Travancore & Kuttanad · Western Coastal Strip
The small things
- Farming below the seaKuttanad's fields lie between 1.2 and 3.0 metres below mean sea level. The crop is not grown on drained land in the Dutch sense of land permanently reclaimed; the polder is flooded for part of the year and pumped dry for the rest, so the same ground is lake and field in turn. The FAO listed the system as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System in 2013.
- The pump is the farmEvery padasekharam has a petti-and-para — a wooden paddle wheel in a casing that lifts water over the bund. It once turned by foot or bullock and now runs on an electric motor, but the principle and the name are unchanged, and if it stops for a day during punja the crop is lost. Farming here is a continuous engineering operation with a growing season attached.
- A barrier with a bill attachedThe Thanneermukkom regulator, commissioned in 1976, keeps salt out of the paddy and made the second crop possible. It also stopped the annual salt flush that used to clean the southern lake, and water hyacinth, silt and a thinner clam and prawn fishery are the documented cost. The bund is the clearest case in Kerala of an engineering success and an ecological debt being the same object.
- A kingdom made over to a deityIn 1750 Marthanda Varma performed the Thrippadidanam, formally surrendering Travancore to Sree Padmanabha and taking the title Padmanabha Dasa. His successors governed as the deity's servants, which meant the treasury, the temple and the state were one accounting system — and is why the vaults opened under court order in 2011 held what they held.
- A mirror that is not glassThe Aranmula kannadi is polished metal, not silvered glass, so there is no pane between the eye and the reflecting surface and no faint second image behind the first. The alloy proportions are held within a few families at Aranmula, the casting uses local river clay, and the polishing takes weeks. It was registered as a geographical indication in 2004–05.
- A boat built without nailsA kettuvallam is stitched — anjili planks drilled and lashed edge to edge with coir rope, then sealed with cashew resin and fish oil. The name means tied boat. A stitched hull flexes in a swell where a nailed one splits, which mattered when these were carrying the harvest across an open lake.
- Lunch that has to be sung forAt the Aranmula vallasadya the boat crew cannot simply be served. Each of the sixty-odd items must be asked for in improvised verse, and the servers wait for it. The singing is the ordering system, not the entertainment.
- The duck follows the harvestFlocks are walked onto the polders as soon as the paddy is cut, to eat spilled grain, snails and stranded fish. The bird fattens on land that has nothing else to do and manures it in passing, which is why duck rather than chicken is Kuttanad's meat and why duck is cheap here and dear elsewhere.
- The clam that got certifiedAshtamudi Lake's short-neck clam fishery — hand-picked from the lake bed, mostly by women — was certified as sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council in 2014, the first fishery in India to receive that certification.
- Kollam shells Africa's cashewMost of India's cashew processing happens around Kollam, and a large share of the raw nut arrives by sea from West and East Africa. The tree came to this coast with the Portuguese in the sixteenth century; the industry that grew around it now depends on imports of the same nut going the other way.
- The language was standardised in a mission pressBenjamin Bailey cast the first Malayalam movable type at the CMS press in Kottayam in 1821 and published his Malayalam–English dictionary in 1846. Central Travancore therefore had an outsized hand in deciding what printed Malayalam looks like, which is why the written language sits closer to this district's speech than to any other.
- Fields with letters instead of namesThe largest Kuttanad reclamations, ringed off from open lake water in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were designated by letters rather than village names — A-Block through T-Block, of which R-Block is the best known. A farmer here gives their address as a letter.
Small local details of Travancore & Kuttanad — customs, quirks and things that are not in any guidebook. (12)