Object No. 6: Pallippuram Fort

Tucked away in a sandy enclosure about twenty miles North of Ernakulam is a relic of the first European incursion into Kerala.
I have chosen it as one of my objects because to me it represents how much of the history of the country is hidden from view.

Vasco Da Gama arrived on the beach near Calicut in 1498. The arrival of the Portuguese is celebrated now with a memorial, a plain pillar of black stone with a plaque in English tucked away behind a crumbling concrete paling on a littered and scruffy stretch of beach. The changes the invaders brought were enormous, the Vyanagar and Travancore kingdoms would never be the same again; religion, the balance of power and trading wealth shifting with their arrival.

The Portuguese built forts to protect their assets and the fort at Pallippuram is thought to be the oldest European building in India. Built by the Portuguese in 1503, it was surrendered to the Dutch in 1663 and bought by the Travancore Raja in 1789. The river frontage would have been ideal for preventing rival countries’ boats from landing anywhere nearby. The Travancore Government conserved the fort in 1909, presumably by coating the lot in mortar, but it is difficult to see where there may be any original materials showing through the coat. There is a well inside the keep, a tiny door which could well lead to a dungeon, and that is all. The thick walls, with their embrasures in each of the hexagonal sides could have withstood an attack, from the inlet at the north end of Vypeen Island.. The husk of the fort stands like a broken molar, quiet and neglected, preserved by uncelebrated.

Here is an important building in national terms, not only for the history of Kerala, but competing demands and lack of money leave it marooned on a hard-to-find site in a little known village. As, in the West, we know little of the history of South India, which does not have its majestic Moghul courts or important centres of the Raj, the history of Kerala is becoming forgotten by its descendants. Political imperatives take over initiatives to promote some aspects of the past, Nationalists not wanting to remember the colonial pasts, Hindu Nationalists being uncomfortable with the Arab cultures introduced by centuries of traders. Pallippuram still sits there and seems to wait for its day of recognition.

I left after our visit feeling that there it stood and we had seen it, and I suspected that we were in a small minority of recent Europeans to view the “oldest extant European monument in India.”