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THE LAST WORD IN TRAVELDEC-JAN 2018-19 | 150
Dec-Jan 2018-19 Condé Nast Traveller 9
A river runs through On a journey through the cultural heart of central Kerala, Saumya Ancheri finds an arts scene that is thriving and evolving
You hear music, you dance From streets to clubs, music and dance are everywhere in Colombia. By Kersi Khambatta
Shanghai, supersized Amid the shiny skyscrapers and Victorian Gothic landmarks of the Chinese city, Steve King discovers a neon-lit mix of old and new
An Odissi odyssey In Odisha to trace the roots of the art form she practises, dancer Arushi Mudgal finds there are echoes of it across the state
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Dec-Jan 2018-19CONTENTS
FEATURES
A boatman rowing at Kayal Island Retreat, Kerala
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WE ASKED OUR CONTRIBUTORS…“HOW HAS TRAVEL CHANGED YOU?”
SAUMYA ANCHERI Who: CNT features editor, writer; A river runs through, p192 A: “Travel is an exercise in surrender. I have yet to go on a trip where everything went as planned! I’ve learned to channel dismay into being alert to what turns up in the moment—much-needed rest, a new friend, a monastery trek.” @Saumya_Ancheri
ALISHA SADIKOT Who: Writer, Stop and smell the sea spray, p106
A: “Travel has made my heart grow bigger.”
@alishasadikot
CONTRIBUTORS
PICO IYER Who: Writer; Goa’s hidden Eden, p114 A: “Travel has shown me how much I don’t know, how much the world exceeds my every expectation and how inexhaustible the planet can be. In many ways, it’s opened my eyes and heart and mind as staying at home could never have done.” @PicoIyer
KERSI KHAMBATTA Who: Writer; You hear music, you dance, p208 A: “Travel has made me insatiably curious about the people who walk our planet. It has made me seek out their history, cultures, how they think about food, and their journey to where they are now. I am just better informed today.”
@kersi101
CROOKES & JACKSON Who: Photographers, An Odissi Odyssey, p232 A: “Travel has taught us to love change. A shift in routine, a visual shock, a cultural journey, a new friendship—when you travel, you never quite know what is going to happen and there is something addictive about it. We let serendipity lead us into new images and so often, it is those unchoreographed encounters that make for astounding pictures.”
@CrookesAndJackson
KANISHK THAROOR Who: Writer; Adrift in Iceland, p148 A: “I grew up almost entirely outside my native country, so I often think of travel as its opposite, a kind of homecoming. This sense has only expanded with time. I don’t feel estranged in a new place. I feel at home on the road.”
@kanishktharoorP
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A RIVER RUNS THROUGH
Saumya Ancheri journeys through the cultural heart of central Kerala. Photographs by Himanshu Lakhwani
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T he water is a psychedelic mauve
and mint green, a silk-smooth tapestry of the dying sun and upside-down coconut trees. The kids who were fishing and the men keeping company with wallowing buffaloes have gone. Our boat glides up and down the river that opens to the sea. It’s not exactly postcard-perfect Kerala, but the sunset casts a surreal beauty on the unkempt banks, and it feels like we are rippling through an Impressionist painting.
Kerala’s rivers, canals and backwaters were once its main roadways; they fostered culture, brought traders and invaders, supplied a life of plenty and, sometimes, took it away. A few months ago, floods ravaged the state, the worst in a century. The Arattupuzha River—named for the holy dip taken in its waters—had risen up the banks to cover 8ft of Neelambari (neelambari.co.in; doubles from 7,500), a resort on the outskirts of Thrissur. We watch a phone video of the resort owner, Sreeni, having to take a boat through the property to survey the damage. The only sign we see now is the faint waterline on the walls. Life is gently moving on.
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Every morning of our eight-day road trip, my photographer and I awake to chenda drumming from the nearby temples. As we drive south through the central Kerala districts of Palakkad, Thrissur—the state’s cultural capital—Ernakulam and Alappuzha, the rhythms follow us, from accompanying the ongoing Navami puja rituals to classical art performances.
The villages of Arattupuzha and Peruvanam in Thrissur are the cradle of this percussion ensemble, Sreeni tells us. A techie, he left his Dubai job to return to his hometown, set up Neelambari and support the traditional arts, and his love for the mathematical structure of the drumming is evident. Nearly 1,450 years ago, he tells us, these villages originated the pooram (temple fair) format of grand elephant parades and spirited drumming that is iconic of today’s Thrissur Pooram, held at Vaddakunnathan temple, 15km away in the city centre. But the locus of power shifted to Vaddakunnathan temple with the patronage of Sakthan Thampuran, the 18th-century ruler of the Kingdom of Cochin who made Thrissur his capital.
Watching the lamp-studded walls of Arattupuzha temple blaze against the inky dawn sky, it’s hard to imagine the quiet grounds undulating with a procession of 24 deities and 70 caparisoned elephants at the pooram every April. The floods didn’t breach these old walls, and it hosted a relief camp for those who’d lost their homes. Exiting Peruvanam temple,
Above: Arattupuzha temple at dusk. Opposite page, clockwise from top: chenda melam at Neelambari; the exterior and interiors of Neelambari. Previous pages: a man rowing his boat on Kakkathuruthu’s backwaters
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“Watching the lamp-studded walls of Arattupuzha temple blaze against the dawn sky, it’s hard to imagine the quiet grounds undulating with a procession of deities and elephants”
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“You can tell if the woman of the house is in a bad mood by how well the kolam is drawn. It’s fair warning to all who enter!”
Kolam, drawn with rice flour, in Kalpathy. Opposite page: schoolboys on an afternoon in Kalpathy
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we notice a painted border of chenda drums on the crisp white mundu of a smiling man—it is Peruvanam Kuttan Marar, who was awarded a Padma Shri for his percussive mastery. Temple drumming is traditionally performed by his community, but like other Kerala ritual art forms like koodiyattam, the chenda melam is now played across castes and by women, too.
The name Thrissur refers to Shiva, but this district has a more layered story. Less than an hour’s drive from Arattupuzha lies Kodangallur, identified as the legendary port Muziris, as the Greeks called it. Muziris drew Romans, Arabs, Phoenicians, Persians, Egyptians and Greeks for trade in black pepper from the 1st century BC, until it vanished in the great Periyar flood of 1341AD. It was the great port of the Chera dynasty—who lent their name to Kerala—and under their generosity and tolerance, trade and religion flourished here.
Kodangallur acted as the gateway to Judaism, Christianity and Islam in India. It is the sometime-home of my Syrian Christian family. St Thomas arrived here in 52AD. Our Muziris host Lijo Jose points out a painting on the ceiling of the St Thomas Kottakavu Forane church that shows the raja giving the apostle permission to build a church here. Like this church that has been rebuilt several times, Christianity has evolved here in waves. We meet a family that performs chavitu natakkam, the flamboyantly costumed dance drama created by Portuguese missionaries in the 16th century to narrate tales of Biblical and Christian heroes.
The last Chera king is said to have converted to Islam and made a pilgrimage to Mecca, though he died while returning to India. The Cheraman Juma Masjid, said to be the oldest in India, built in 629AD, lies within a 10km radius of the Kottakavu church set up by the apostle Thomas, the ancient Kodangallur Bhagavathy temple, and the Paravur synagogue, one of the earliest in India. There is a similarity in their architecture and customs—and the Hindu temple architecture and customs are also said to draw on Buddhism, which was practised here earlier. Driving around, we have hurtled through a few centuries in just a couple of hours.
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The air reverberates at Kerala Kalamandalam. Waves of percussive rhythm descend on us, emanating from different groups at every leafy corner. School begins at the eighth standard—we look in on kids singing, drumming, dancing, painting masks—each small class tightly held in the palm of its strict guru. Malayalam poet Vallathol Narayana Menon set it up in 1930, when social changes led to a waning interest in kathakali, which had prospered under royal and feudal patronage. Kalamandalam is now a deemed university for classical arts including kathakali, koodiyattam and
mohiniattam. In the koothambalam—the performing area usually only found in temples—I am transfixed by the process of dressing up for kathakali, which takes over five hours. A trickster in red face paint glowers in front of the mirror while a righteous green-faced lad slowly pirouettes as crisp gunny bags are tucked under his belt to make his skirt balloon. Under the layers of paint and cloth, they morph, already halfway to stepping into archetypes older than their years.
We tiptoe out to head for Kalamandalam’s original Nila campus, named for the river running by, It is smaller, more pastoral and meditative. We spot a postgrad student we met earlier getting a Kalamandalam mridangam repaired at Perumbavur, one of the last villages that traditionally make musical instruments from leather. V Prashanth Babu, whose family has been in the business for 150 years, showed us how the edakka—usually performed near the sanctum sanctorum—gets its musicality from the colourful pom-poms tied on jackfruit strings and hung from the drum. An edakka has 64 pom-poms, for the number of traditional art forms in Kerala, he tells us. “You have to have a musician’s ear to tune an instrument,” says Babu, adding that people only recognise a player’s artistry and forget the craftsman. He is 49, and soon the sheer physicality required for this work will get too much he says, before pounding the mridangam with a 5kg bus axle.
A 20-minute ride away lies Kalpathy, a heritage village of predominantly Tamil Brahmins who moved here by royal invitation. As the story goes, the local Namboodiri priests left when a 16th-century prince of the Kingdom of Palakkad married a tribal girl, says Bhagwaldas, owner of Kandath Tharavad homestay (tharavad.info; doubles from 5,000) and our host in Palakkad. Kalpathy looks and feels different from the villages we’ve visited, with cosy row houses radiating from the main temple (which hosts a famous chariot festival). Each porch sports a kolam, a rice-flour pattern that the women draw every morning to welcome goddess Lakshmi. “You can tell if the woman of the house is in a bad mood by how well it’s drawn,” Bhagwaldas quips, “It’s fair warning to all who enter!” Neighbours in kasavu saris and white mundus chat in clusters while others return from temple rituals as we enter the home of a Carnatic music teacher from Karnataka. Neha, his granddaughter, plays evocatively on the veena before telling us that she plans to return to Carnatic music after obtaining her B.Tech, maybe even study further and teach at the local music college. “There are so many engineers already,” she says, “I want to do something with what I’ve learned.”
At Bhagwaldas’ 18th-century ancestral home built of teak and mud and surrounded by paddy fields, a sign above the dining area says: “Let not the silence disturb you.” Apart from temple sounds, our stays on this trip have a quiet so loud it can be unnerving and yet it
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Clockwise from top: Neha, the granddaughter of a Carnatic music teacher in Kalpathy, playing the veena; the Paradesi Synagogue in Mattancherry; the window of Sarah Cohen’s house in Mattancherry
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“Ram and Ravan tussle for Sita, manipulated by bamboo sticks from behind a white curtain backlit by wick lamps. Frankincense is showered on the lamps, creating a fiery explosion”
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is a soothing contrast to Kerala’s immersive, larger-than-life arts. That evening we watch tholpavakoothu, a 2,000-year-old shadow puppetry form performed at Bhadrakali temple festivals along the Nila River: in Palakkad, Thrissur, Malampuzha. Based on the Kamba Ramayana, the storytelling is dedicated to Bhadrakali (the mother goddess Bhagavathy), who missed the war between Ram and Ravan because she had been battling the demon Darika.
Kalasree Ramachandra Pulavar’s family has followed the tradition for 13 generations. Like other Malayali artists we meet, he and his troupe have performed across India and around the world, taking along their 3,000 songs and trunk of puppets fashioned from deer and goat hide. Tonight’s show is from the traditional repertoire, which Ramachandra offers to perform in Hindi, but they have newer adaptations too, such as Rabindranath Tagore’s Chandalika. Like kathakali and koodiyattam, tholpavakoothu plays out over several hours and days at temple festivals, but we get a traveller-lite, hour-long version. Ram and Ravan tussle for Sita, manipulated by bamboo sticks from behind a white curtain backlit by wick lamps. Every now and then, frankincense is showered on the lamps, creating a fiery explosion. The effect is magical, and seems out of time.
The Ramayana is the base text for Ramanattam as well, the temple art that inspired kathakali. Kottayath Thampuran, a 17th-century ruler in north Kerala, drew on its style to narrate stories from the Mahabharata. “A story can be told in a few minutes; the emphasis is more on the telling, which is why you can watch a story again and again and still see something new,” says Ramankutty, a schoolteacher in Vellinezhi, a village near Kalamandalam once famous for its kathakali gurukul. We are sitting in the workshop of Govindankutty, who belongs to one of the last families that traditionally make kathakali ornaments. The crown itself weighs 5kg, but the speciality of jackfruit wood, Govindankutty tells us, is that it becomes lighter when sprayed with water. “There is no tradition as such, it keeps changing,” Ramankutty says, although everywhere we go, people tell us that with declining patronage, the Kalamandalam style is currently dominating the other variations in the performance of kathakali and koodiyattam.
Unlike kathakali, which was historically staged in open spaces, the 2,000-year-old ritual art of koodiyattam was traditionally performed in a koothambalam as a sacrificial offering for the deity. This was the practice until the masters opened up the performance when it was in danger of dying out. Watching a koodiyattam performance by Sooraj Nambiar, I am reminded of Ramankutty’s description of the power of narration. In Kalyana Sougandhikam, Bhim enters the forest seeking a flower for Draupadi, but much of the telling is about the sights that he encounters: an elephant struck by a snake, feasted on by a tiger.
Clockwise from top: Renjini, a kathakali artist, getting ready for her performance; the paint used by a kathakali artist; Renjini during her
performance. Opposite page, clockwise from top: shadow puppetry being performed at Kandath Tharavad; Bhagwaldas at Kandath
Tharavad; a water lily at Kandath Tharavad
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“A trickster in red face paint glowers in front of the mirror while a righteous green-faced lad
slowly pirouettes as crisp gunny bags are tucked under his belt to make his skirt balloon”
Kathakali dancer Renjini in the flow of
a performance
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Sooraj effortlessly drums up deep emotions to the hypnotic beat of the mizhavu played by Kalamandalam Hariharan; when he is the petrified elephant, I am reminded of the fear some of my schoolteachers inspired in me, as the snake and the tiger, he embodies pride. I find it cathartic.
At Kayal Island Retreat (kayalislandretreat.com; doubles from 10,500) in Kakkathuruthu, an island not far from Kochi, we meet Renjini. Kathakali has traditionally been a male bastion; she is part of the recent wave of female exponents. “My father was a kathakali artist, but he didn’t think I’d continue for more than a few years,” says Renjini, whose deep interest as a five-year-old encouraged her father to teach her. “People say a woman doesn’t have the physical strength for kathakali,” says the 45-year-old who still packs in three-hour shows. “Art is neither male nor female.” Anti-heroes have traditionally been performed by short-statured players like her, Renjini explains, but she enjoys playing them. So much so that her portrayal of Ravan has become a benchmark for several young female dancers to prove their mettle.
Tripunithura, where Renjini is from, was the last capital of the Kingdom of Cochin and the current home of their descendants. “The Kochi royal family has always been patrons of the arts,” says Balagopal, who belongs to the family. Like Kottayath Thampuran, who devised kathakali, the royal family hasn’t stopped at being connoisseurs. “My mother is a kathakali artist who learned from Kalamandalam Krishnan Nair, and then many started picking it up,” he says. He takes us to the home of his aunt, Subhadra Thampuran, an All India Radio artist now in her eighties. Her mother, Ratnam Thampuran, the king’s niece, won his support to perform Carnatic music. Though a revolutionary move for its time, it helped that these classical arts were based in religion, Balagopal explains.
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“Society doesn’t get visual art,” noted sculptor Reghunadhan K tells us at his home and studio near Kakkathuruthu. “Unless a piece has a title, people don’t understand a thing. Though the Kochi-Muziris Biennale is changing things for the younger generation.” His sculpture of a cow is at Kayal Island Retreat, a reminder of its previous life as an artist residency run by the former owners of Fort Kochi’s Kashi Art Gallery. Contemporary art, like a boutique hotel, somehow sits easy on Kakkathuruthu, an isle not more than 1km wide, devoid of motor vehicles as it is yet to be connected by road to the mainland. The waters around the island seem like a gorgeous, static mirror when we take a boat ride; time seems to stretch forever and yet slip away without us noticing. The islanders mainly engage in harvesting prawns and farming paddy, and enjoy folk arts like kolkali,
a harvest dance traced back to the Pandavas. It was not performed this Onam because of the flood, but we get a glimpse from Bhargavan, who ensures that the young boys and girls learn the art form. They sing, tap sticks—“Kerala’s dandiya” we can well imagine Mumbaikars saying—and clap their hands as they move about in a circle. His sister-in-law Kaumari sings the chants from working in the fields; her favourite, though, is a ballad of longing by a man whose lover has left him.
Reghunadhan’s sculptures, too, made their way from Kakkathuruthu to the mainland on boat; when money came in, he bought land to settle down nearby. His works were at the first Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2012; we see more of his work at Gallery OED in Mattancherry, on an art walk by Maneesha Panicker, the owner of Kayal Island Retreat and Silk Route Escapes. The biennale seems to be catalysing the area’s potential as an art district, she says, as we pop into a former Jewish home that is being reconstructed as an art hotel to open in time for this December’s biennale.
As with Kodangallur, trade and religion prospered in Fort Kochi and Mattancherry under the tolerant Kingdom of Cochin. We pass former Jewish warehouses that still process pepper; linked by tiny streets and overlooking the backwaters, these echo a time when cargo arrived by ship rather than by truck. When artists Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu launched the biennale, they turned these once-bustling warehouses into art spaces, and artworks often nod to this history. I remember Sissel Tolass’s 2014 Fear, where ballast stones—likely relics from ancient ships at Kochi—were painted with the replicated sweat scent of 20 men who shared a phobia of bodies; it made me think of the slaves who rowed the ships here. Fort Kochi and Mattancherry are touristy now, but there is history and art everywhere. Near the synagogue stands the beautiful handmade lace shop of Sarah Cohen, the oldest Paradesi Jew still residing here. Our hotel, Forté Kochi (fortekochi.in; doubles from 12,500), used to be a Jewish residence, just like nearby David Hall, now an art gallery showing the graphic art of Taarika John. The 25-year-old illustrator moved from Kochi to Mumbai for the work opportunities, and is thrilled to return for her first solo show. “Kochi has so many art galleries now,” she says, “I didn’t even know this could be a profession. At least people know now what I’m doing and don’t think I’m a fashion designer!” she jokes, “It’s the Kochi-Muziris Biennale that has opened Kochi up to art.”
Anita Dube, eminent contemporary artist, is the Kochi-Muziris Biennale’s first woman curator. Her connection with Kerala goes farther than exhibiting her work at the first edition. She was part of the Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association, founded in Baroda by graduates of Thiruvananthapuram’s College of Fine Arts (including the sculptor Reghunadhan)
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Clockwise from top: Kolkali (a harvest dance) being performed at Kakkathuruthu; a room at Kayal Island Retreat; Maneesha Panicker, the owner of Kayal Island Retreat, at Kakkathuruthu
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in the aftermath of the Emergency. That politically and socially conscious approach to art informs her curatorial vision too. “When I was given this role as curator, I was wondering: what is my primary audience?” she tells us. “Is it the one percent that goes to Kassel’s documenta and the Venice Biennale? Or what the statistics say: that six lakh people came to the last biennale? I am choosing artists that are international and I’m making a conscious choice to give people a range of activities.” She has looked to highlight “practices that are ecologically sensitive, marginal practices by artists who are not stars, young voices; also exploring what Asia has to offer theoretically to the world. There are also more women artists in this show than men. We are asking, ‘Really, are women not good enough? Have a look for yourself.’”
Alongside the ticketed exhibition, Dube is launching a free pavilion at Cabral Yard to enable conversations, where people can listen to lectures and also share any content they wish via the internet, “where I am abdicating my authority as a curator,” she says. She notes that the biennale has revitalised Kochi’s old trading warehouses like Pepper House, where we are seated and which now runs an art residency. But there is still scope for much more, she emphasises. “I think artists in Kerala need to get out of an illustration of local culture as a route to the market. When they encounter the different ways in which artists are making wonderful work, hopefully they should pick up on things.”
As we leave Pepper House, I am reminded of the evening before, when we stopped at Hotel Seagull, a no-frills bar next door. We’d spent the day fruitlessly searching for life in a city on strike, and finally wound down for sunset. It turned out to be the most memorable one on our trip—the sky drenched in golds and pinks, so mesmerising, we let the waiter order for us rather than spend time considering the menu. It was surreal, no filter needed. There was a subtle, ephemeral beauty to it that eluded our cameras, just like with the trance-like sense of elevation from being immersed in a chenda melam at the lamp-lit Kodungallur Bhagavathy temple at dusk. Or the limbo of walking through the empty 101-room Paliam Naalkettu, the matrilineal Nair home where a boat once hung inside the house in preparation for floods and a woman announced her readiness for a relationship by placing a lamp or a man’s shoes outside her door.
The rise and fall of rivers and kingdoms have shaped the region and its art forms indelibly; some last the dance, others remain only in memory while new ways of telling the same old stories appear. Through all the myths we heard and the arts we witnessed, we caught glimpses of a past whose glory and darkness we could only imagine, faded and yet still luminous like the murals at Mattancherry Palace. And that’s Kerala for me, the motherland, always more than I expect.
A similar trip can be organised by Silk Route Escapes (silkrouteescapes.com)
Above: Anita Dube, the first female curator of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, in Fort Kochi. Opposite page, clockwise from top: a local
child at Uru Art Harbour; a sculpture of Gandhi by Reghunadhan K; the artist Reghunadhan K at home
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“This biennale highlights practices that are ecologically sensitive, marginal practices by artists who are not stars, young voices; also exploring what Asia has to offer to the world”
