Koyikode Vignettes

It is one of those unusual trips where the journey and the destination were sources of joy to me.  Driving through the forests of Bandipur and winding up and down the hills where the Western Ghats meet the Deccan plateau was delight in itself.   The troops of monkeys and a darting leopard in the reserve forest raised our expectations of being able to see more of the wildlife of Bandipur.  That was not to be though.  It turned out the leopard indeed was a non-normal sighting. 

  

We descended into the foothills of Wayanad, having negotiated the nine hair pin bends, with me muttering and swearing under my breath as I tried to deal with my acrophobia.  After driving through another fifty kilometres of the undulating beauty of the Western Ghats we drove into Koyikode. 

To all those who have not been on this trip I would strongly encourage you to make the trip to Wayanad just for enjoying the sheet beauty of nature in this part of the world.  I guess it may look even more picturesque in the rains, although one may not able to screech through the distance in the six hours and fifteen minutes that I managed to in the comfort of the dry, cool December air.

Koyikode and Malabar are different from the rest of Kerala.  Our stay there was very short, for a maiden trip.  Apart from the seven hours that I slept for, most of the twelve waking hours we spent there was taken up by the main purpose of our trip, which I shall not say much about. 

So we did after all miss seeing those spots on the lovely beaches where Dr. Prasad Varkey explained to Puja Mathew the three sequential levels of response to lost love in the movie Om Shanti Oshana (OSO).   More about Dr. Varkey's theory on lost love in another post.

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Koyikode – that is what the locals would call Kozhikode – is a city with a rich past that is struggling to come to terms with a contemporary present.   The Malabar region has always captured my imagination as it has held a prominent place in the history of Kerala.  

Its fertile hinterland grew spices that the rest of the world coveted.  Its inviting ports beckoned traders, who eventually became conquerors, to its shores, centuries before the advent of Jesus Christ.  In medieval times, a mere forty five years after the officially accepted year of the Renaissance and Reformation, fired by the spirit of adventure that it is said to have ignited, the first Europeans landed in India through the Kappada beach.    

In more recent times it reasserted its place in the annals of history as the fiery spirit of its people manifested in one of the early freedom struggles in the form of the Mappilla rebellion.  The people of the region later on followed with their struggle for social justice through their feisty leaders like EMS, VT Bhattathiripad and Comrade Ajitha.  

Each of them represented a different approach to achieving their ends.  What was common to all of them was their abiding commitment to the social cause they espoused.  That is the essence of history in a sense.  

For successive generations, history has been wrongly taught as the story of individual triumphs of conquerors and heroes who prevailed over the vanquished.  The truth is that often they also represent the larger collective aspirations of peoples and societies.

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To me places are nothing but the spatial coordinates of where people created events.  Take the people out of the context, a place is nothing but a lifeless piece of geography, with the flora and fauna the only living beings who anyway do not have much of a story to tell by themselves, unless you are a zoologist or a botanist.   I am neither.  Imagine the flowers and the beasts and the birds that we read about as children without the human or humanoid stories woven around them!

 

I tried to visualize the Dravidians as they over-ran the local negroids more than three thousand years ago in modern Wayanad, as they tried to find a new home after they had been displaced by the more war like Aryans who marauded their way into the fertile Indo Gangetic plains from the cold, dry and inhospitable terrains of Central Europe and West Asia.  I wondered how the local worshippers of animistic faiths must have responded as their religions were supplanted by the Goddess worshipping immigrants and their symbols and icons cleverly coopted.

As we drove through Sultan Battery I relived the battles between Tipu Sultan and the British and the role that the battery must have played in those battles till the truce of Srirangapatnam.  The Sultan never managed to get to Kozhikode although he extended the road to Thamarassery.  

The little towns of Chungam, Chundale, Engapuzha, Adivaram,Vythiri, Thamarassery and so on bore testimony to the trading prowess of the Muslims of this region and the tenuous confluence until the recent past between their religious and their secular lives.  The market places and their shops had a look that was distinct from similar establishments I had seen in Central or Southern Kerala.  On the beaches of Kozhikode I could not help imagining the first Greek and Roman vessels buoying up and down on the waters of the distant dark moonless horizon.   

So here is the rub.  While my wife and sons admired the sights, sounds and smells of the beautiful and vibrant beach of Kozhikode on a balmy Sunday evening, here I was lost in reverie, somewhere inside the many hundreds of pages of history that I had read and was now struggling to recreate through my fading recollections - like a visually impaired man trying to read the faded and moth eaten pages of an ancient book.

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I loved Koyikode for all that.  I could see the struggle between tradition hanging around its old houses and shops and buildings that clung together with their black tar roofs on the one hand and the new glass walled showrooms that evidenced the purchasing power of the western trained, Gulf oil funded Malabari.  Koyikode did not seem to have transitioned neatly from the world of (Vaikom Mohammed) Basheerka to this modern world that is perhaps epitomized by Dulqur Salman and the character that he plays in Ustad Hotel.  

Its strong tradition and character, I suspect, will not allow that to happen.  And that has perhaps nothing to do with the zeal of the hundreds of thousands of pious Muslims clad in their spotless white Mappilla costume that I saw milling around the Markaz convention centre where a massive event was in progress.

In that sense Koyikode is like my home town, Trivandrum.  There is an uneasy and immiscible coexistence between the quaint and the contemporary.   It is unlike Kochi which has always been a bit of a parvenu.  The jarring garishness of Manmohan’s Singh’s market economy has come to settle down well in Kochi, among its new hotels, fancy apartments and a new generation that often appears to have lost its way and seems to seek solace and sense in the city’s numerous bands and herb-dispensing hangouts. 

Koyikode is unlike Trivandrum in an important way though.  Its people are awfully nice, to the point of being genteel.  That is very unlike my fellow Travancorite who would make you think twice before you try a second attempt at building a conversation.

 

And as you think of its many violent struggles in the past, as you recall the many press stories of the political clashes, as you think of the many movie stories that revolve around mindless fundamentalists being misguided into evil plots to liquidate unsuspecting and harmless citizens, one cannot help wonder how a society that is full of such people could whip such a frenzy of emotions.   

That is perhaps what the Malayali means when he says that even the docile rat snake is capable of striking back if adequately provoked.

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As we navigated out of Koyikode, through its narrow but well maintained streets, past its well laid out even if somewhat tasteless buildings, through the din of the Monday morning traffic, listening to the sweet prattle of the RJ in her musical North Keralite and Malabari accent, I said to myself that this, Insha Allah, will not be my last visit to Koyikode.  

This is where I need to start my journey to gather the material for my as yet unborn, half written novel, in which my protagonist, Ammu, a fierce Marxian historian in the footsteps of Damodar Kosambi, a love child who is struggling to come to terms with her scar-filled past, sifts through years of archaeological material littered across the hills and caves of the Western Ghats to find a new explanation for the mystery of the nearly mythical port of Muziris. 

At the end of my travel I may still not have a novel.  But I hope to have sated my lust for the coast of Malabar. 

But then I also know that I will have another important reason, a new chapter that appears to be unfolding in my life, God willing, that is too early to speculate about.  But it is one of those visions of the future that one sometimes thinks one can see, however hazily through the silvery mists of uncertainty.

This post is dedicated to the only two Koyikkodans I know, apart from the third who is at the centre of the unfolding future that I am not able to speak of yet in much detail.  By the time that drama has played out its magic on me I might just smile at the evanescence of all that I saw, I experienced, I wrote about and all that is so ephemeral that we hold on to it like it will be there eternally.

Nanni.  Namaskaaram.