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.