Kosta Andhra · Eastern Coastal Plains

The small things

A dance form with a land grant behind itKuchipudi is a village of a few thousand people in the Krishna delta. Its brahmin households held the village on a grant confirmed under Golconda rule in the late seventeenth century, on the understanding that they would keep performing the dance-drama. The form was therefore a hereditary obligation attached to land before it was ever an art form on a stage, which is why it was all-male, all-night and narrative rather than abstract.
A sweet made by peeling a film off a potPootharekulu is made by wiping thin rice-starch batter across the outside of an inverted heated pot, letting it set for a few seconds, and lifting the sheet off whole. The sheet is thinner than paper and the whole product is layers of it with sugar and ghee between. The step has resisted mechanisation, and it is done almost entirely by women in home units around one village.
A print that develops laterMachilipatnam kalamkari's blocks do not carry colour. They carry mordants — iron and alum — printed onto cloth pre-treated with myrobalan. The colour only appears when the cloth is boiled with the dye, so the printer works on a pattern that is essentially invisible until the last stage. Black and red come out of the same dye bath depending on which mordant was printed where.
The fish that costs more than the jewelleryPulasa — the Godavari hilsa — is in the river for a few weeks after the first monsoon flood, and individual fish have sold at auction for tens of thousands of rupees. The local saying about selling the wedding chain to eat one is repeated as a joke by people who have effectively done it.
A delta that runs on an 1852 weirBefore the Dowleswaram anicut the Godavari delta was flood-prone, famine-prone and exporting people. The weir, and its Krishna counterpart at Vijayawada, converted both deltas to canal irrigation within a generation. The engineer responsible is still garlanded on his statues, which is a rare afterlife for a colonial official and is explained entirely by the fact that the works still function.
A port erased in a nightCoringa, at the Godavari's northern mouth, was a substantial shipbuilding and trading port. A cyclone and storm surge in 1839 destroyed it with a death toll usually given in the hundreds of thousands; a second surge at Machilipatnam in 1864 killed tens of thousands more. Both towns still exist and neither is a port. The concrete cyclone shelters along this coast are the modern answer to that record.
Seven mouths, three flowingTradition names seven branches of the Godavari at its delta. Three — Gautami, Vasishta and Vainateya — carry water. The others survive as names attached to temple tanks, dry channels and confluence sites that are still worshipped as though the rivers were there, which in ritual terms they are.
The Amaravati sculptures are mostly elsewhereThe great stupa on the Krishna was surveyed from the end of the eighteenth century and dismantled in stages. Its carved limestone drum slabs and railings are now largely in the British Museum and the Government Museum in Chennai. What is on the ground at the site is the base, the museum's holdings, and a sense of scale.
One image, two deitiesThe stone at Ryali is carved as Vishnu on one face and as Mohini on the other, from a single block. Which god you are looking at depends on which side of the shrine you stand, which is a fairly economical way of representing a story about a god taking another form.
A lake that was farmed and then partly unfarmedKolleru's bed was converted into fish and shrimp ponds through the 1990s until the lake had shrunk drastically. A court-directed demolition drive in 2006 removed a large number of the ponds. The lake is a Ramsar site and an aquaculture zone at the same time, and the conflict between those two descriptions is unresolved.
A French town inside the deltaYanam, on the Gautami Godavari, was a French possession and is today a district of Puducherry — administratively separate, geographically enclosed by the delta, and about twenty minutes from Kakinada. Its street signs, its liquor pricing and its municipal law all differ from the villages that surround it.
A canal from the Krishna to MadrasThe Buckingham Canal ran several hundred kilometres down this coast as a salt-water navigation, built in the nineteenth century to move rice and salt without going to sea. It is now largely silted, encroached and dry, and its line is still visible on the ground for most of its length.

Small local details of Kosta Andhra — customs, quirks and things that are not in any guidebook. (12)