Home again after our visit to the Kochi-Muziris Biennale

We arrived home a day late after our latest trip to India and Sri Lanka. I will not go into the misery of a delayed flight, 24 hours after a bout of Sri Lankan food poisoning. It was strange not trying to research anything, but I did do a couple of nifty visits to book shops to promote my book. They were very keen on a general, readable history of Kerala, so perhaps I shall resurrect the project and get writing again. Apart from a whistle-stop tour of the major tourist centres with our friends Karen and Mike- their first visit to India- I planned to visit the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. In the event, it was an even more whistle-stop tour of the exhibitions.

I wanted to see the art, but I also wanted to gain access to some of the warehouses which are not usually open, the main one being Aspinwalls. I wish we had had a fortnight to see it all! The organisers, mostly artists themselves, had done a fabulous job in getting together a show of such high quality in such difficult spaces against the problems which had bedevilled this year's exhibition. Add the India factor to this and I take my hat off to them. On the day we visited it was fairly quiet, apart from gangs of school children who seemed appreciative of most of the work.In the town, the general consensus was that the Biennale had not attracted much extra trade, but I hope this isn't so. Visitor numbers last year were high, and I hope they were not all school parties!

The incomprehensible title, Whorled Explorations, led to an exhausting round of trying to read the equally convoluted and incomprehensible descriptions of the artists' work. I have written this stuff myself. Sometimes the art work is made with the title in mind and then the description seems to make sense. Sometimes the work, or its antecedents, exists, and then the description has to be bent to fit the exhibition title. Mostly I had to give up reading after a couple of paragraphs before my head exploded. I had to resist thinking that it was mostly pretension, but....... Possibly some of it was lost in translation. In the end I gave up trying to make sense of the work and enjoyed it for its own sake, and very enjoyable much of it was too..

Aspinwalls warehouse had had a bit of a facelift, but did not look as though it was in a state of terminal decay, in spite of its long empty years. The art was good enough to distract me from the building, Charles and Ray Eames video being engaging enough to delay exploration for some time.

Aspinwalls offices

We had to rush off to the Pepper House before I had time to see the Anish Kapoor, and took advantage of the handy electric golf buggy which ferried us along the most unpleasant and hottest part of the road.

Pepper House

I have written about Gigi Scaria's bell before, and we had seen it from a boat on the previous day and were keen to get a close up view. It did not disappoint. The subtle metallic tones and the fall of water made it a most beautiful and restful sculpture. Here India intruded and made me sad. The photograph we took shows very clearly that a great deal of work and effort to locate this piece to its best advantage was undermined by the fatal lack of attention to detail which dogs everything in India.

Underneath the bell, where the sump for the circulation of the water had been installed, there was rough soil and gravel and the inevitable rubbish, not much of it washed in from the river. No attempt seemed to have been made to clear it up , or the patch of depressing grass to the side, where plastic bottles, polystyrene and unidentifiable litter lay everywhere. Did it detract from the sculpture? A little. Would it have happened at any other major art show? I very much doubt it.

The organisers had managed to put on a well-organised and world-class exhibition and I hope that the next one is even an improvement on this one, but somehow I fear that it will not gain international status until it takes more pride in its wonderful location.

Ten years after the Boxing Day tsunami

There have been many events in memory of the tsunami of 2010 which spent the last of its force on the coast of India. We are reminded of its power whenever we visit the Western coast, where although we can't envisage the shape of the coast before the wave ripped its way through, we can see the lack of structure on the beaches and the uniform size of the small palm trees which have been planted to replace those which were washed away.

The ugly barrier of concrete and stone which stretches down the highway to the South seems a flimsy protection against such a destructive force, but many warning systems have been put into place and everyone along the coast now understands what to do if the sea behaves strangely. A great deal of post-tsunami work has been done and zoning laws, frequently ignored, restrict new building close to the beach. The Hindustan News describes some of it.

"Thatched huts have given way to housing clusters named Tsunami Colony or Tsunami Village, fishing markets have been built further inland and sea walls have turned the once-bustling beaches dreary and barren," 

Most of the 170 people who lost their lives on this coast were fishermen and while the slow process of rebuilding has gone on, they have resumed their lives in the flimsy beachside huts which made them so vulnerable in the first place. Much of the money allocated to the sea wall and rebuilding the infrastructure has vanished elsewhere, according to the local panchayats.

http://www.thehansindia.com/posts/index/2014-12-27/Sea-walls-in-Kerala-still-a-dream-post-tsunami-123114

A less obvious problem has been the amount of land which was washed away. The tsunami in the 14th Century, which resulted in the disappearance of Muziris and the opening up of the inlet to present day Cochin, shows what the power of the sea is capable of. Less dramatic geological changes came about after the 2004 tsunami, but its effect on the farmers whose land vanished has been immense, and they too are waiting for compensation.

The effects on the 8,000 people who were displaced and housed in relief camps in Alleppey alone are long-lasting, and complete recovery will be a long time coming for people and businesses afftected by this huge disaster.

The Muziris Biennale is happening!

In spite of my cynicism and doomy outlook, I am delighted that the Kochi Muziris Biennale is happening, and even more delighted because I shall have a chance to visit in February. I am especially interested in the collection of old maps, but the chance to look inside the Aspinwall's warehouse and see the artworks which are the result of so much energy against all the odds.
As expected, things have not gone 100% to plan. The money promised by the government has not arrived, possibly because of the change of party after the last election. Many of the artists are seriously out of pocket and have underwritten the show.

Given the title of "Whorled Expectations" the theme is based on a period of great expansion in trade and travel, the 14th to 19th centuries, when Kerala was undergoing a huge period of development in mathematics and philosophy. The curatorial note at
http://kochimuzirisbiennale.org/curatorial-note/

is a bit high-flown for me, but I love the usual obscure art speak. Is it art speak, or the Indian English obscurity which makes it hard for me to read anything originating in the higher reaches of Indian thought?

This time, the biennale has attracted some international names known even to me. Anish Kapoor is one, but there are others which ring bells. TAlking of bells, I am looking forward to seeing Gita Scaria's large silver bell onthe front at Kochi looks conceptually amazingly like the exhibit at Folkestone's last Triennale in 2011 by A. K. Dolven,
http://www.folkestonetriennial.org.uk/artist/a-k-dolven/

His bell still stands on the front at Folkestone like a very mournful piece of jetsam. The bell in Fort Kochi is larger, silver and altogether more jolly.

See some of the artists and their work here.
http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/ZHoR9TriwRPuhE9Mt4L7YN/KochiMuziris-Biennale-Seven-artists-you-must-see-at-Kochi.html

The last biennale was a success, attracting an estimated 400,000 people to the city. Optimism is high that this year's will do the same.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a6cb253c-797c-11e4-9567-00144feabdc0.html

Muziris and the Borabadur connection.

For me the romance of the "Periplus of the Erythraen Sea," the sailors' handbook which listed the trade commodities, routes and ports from the Mediterranean to India is contained in the mystery of its language. Names have changed, as have the trade goods on which earlier civilisations depended. The loss of names and growth and death of ports is one reason why it has been so hard to find Muziris and why its location is still contentious with some.

"Muziris, Nelcynda and Bacare;
(to which large ships come for pepper and malabathrum).
Exports:
Pepper, produced in Cottonara
Fine pearls in great quantity
Ivory
Silk cloth
Spikenard from the Ganges
Malabathrum from the interior
Transparent stones of all kinds
Diamonds
Sapphires
Tortoise-shell, from Chryse and from near-by islands"

The goods listed in the export list show that these three ports on the West of present day Kerala were not only sending out native products, but were trading in commodities imported from elsewhere. The pepper was produced in the area around the Pamba River, named Cottonara by Pliny the Elder, and the malabathrum grew in Himalayas and had a long journey South, probably via Cape Cormorin, along with the spikenard.
The silk, pearls and precious stones probably came from present-day Sri Lanka and China and the tortoise shell from as far away as the Phillipines, which was known to the Greeks.

I found a clue as to how these goods travelled such enormous distances routinely on a visit to Java a couple of years ago. A panel in a huge frieze round one of the levels of the temple at Borabadur looked as though it had been sculpted far more recently than the 9th Century.

One Borabadur Ship

Borabadur ship by Michael J. Lowe

Archaeologists reconstructed this ship and its voyage to Madagascar and Africa in 2003. Less well known than the Chinese Junks which traded all over the Indian Ocean, these boats were trading half way across the world in the 8th Century.
The web of trade was vast and worth huge amounts of money. Muziris must have been a very rich place indeed.

Finished at last!

After nearly three years of slog, I have finished the book and uploaded the Kindle version to Amazon. The paperback will follow as and when I can grapple with the technical complication, but I hope it will be soon.
The point was to write the book. The idea of people reading it feels strange, although I hope they do.
I suspect I won't feel that I have finished until I have a copy of the paperback in my hand!

Everyone asks, why and what is Muziris? Muziris is the semi-mythical port in South India which was used by the Greeks and Romans in the trade for pepper. Semi-mythical, in that although it was known and written about by contemporary poets and traders, the site of Muziris is not reliably known.

MB Muziris

The ancient trading Empires which had contact with Southern India are many, and each one has left relics of itself all over the country, but these are often elusive and difficult to untangle. They are undeniably romantic, as is the idea of India itself. The reality is sometimes different, as our experiences trying to do business there shows.