The Land That Lost Its History

Come to the Chinese nets and turn right. for the two years my family lived in Cochin, back in the early 1980s, that’s how my folks gave directions to our home. We lived just around the corner from the city’s most prominent landmark, a cluster of giant, cantilevered wooden-frame contraptions that local fishermen manually dipped into the green-gray backwaters that crisscross the city. It was the received wisdom that these nets were Chinese — everybody said so, and the municipal office had posted a plaque nearby, attesting to their oriental antecedents. At age 15, preoccupied by football and heavy-metal music, it never occurred to me to ask how they came to be here, 5,000 km from China. Their presence seemed no more curious than that of the Sichuan and Manchurian restaurants in town.

Now, returning to Cochin two decades on, I was looking for some answers. Could it be that these massive nets, or at least the know-how to build them, were brought here by Zheng He’s treasure ships on their many visits to the coast of what is now India’s Kerala state? It would turn out to be a week of red herrings and only occasional, tantalizing glimpses of my objective. If the admiral left any signs in Calicut, Cochin and Quilon, they have faded to the point of vanishing. (Fair enough: he’s been all but forgotten in his own homeland.) But on my journey back I discovered that along with the Chinese adventurer, Kerala has consigned to oblivion the most glorious period of its own history. In the 14th and 15th centuries, Calicut and Cochin were the main entrepots of Asian commerce. Cochin had the monopoly on pepper, a commodity deemed so valuable that it was nicknamed “black gold.” Traders, envoys and travelers came to these cities — from Venice and Constantinople, Alexandria and Arabia, Java and China — to buy and sell goods, to pay their respects to the powerful local Kings or just to gawk at the grand palaces, avenues and bazaars.

At school in Cochin, I never read about these places as great ports. In history class, we learned that when Vasco da Gama arrived on India’s shores in 1498, Calicut was ruled by a King known as the Zamorin. That’s it. From my classroom in the Delta Study, we could practically hear the creaking of the wooden frames of the nets as they were lowered and raised, but there wasn’t a word about them in the textbooks. Heera Nayaran, who taught us history, was a superb teacher: rather than insisting on rote learning, as is the Indian custom, she led absorbing discussions. Miss Heera, as we were required to call her, obviously relished her subject, and we were easily infected by her enthusiasm: it’s mainly due to her that I became a history buff myself. But in the two years that I attended her classes, Miss Heera never once mentioned the big nets outside the window. I called her to ask why. “I remember being struck by the Chinese nets when I first arrived in Cochin,” she said. “I kept asking people how they came to be there, but nobody seemed to know. People just took them for granted.”

The government of Kerala decreed some years ago that the names Calicut, Cochin and Quilon be de-anglicized to Kozhikode, Kochi and Kollam. But the return to ancient names appears to be an empty gesture. “We have no respect for our own past,” laments Venugopal B. Menon, professor of history at Cochin College. A highly educated and politically aware people — the local literacy rate in excess of 90% is among the highest in the world — Keralites know a great deal about half of their history, the half that begins with da Gama’s arrival. The brutal occupation by the Portuguese and, soon thereafter, the British, was so traumatic it erased memories of what went before.

The well-documented colonial experience is still taught in schools and colleges. The Portuguese and British also left plenty of physical reminders — churches, palaces and forts, often built on the ruins of structures demolished by European cannons. Anyone in Cochin can direct you to the church where Saint Francis Xavier’s remains were originally interred, and any school kid can recite from memory the administrative reforms introduced by the British. But most of the people I talked to were only dimly aware of the era of the enlightened Zamorins of Calicut and the mercantile Rajas of Cochin.

Nobody was more surprised to hear of the early glories than Variamparambil “Joe” Job, an old classmate. Joe is more than a native: his family is a longtime Cochin institution. A successful exporter of handicrafts, Joe’s father had many, many children; enough, it was said, to field his own cricket team. (When asked how many brothers and sisters he had, Joe would smile enigmatically and say: “Lots.”) Job Sr. was wealthy and gregarious, but he was held in especially high esteem for the size of his brood. The whole extended family lived in Padua House, a sprawling bungalow not far from my home, and people passing it invariably pointed to the big gates and said, almost reverentially: “That’s the Jobs’ place.”

Joe still lives in Padua House, but he’s now a businessman in his own right, probably the most successful member of my old class at the Delta Study. He manufactures carpets for export. This, he acknowledges with a modest shrug, makes him a local rarity: “I’m an industrialist, an endangered species.” Reconciling the paucity of entrepreneurialism with accounts of the great Indian free ports, the centers of medieval capitalism, is difficult. Modern Kerala state is a communist bastion. It produced, in 1957, the world’s first elected red government, and has since been ruled alternately by Marxists and a leftist coalition led by the Congress Party. Both groups are beholden to powerful trade unions, which have stifled enterprise. So, barring the odd Joe Job, Kerala depends, as it always has, on its ancient plantations — of spices, coconut and rubber — to sustain the economy.

Of the three ports Zheng He visited, only Cochin still has a harbor of any significance, complete with a modern shipyard and naval base. (Calicut’s has silted up and Quilon is a mere market town.) It is still an export center, sending spices and coconut-fiber carpets around the world. In recent years, after a gap of centuries, Cochin has begun once again to attract foreigners — not traders, but tourists. These days Kerala’s lush green countryside, its exotic spice plantations and stunningly beautiful backwaters are drawing visitors from Europe and the United States who use Cochin as their base.

I see the signs of creeping tourism even in my old neighborhood of Fort Cochin, a quiet, leafy enclave with stately mansions and grassy football fields. It’s still leafy enough, and local laws have saved the mansions from real-estate developers, but all too many of the old houses have been converted into hotels and tourist lodges. There are also more shops selling antiques than I remember. The area around the Chinese nets has been paved, all the better for tourist photographers to place their tripods.

After travelers have exhausted their film and are herded onto their air-conditioned buses, they are driven to Cochin’s second most famous landmark: the synagogue, set amid the blue-shuttered pepper warehouses in the neighborhood known as Jew Town. There, on the synagogue’s floor, may be another clue to Zheng He’s visits: Guangzhou-made porcelain tiles, several centuries old. The synagogue is the legacy of a Jewish presence in Kerala dating back to A.D. 70. But it’s not much to look at, just an ordinary house on an ordinary street. Built in 1568, it now caters to a few score local Jews and thousands of tourists. The narrow lane leading to the synagogue is full of shops selling dubious antiques and cheap handicrafts. Inside, the main hall is awash in gaudy colors, far too much gold paint and more chandeliers than any ceiling should be expected to bear. It seems less a place of worship than a curiosity, and the resident “guide” seems principally interested in selling postcards. One of these is a picture of the tiles, which it says were donated to the synagogue by a rich Jewish trader and laid in 1762.

In a bookshop near my old home, I find an obscure monograph on the history of Cochin that provides more clues to the tiles. The author suggests they were presented to the Cochin Raja by the Chinese traders who were accompanied by Ma Huan, the treasure ship’s chronicler, and an unnamed ambassador (probably Zheng He). The tiles, he claims, were meant for the Raja’s palace, but some clever Jewish merchants spread the rumor that Chinese use cow’s blood to make porcelain and the King, a devout Hindu, had to give them up — to the Jewish merchants.

Before leaving Cochin, I return again to the Chinese nets. I read that old plaque. The nets were brought to Kerala between 1350 and 1450. I watch eight men lower one of the nets — a giant wood-ribbed umbrella, suspended from a 30-m wooden spine by a complex system of ropes and stone counterweights — into the water, hold it there for a minute, then haul it out by pulling the ropes like some ancient tug-of-war with the backwaters. The men win, but the prize is paltry: a few eels and some nondescript fish, no more than 15 kg in all. But the fishermen seem happy enough. They break for a smoke. I ask one of them, Maran, if he knows why the nets are called Chinese. “They came from China,” Maran replies. Does he know when? “Long time ago, before my grandfather’s time.” Would he care to guess how many years ago? “Maybe 200, maybe more.”

I still remember the collective groan that went up in the locker room when coach D’Souza said we would be traveling to Calicut for a football game. That was in 1982, and for us big-city sophisticates in Cochin, Calicut was a one-horse town in the middle of nowhere. Even I, who had never been there, knew the place was a crushing bore: no ice-cream parlors (the preferred hangouts of early-80s Indian teens), no good record stores and — this was the killer — no girls’ schools famous for beauteous babes. We moaned about it the entire five-hour bus ride to Calicut and spent much of the return trip making derisive comments about the place. I have no recollection of the match itself. But I know the town lived up to its reputation.

Now, as I get off the plane, I’m in a much more respectful frame of mind. Calicut, after all, was the objective of the admiral’s great voyages; this was Ma Huan’s “great country of the Western Ocean.” The principal city of the magical Malabar coast, it was a necessary port of call for traders and adventurers alike. Marco Polo visited Calicut on his way back home from Kublai Khan’s China. The Chinese didn’t just stop here, they built homes and warehouses. But driving in from the airport, I can’t see a single building that might be more than 100 years old. Half a history? Modern Calicut seems to have no history at all.

Still, my first interview gets off to a promising start. Raghava Varrier, a professor and local historian, seems more knowledgeable about Chinese trade. And not just Chinese. “Traders came from everywhere,” he says. “This was Asia’s most important entrepot.” It was the closest thing to a free port in the medieval world: the local rulers, known as Zamorins, charged 6-10% import duty on all items. They provided traders with guest houses and servants — and the odd courtesan, natch — and guaranteed the security of all goods. Varrier encourages me to think of it as a 15th century Hong Kong, complete with its own seamy Wanchai district.

Varrier takes me to Silk Street, which was the Chinese quarter in Zheng He’s day. But he warns me against getting my hopes too high: “There’s nothing Chinese about it now.” He’s right. Silk Street is a narrow lane, not far from the beach, and none of the bungalows shows signs of antiquity. Where the Chinese once built a fortified warehouse and quarters for high-ranking traders — including, presumably, the admiral — now stands an Islamic school. Zheng He, a Muslim, might have approved. Next, we make our way to the center of town, the site of the former palace, once surrounded by huge gardens, temples and lakes. These days there’s a modern multi-storied building that houses the state-owned life insurance company, and a pretty little park where children play under the watchful eyes of their amahs. “If you want to see the Calicut of the Zamorins,” the professor says. “I’m afraid you have to rely entirely on your imagination.”

Nothing of the great port has survived, not the jetties, not the warehouses, not the palaces. The plaque Zheng He erected to commemorate his visit has disappeared, too. Although da Gama landed here, the Portuguese colonizers quickly realized that Cochin had the better natural harbor. After looting and razing the Zamorin’s palace complex, they moved on. The spice traders who accounted for most of the commerce had no choice but to follow. Ever since, Calicut has been a mortally wounded city, waiting for a coup de grace.

It got a brief reprieve in the 1970s and 1980s, when hundreds of thousands of Keralites — most of them from the Malabar area surrounding Calicut — found jobs in the booming oil economies of the Persian Gulf. Today, their remittances account for one third of Kerala’s GDP — and a far greater portion of Calicut’s. Thanks to the petrodollars, Calicut is a compact, tidy and very middle-class town. There are very few slums, and very few grand houses. But in recent years, the remittances have been slowing. The Gulf economies no longer create thousands of jobs for Keralites and, after Hindu nationalists demolished a mosque in the northern Indian town of Ayodhya in 1992, many devout Arab businessmen grew wary of employing Indians. What would happen if the jobs dried up altogether? “I don’t even want to think about it,” says K.P. Mayan, a tour operator.

In what remains of Calicut’s old spice market, I meet Harikant, a pink-faced fortysomething man who operates out of a tiny office-cum-warehouse and sweats profusely in the muggy heat. Over cups of lukewarm masala (spicy) tea, he recounts tales from his 25 years as a spice broker. It’s a family business: his ancestors left their native Gujarat state in northwestern India to settle in Calicut to make their name. He’s never heard of medieval Chinese spice buyers, but “the Chinese like spicy food, no?”

In a sudden, unexpected gesture of generosity, Harikant inducts me into a secret ritual, practiced by spice traders for over a millennium: the bargaining of prices. Buyer and seller clasp right hands under a towel or handkerchief and, thus hidden, make offers and counteroffers with a system of finger signals. If I grasp all of your fingers under the towel, I’m offering either 5 or 50, depending on the context of the transaction. If I tug at your index finger, it means I’m offering 1 or 10; two fingers indicate 2 or 20, and so on. There are more complex signals, but these are not to be shared with prying journalists. Buyer and seller use combinations of this code at lightning speed — without exchanging a word — to do business worth millions of rupees.

Here, finally, I get a glimpse — or more accurately, a touch — of the Calicut Zheng He knew. This undoubtedly is how the admiral’s minions conducted negotiations while they were here. (Ma Huan’s account, Triumphant Visions of the Ocean’s Shores, cites deals sealed by the clasping of hands.) The finger-code system was devised to allow traders from all over the world to do business here without having to learn Malayalam, the local language. The towel keeps the deal-making under wraps, a useful precaution in an overcrowded bazaar where the next man might try to undercut you. For added secrecy, the codes are commodity-specific: rice traders have different signals from spice traders. In an era of handheld computers that can exchange data by infrared beams, no spice merchant in Calicut would dream of giving up the old way. “It’s a perfect system,” Harikant beams. “There’s no need to change what’s perfect.”

On the morning of my last day in Calicut, Mayan brings the happy tidings that the Zamorin has agreed to see me. This is the direct descendant of the King who welcomed Zheng He’s fleet. The current Zamorin, 92 and a bachelor, lives in a tiny, single-storied whitewashed home with a small garden and well, on the outskirts of the town. His condition, fittingly, mirrors Calicut’s: he isn’t poor, just comfortably middle class, drawing a small government pension and traveling occasionally in his honorific capacity as chairman of a trust that manages some ancient temples. As Calicut has lost its historic significance, so too has its titular ruler. Few people in Kerala know there still is a Zamorin; many wouldn’t know what the title means. “He’s a ghost from our past,” Mayan says.

He gives audiences — rarely, these days, on account of his advancing years — in a small living room lined with rattan and plastic chairs, faded portraits of his mother and great, great grandmother, two unpolished ceremonial shields, some brass lamps, a cheap wooden model of a sailing ship that sits atop an old TV set and, incongruously, a shiny Japanese boom box. This might be the home of any Calicut family with a father or son in Dubai or Doha. The only sign of his royal antecedents is a painted sign posted on a rusty metal pole at the gate: ZAMORIN RAJA OF CALICUT.

The Zamorin arrives, a small, gaunt man in a cream T shirt and white mundu, or sarong. He walks with some discomfort, helped by a distant relative who also acts as his translator; largely home-schooled in his youth, he once gave private tutorials in ancient Sanskrit, but is uncertain about his English. I try to explain the purpose of my visit, the search for signs that the magnificent treasure ships had passed this way six centuries ago. As the translator takes over, the Zamorin nods and smiles broadly at me, clearly amused by the obscurity of my quest. His eyes are weak, but they twinkle disconcertingly. Did he know his ancestor had met with Zheng He and the Ming Emperor? Did he, perhaps, hear family legends on his grandmother’s lap, about Chinese envoys and their exotic gifts? Never breaking his smile, the Zamorin shakes his head. Like other Keralites, he remembers reading about the Portuguese and British colonizers, but is only vaguely aware that Chinese traders once regularly visited Calicut. Perhaps sensing my disappointment, he offers a consolation: “We had great clay pots in the palace, and they were called chinna-bharani: they were made in the Chinese style.”

Later, posing for photographs at the gate, he makes some small talk in halting, but very correct English. As we head back indoors, I ask if he regrets the fading of Calicut’s glory and whether the Zamorins may have a role to play in reviving the town’s fortunes. “No, there is no role for me in a democracy,” he says, his voice firm for the first time. “I am trying to build some colleges and schools, but nothing more.” Still, he says, he has noticed that these days he is invited to public events — cultural awards ceremonies, Rotary Club galas and the like — more frequently than before. “People seem to want to honor me, maybe they want to remember the old days.” Maybe. But it will take more than a few public appearances by an elderly Zamorin to restore the missing half of Kerala’s history.