They call it God’s own country and the joke runs that it is because no one else would accept something so bad! A fortnight ago, I finally mustered the courage to venture into Kerala. After visiting Ladakh in the north a couple of months ago, it only seemed appropriate – symmetrical – that I visit the southern tip of India too, which, technically, is in Tamil Nadu. Nonetheless, Kerala is one of the two southernmost states of India and the only one south of the Vindhya mountains I had not yet visited.
I chose to join a tour group because it is just simpler to let them handle food, lodging, and transportation in a land where I did not speak the language. For that matter, given India’s tourist infrastructure, I lack the courage to wander around on my own in the country even if I know the local language.
Our group started from the south in Kanyakumari and moved up north towards Guruvayur. I had chosen to travel to India’s southern tip by road transport and learned my lesson very quickly – do not forget your earplugs! Most bus transport companies in India feel an uncontrollable urge to run movies during the journey. Without fail, these cause thoughts of hominid extinction and massive catastrophes to cross your mind. Something else I noticed is that despite the similar quality of buses, Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation has much better service than other state transportation companies or even private enterprises. Still, this does not spare you from blaring movies during your trip!
Kanyakumari is the southernmost point of mainland India, about 8° – approximately 900 kms – from the equator to the north. It would be unreasonable to expect cool weather at such latitudes during any part of the year; it was hot, humid, and the sun was strong even in October. The town attracts many tourists but is especially important to Hindus for its place in their mythology – according to one story, the town was the site where Kanya Devi, an avatar of Parvathi, did tapas to obtain Lord Shiva’s hand in marriage. Today, the Kumari Amman kovil attracts many pilgrims.
Kanyakumari is famed for its sunrise, especially during certain times of the year when the sun’s first rays illuminate the southern tip of India. If you stay overnight in Kanyakumari, be sure to catch the sunrise; your hotel may have a terrace from which you can see it or you can go down to the shore where many people gather to usher in the day. Since our trip was in the midst of the monsoon season, the skies were overcast and the sun diffuse and weak until much later in the day.
I found the memorial underwhelming and not quite worthy of the wait. This is a matter of personal aesthetics, but I would have preferred a large covered mandapam mostly open on the sides for meditation with perhaps a small marker of Vivekananda’s visit in the hall. Instead, we now have a structure that might as well have been built on shore – a building containing a towering statue of Vivekananda in large hall, and a warm and stuffy meditation chamber.
Given the serpentine lines for the ferry, we visited the ancient but repeatedly renovated Kanyakumari temple on the mainland first. The place was flooded with worshippers and tourists who wished to get a glimpse of the famous diamond nose-ring of the deity that is rumoured to be visible even from the sea. Men are not allowed any upper garments inside the temple and conservative clothes are recommended for all visitors just like at any religious site.
Near the temple is a small memorial to Mohandas Gandhi built in 1956 in the form of a Oriyan Sun temple. Every October 02 – Gandhi’s birthday – through a small aperture in the ceiling, the sun’s rays fall on the exact spot Gandhi’s funerary urn was kept before some of his ashes were immersed in the sea.
There was hardly any point in sticking around in Kanyakumari so we left for Thiruvananthapuram, the capital city of Kerala, that afternoon. Out of curiosity, we stopped by a place that advertised itself as India’s first wax museum – save yourself ₹60 and the horror! The place has only about 16 very poor quality life-size wax figures of famous personalities like Michael Jackson, Manmohan Singh, Mother Teresa, Mohandas Gandhi, Albert Einstein, and Barack Obama.
I was taken aback by Kerala’s capital. The city was clean, if not by Viennese standards, at least among the cleanest I had seen in India. Unlike other concrete jungles, the city could still boast of a fair bit of foliage and seemed like any modern city. For a state run by communists, this was impressive and quite at odds with Calcutta, the capital of the recently communist state of West Bengal. Thiruvananthapuram is about 90 kms from Kanyakumari, a journey of almost two hours by bus. I had come armed with ethnic jokes about the Land of Lungi (original) and Hotel Keralafonia (original), but the city simply did not give me an opportunity to indulge in them. My spectacular version of I Am A Malayalee (original) had to be abandoned.
The dress code for the Padmanabhaswamy Temple is saris for women and mundu for men, though they may cover their torso with a shawl if they wish. No leather products – belts, wallets, watch straps – are allowed in, and neither are mobile phones or other electronics. These will be stowed for you if you wish to deposit them at a stall near the entrance. At the same stall, mundu are available for rent for ₹40 in case you do not own one and do not wish to buy one. Women wearing jeans or salwar kameez were also made to wrap a mundu on top, so looks like sari is the only attire allowed.
We had planned to swing by the Raja Ravi Varma Art Gallery and the Napier Museum later in the day but being a Sunday, they were closed. Instead, we went to Kovalam beach to say hello to an old friend of mine, the Arabian Sea. The beach was small, rather crowded, and had insufficient facilities in terms of changing rooms, food & drink, and restrooms, but the water was quite safe. One could walk into the sea until the water was at least six feet on a smooth if slightly undulating bed of sand.
The museum, named after the former Madras Governor General John Napier, held a small but fair collection of sculptures, coins, and other artifacts from the Chola and Mughal periods. Yet it was the collection of a small museum of a city away from the art highways of the world, and interested visitors would have seen superior collections in several places in Europe and the United States as well as in India.
After lunch, it was off to Munnar. The road from Thekkady to Munnar must have been one of the highlights of the trip. Despite the twits and turns, the winding road was good if narrow, and the altitude made the climate cool; the entire stretch was very clean, like the rest of Kerala that we had driven through. With tea estates and spice gardens planted on either side of us, it was truly a beautiful scene outside our windows.
We reached Munnar by evening and the next day, we went for a speedboat ride at the Mattupetty Dam. It was very much overrated, but as with most activities in water, even a bad thing was good. Afterwords, we stopped at a scenic spot along the road where a small market had sprouted to try out some Thekkady tea. It was weak and very unlike Assamese tea, but it certainly had a distinguishable flavour some might enjoy. We also picked up homemade chocolates, whatever those are, as everyone I know who has visited Kerala raves about them.
In the afternoon, we went to the Eravikulam National Park. I was surprised to see a pretty long line at the ticket counter; it took us approximately 45 minutes to finally get in. Visitors have to take a bus into the park and return by bus from the designated spot inside. Each bus ferries some 25 people at a time and the ticket vendor told me that the park has six such buses. The park closes around 17 00 and the last bus is at 16 30 or so. Make sure you plan accordingly if you wish to visit Eravikulam.
Our next stop was the holy temple town of Guruvayur, the Dwaraka of the South. Not surprisingly, it took a temple town to show us the first signs of litter on the streets in Kerala. By Kerala standards, Guruvayur is a dirty temple town but it is still significantly better than many of the temple towns of north India like Puri. We made it to the temple only by early evening, around 17 00. The dress code for the temple is the same as that at the Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Thiruvananthapuram and the same rules regarding electronics and leather products applies. The queue was murderously long as is common at more sacred temples. Unlike at Thirupathi, there are no faster queues available for out-of-town visitors for a fee. However, there is a senior citizen queue for those above 60.
The regular queue took me about two hours, whereas the senior citizens in our group went through in 40 minutes. It seems to me that temples these days have little to do with faith and spirituality and a lot more to do with endurance tests and transactional religion. Not only does a visitor hardly get an opportunity to appreciate the temple architecture, inscriptions, or sculpture, but he is made to wait for hours for a darshan of perhaps five or ten seconds before the priests shove him to the side to allow others to stand before the deity. The huge crowds are so tightly packed and the ancient temples were hardly built with modern safety codes in mind that it is a wonder so few people die in the occasional stampede. Despite the sacrality of Guruvayur, my temple experience did not leave me with a spiritual afterglow.
The next day, we visited the elephant sanctuary at Punnathurkotta run by the Guruvayur temple. The site was the home of the Punnathur maharajahs at one time and is about ten acres. Presently, there are some 36 elephants at Punnathurkota and no calves. I like elephants and so I enjoyed watching the elephants goofing around. Some were carrying their food back to their pens, others were bathing or being given a bath, yet others were eating and a few seemed to be doing some sort of stretching exercises! On the way out, I did have a chuckle at a board that said that dealing in elephant tufts was illegal because it was against the wishes of Lord Guruvayurappan!
Guruvayur is famous for its brass lamps, but honestly, I have seen merchandise of equally good quality in Udupi, Karnataka.
In Cochin, the next day, we visited the St. Francis Church where Vasco da Gama was buried before being repatriated to Portugal. It was built in 1503, and is perhaps the oldest standing church in India. Most of the Portuguese churches and other structures were destroyed by the Dutch when they took over the town in 1663. The Dutch also converted the one Portuguese church they allowed to stand from the Catholic.
Given my penchant for Jewish history, there was no way I would miss the Paradesi Synagogue in Jew Town. Constructed in 1568 by the Cochin Jews, Mattanchery Synagogue, as it is also called, is the oldest still-functioning synagogue in the Commonwealth. The original synagogue was built in the 4th century in Kodungallur but moved to its present location in the 14th century when business caused the community to shift to Cochin. The Portuguese occupational authorities destroyed the synagogue but a new one – the present one – was built almost immediately under the protection of the local Hindu king. There are six more synagogues in the area but they closed their doors many years ago. It is an Orthodox house of worship that now serves the last 15 Jews of the city.
Jews are thought to have first arrived in India centuries ago. However, several exodoi of Jews have occurred into India and it is difficult to pin down specific dates to the migration of different Jewish communities except the most recent – Bene Israel in the 11th century, Iberian Jews in the 17th century, and Baghdadi Jews in the 18th century. The origins of the Bnei Menashe and Bene Ephraim are disputed.
One thing that stumps me about the Jewish people is the strong desire among many of India’s Jews to leave for Israel. Jews have been persecuted for 2,000 years all over Europe and the Middle East but many of the Sephardim and Ashkenazim have strong geographic loyalties to their adopted lands and the Zionist project of establishing Israel in the Levant could not gain momentum without the horrors of the Shoah. In India, on the other hand, there has never been any antisemitism on the part of the majority Hindu community and yet the establishment of Israel saw a mass migration of Jews from India to Israel. I would be eternally grateful if someone could explain that!
The synagogue was the last stop of the tour and those interested in shopping for saris, spices, souvenirs, and gifts disappeared in the evening to make those acquisitions while I spent some time in the hotel pool. I flew out the next morning; Cochin airport is far from the city, about 35 kms from my hotel, and is serviced by a two-lane road for most of the distance. This should be factored in, as should the traffic, for anyone flying out of Cochin. The airport itself was nice. The Mangalore tile roof and the palm trees outside were aesthetically pleasing and the inside was modern, clean and large enough not to be overly crowded.
My trip had been unfortunately timed between Vijaydashami and Diwali but I was lucky to get away with it except in Kanyakumari. There, north Indians had descended upon the town in swarms and the hotels were full as were the lines outside many of the tourist attractions. Worse, there were plenty of loud and obnoxious children running and screaming in the corridors of our hotel – whatever great things my generation may have achieved, good parenting is not one of them. Thankfully, all this ended the moment we left Kanyakumari but I consider myself warned to consider the calender before booking tours.
I was also reminded of why Indians make lousy tourists and are not welcome in many parts of the world. At the buffet table, several guests simply had to touch each chapati with their hands to check if it was hot, and apparently, the tongs provided were not as capable as their fingers at picking up salad. Later in the trip, at the wildlife reserves, many insisted on feeding and teasing the animals despite several signs requesting that this not be done. On the boat ride in Periyar lake, again, loud passengers scared away whatever few animals we might have spotted.
Thanks to a wide variety of food at the buffet table, I was able to avoid the local cuisine throughout the trip. I have had Malayali cuisine before and the vegetarian cuisine tastes horrible, drowned in coconut oil as it is. However, the fish curries of the state were quite nice as was the appam – the two became mainstays of my diet for the duration of my trip.
Friends and relatives who had gone to Kerala earlier had warned me that the state would not be to my liking – there were a few things of historical interest and it was dirty. However, that was not my experience and I am told that tourism has drastically improved in the state in the last eight years. There was little pollution, the streets were largely clean, the roads were fairly good – and toll-free unlike Maharashtra, Karnataka or Tamil Nadu – and many zones were environmentally conscious and plastic-free, but as someone joked, it is not difficult to achieve these things if you chase out all the industry!
Despite my foreboding before the trip, I had a good time. It also helped that we had a good group for the ten days. Kerala may not be on the top of my places to re-visit, but I am definitely glad that I did so once at least.
