginnings of the dynasty centuries before that). Kerala suffers the same disability with Nusantara: it has many manuscripts but all the same large swathes of its history cannot be currently profitably perused through any written records. Of course, Nusantara has had Chinese records; these are not common for Kerala. Arabs have of course written on both Nusantara and Kerala. Calicut - Kozhikode - in particular has a very strong and ancient Arab Malayalam community with roots in the pre-colonial era. Calicut's Zamorin was as a consequence famously an often successful enemy of the Portuguese even though he was a Hindu monarch (in fact there seems to be only one small Muslim ruler in the whole of Kerala's history, besides Tippu Sultan's invasion in the late eighteenth century that came just a couple of decades before the English takeover of today's Kerala. I met people in south Kerala whose ancestors had probably been refugees from Tippu's invasion in north Kerala).

Not the Royal Palace     Source:  ബരഗുല്‍

The Hindu influence is therefore much stronger in the case of Cochin's history than in Melaka's, and so is interestingly enough the Arab element because of the ancient connections to Arabia. The Chinese influence by comparison is far more obscure and limited. It may seem so because it must have been confined mostly to the pre-sixteenth century period. There are also the Roman connections of the immediate predecessor of Cochin, namely, Cranganore (today's Kodangallur), just over an hour away from Cochin. This used to be ancient Muziris, also probably the capital of the Chera kingdom, the most famous Kerala medieval polity. Muziris had close relations with the Roman Empire. In fact, excavations there have found the largest cache of Roman coins and ceramics and other objects yet found anywehre in India. One historian I spoke to even believes that the place was a Roman colony. To me this sounds very much like theories that used to state that places on the East African coast such as Kilwa or Zanzibar used to be Persian colonies (these theories are now discredited even though connections to Persia are obvious especially up to the fifteenth century). I find the theory far-fetched. All the same, relations were obviously intense and close throughout the last centuries before Christ and the first two centuries or so afterwards. Just as Melaka has no pre-colonial history featuring Christians or Jews, nor does it have Romans either.

Passage of Time, Sinagogue    Source: ബരഗുല്‍

Another interesting point that can be raised is that the people who came from today's India to Melaka and Nusantara were arguably the very same people the population of Kerala had to keep at bay throughout the centuries so as to maintain their independence: for instance, the Cholas, who sent a fleet against Srivijaya some time in the eleventh century, I think. Throughout the centuries therefore connections to today's Tamil Nadu were both close and not necessarily friendly; no wonder that Malayalam and what is today Tamil increasingly diverged from a common language (that used to be also called Tamil on both sides of the Ghats but is not today's Tamil). The religious trading minorities of Kerala must also have contributed in no small degree historically to Kerala's growing political and cultural autonomy in South India through the centuries. In fact, Kerala's Hindu rulers were often closely associated with trading groups living under their protection, whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim (or all three at the same time as for instance in tiny Chennamangalam near Kodangallur). In this they were not too different from their Nusantara counterparts, Melaka's ruler included, though the mix of trading groups was different to Kerala's.

Backstreet   Source: ബരഗുല്‍

Then the Portuguese came and all that pre-colonial past was both changed forever and somehow continued strongly until the postcolonial era. In this, Melaka is a bit like Cochin: the colonial era has left an undeniable imprint on the town, first and foremost in its architecture and also in the presence of Catholicism. However, the pre-colonial era also somehow goes on: groups such as the Chetties and the Peranakan are of pre-colonial origin. Maybe because Malaysia is a much smaller country than India (though much larger than Kerala), and one that has kept colonial society somehow more intact than the latter, Melaka has managed to stay as it has been for longer than Fort Kochi has been able to. Kerala has an all-encompassing Malayalee identity constructed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, one of India's strong and well-defined sub-nationalities; Malaysia and even West Malaysia do not have anything similar to that. However, maybe that is not really a drawback. After all, all-encompassing identities exclude as much as they include.

Source: ബരഗുല്‍