Nanjil Nadu · Eastern Coastal Plains
The small things
- A Kerala palace in Tamil NaduPadmanabhapuram Palace stands in Kanyakumari district and is owned and maintained by the Government of Kerala. It was Travancore's capital until 1795, and when the taluks were transferred in 1956 the palace stayed with the state that had built it. Two governments, one building, no dispute about who sweeps it.
- A district assembled in 1956Kanyakumari district was formed on 1 November 1956 from four Travancore taluks — Agastheeswaram, Thovalai, Kalkulam and Vilavancode — after a sustained campaign led by A. Nesamony. Everything odd about the region's culture is a consequence of a boundary being drawn across a functioning society rather than around one.
- The oil changes at the gapTamil Nadu cooks in gingelly oil and Nanjil Nadu cooks in coconut oil, and the switch happens at the Aralvaimozhi gap rather than at the state boundary a few kilometres away. The fat line and the administrative line do not coincide, and the fat line is the older of the two.
- Two batters in one kitchenA single household here keeps a toddy-or-coconut-raised batter for appam and a separate urad-and-rice batter for idli, and uses both in the same week. Neither displaced the other after 1956, because they were never doing the same job.
- Most of the country's clovesThe Ghats slope in this district produces a very large share of India's clove crop, grown on smallholdings under shade alongside nutmeg and pepper. Kanniyakumari Clove was registered as a geographical indication in 2021–22, and the local meat kuzhambu uses whole clove more freely than almost any other south Indian meat dish, simply because it is grown up the hill.
- The wind comes through a hole in the mountainsThe Western Ghats break at Aralvaimozhi, and the southwest monsoon wind funnels through the gap onto the eastern plain. This is why the district gets both monsoons where the rest of Tamil Nadu gets one, and why the same pass now carries one of the densest concentrations of wind turbines in India.
- A canal carried over a riverThe Mathur thottipalam, built in 1966, carries an irrigation channel across the Pahrali valley on piers reaching about 115 feet, over a length of some 1,250 feet. It is walkable, and standing on it is the quickest way to understand that the paddy plain below is entirely a work of plumbing.
- A statue measured in chaptersThe Thiruvalluvar statue is 133 feet including its base, for the 133 chapters of the Tirukkural, and its 38-foot pedestal stands for the 38 chapters on virtue, with the 95-foot figure above standing for the chapters on wealth and love. The proportions are a reading of the text, not an aesthetic choice.
- A religion that began in a village hereAyyavazhi began with Ayya Vaikundar at Swamithope in the nineteenth century and produced its own scripture in Tamil ballad metre, its own worship centres and its own practice against caste distinction. It is one of very few religious movements that started, and remain concentrated, inside a single district.
- A Dutch admiral who changed sidesEustachius De Lannoy commanded the Dutch force defeated at Colachel in 1741, was captured, and then spent thirty years rebuilding the Travancore army with drilled infantry and artillery. He is buried at Udayagiri fort, which local usage still calls Dillanai kotta.
- Jains were here firstThe rock-cut reliefs at Chitharal date to around the ninth century and are Jain, and the Nagaraja temple at Nagercoil carries figures identified as Mahavira and Parshvanatha on its pillars. The Jain layer of this region survives inside buildings that are now used for something else.
- An Everest climber's operating theatreTheodore Howard Somervell went to Everest in 1922 and 1924 and then spent the rest of his career as a surgeon at the mission hospital at Neyyoor, which by the mid-twentieth century was among the largest in south India. The district's health and literacy indicators have a long institutional history behind them, and this is part of it.
Small local details of Nanjil Nadu — customs, quirks and things that are not in any guidebook. (12)