Object No. 11: Chinese Fishing Nets

The Chinese fishing nets along the front in Fort Kochi, and scattered throughout the backwaters, must be one of the most photographed objects in the world. They stand for the mystery and history of South India and in addition they are extremely photogenic. It is so easy to catch them with the setting sun behind them and during the day they make a dynamic setting for the working life of the town.
Searching for the definitive photo I am struck by just how many pictures we have of the nets, up, down, against the sky. I think my favourites are the ones of the nets as they exist in the community, on the edge of the backwaters.

The nets probably originated in China, links with the East being well established long before Fort Kochi was established following the earthquake in the 14th Century. The Chinese had come to India in the first Century CE in search of pepper and set up their main trading port in Quillon (Kollam). Supposed to have been brought to India in the 1400s by Chinese traders, the spidery Chinese nets are found only in Cochin and China. They have huge, counterweighted nets strung horizontally under fingers of rough timber. The nets are dipped in to the water and after a time, they are raised to see what they have scooped up. In the backwaters they fish at night, a lantern attached to the top of the gantry attracting the fish. The date of their introduction probably relates to the well-documented voyages of the Chinese Admiral Zheng He, who is thought to have taken his fleet of large ships as far as the coast of Africa.

The earliest contacts with the far East were probably along the silk routes, entering India to both the East and West of the Himalayas. This is the way that Buddhism would have made its journey across the continents. Maritime trade quickly followed, and it is likely that ships were following the coastal routes to the North-Eastern Ports by the 7th Century CE. Exactly when this trade reached Kerala is unknown.

Today the nets in Fort Kochi have been restored and are now working hard for the tourist trade. They rarely catch fish, but one can usually be fished out of a bucket for a photograph to add to the obligatory tip.

Object No. 10: the black Buddha of Kuttenad

Evidence of the long trek the first followers of the Buddha took from the North to the South of India and on to Sri Lanka is scarce. The Jain religion spread Southwards at about the same time, and although both of these religions were severely repressed by the Brahmins from about the 12th Century CE, there are complete Jain temples remaining, especially to the North in Wayanad. From about 600 CE there were likely to have been many of the Buddhist faith in Kerala, but these are represented now by a very few statues which have survived against all of the odds.

My favourite is the black statue which sits in a very unremarkable stupa in a field on a backwater between Alleppey and Kollam, deep into the Kuttenad region. It has lost some of its torso and one arm, its features are crumbled, but still serene and its legs are very small. (One of the effects of my computer crash has been the temporary loss of thousands of photos, and I can't find my pictures of this isolated, but moving, statue, so I have stolen a couple.)

https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/398850110720541273/

The statue probably dates from the 9th Century, and when we visited it sat forlornly in a very plain, concrete structure, open to the elements and half-buried in the field. It did have offerings and incense burning near it, and had been anointed with turmeric for good fortune by the local villagers. The locals believe that the statue lost its arm when it was trampled by an elephant. The stupa in the picture above was donated by the Dalai Lhama.
These relics of the old faith are unsung across the South. We stumbled across another in the Krishnapuram Palace, about 40 miles South of Alleppey. This palace houses an interesting museum and the larger 10th Century statue is housed in a peaceful garden. It is one of four dug out of wells and tanks in the area and they are still coming to light.
Another sits at Buddha Junction in a grubby shrine, still visited daily by a lone resident.

http://www.alappuzhaonline.com/buddhajunctionmavelikara.htm

Those with a keen eye will see other images which might, or might not, be the Buddha in shrines and temples in the area, integrated into the Hindu pantheon, lacking the necessary serenity but relics of the long, historical journeys of faith taken by the people of South India.

Kochi-Muziris Biennale and some news

I haven't posted here for a while. This has been partly because my laptop melted down on me, courtesy of Windows 8.1 eating my graphics card. I had backed up some things, but not for a while, and lost the first two chapters of my next book, which caused me to go into grief mode for a couple of weeks while I frantically tried to retrieve everything I could.

While I was doing this I reflected on how different it is today from a few years ago. Much of what we do is in the cloud, my email and contact lists were safe, my book was on Amazon (although I had got a back up of the next-to-final proof-read version) my blog content was online and many of my pictures existed elsewhere.

Part of me was excited by a fresh start, a computer which is clean of everything, including software! Alerts for various things kept coming in to remind me of the ones before and I was in constant receipt of invitations to events at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which obviously I could not go to, but liked to see.

So, how did the great art show go? This article says a lot about how it is seem in the aftermath.

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/features/kochimuziris-biennale-is-here-to-stay/article7054382.ece#

So half a million people visited? Really? I remain open-minded about this. It depends how you count. If it is ticket sales, then the figure is likely to be accurate. If it is the number of people attending the venues, then it is likely to be wildly out, as there were so many different places to go, all accessible by the same ticket, but able to be counted as separate attendances. Plans for the next biennale are already being made, and I hope it is as successful in artistic terms as this one. It was, unlike the first one, truly international, amazingly varied and brave.

As KPM Basheer wrote:

"At a time when individual freedoms are shrinking and moral policing is expanding across the country, the unlimited creative freedom enjoyed by the artists at the biennale was envied by many visitors. The wide variety of media – metal, stone, paper, video, light and shadows, lit electric bulbs, audio and the wild imagination excited even the casual visitor. " 
That tolerance and freedom are under review in India is indisputable. Prime Minister Modi's honeymoon period is nearly over, and there are worries about the place of women in society and increasing religious divides.
While we were in Fort Kochi we visited the Teapot cafe, one of the unchanging features of a fast-changing town. The Muslim waiter who had told us that he was going to vote for Modi at the election was less enthusiastic now. "We will have to see." he said. "We have not seen much change so far, but it is early days."

Washing at the Dhobi Khana

P.S. We visited the Dhobi Khana in Kochi and found it turned into a tourist destination! The people were hard at work bashing the washing in the usual way, but also allowing tourists to try out their charcoal-heated irons. Amazing!

A small woman with a massive iron

Another feature: Risky Tours

Item No. 9: Tea, part 2.

Taking the tea for weighing

Tea bushes were grown from seed at first, taken from tall parent plants. Now all the bushes come from cuttings and are grown in winding rows following the contours of the mountains, assuring the standard quality of the leaves. The plants, which would grow to over 30 feet if left alone, are pruned down to about a metre. Tall shade trees punctuate the manicured gardens, where women, with large
bags slung from their foreheads, pick the top two leaves and a bud. Four kilogrammes of leaves are required to make one kilogramme of black tea and an experienced plucker, carefully taking out the two leaves at the tip of the shoot, can pick thirty kilogrammes a day, a heavy load to cart around to the weighing stations. Tea bushes can live for a long time, but here they are renewed in patches across the gardens on a constant schedule. This can be anything from 25 to over 50 years.

Originally it was thought that green tea and black tea, both originating in China, came from two different bushes. After a period of skulduggery, when spies and collectors managed to travel within the closed areas of China, it was realised that tea, like the varieties of pepper, was one plant only.

This picture shows the camelia-family flower, the leaf and fruit on the right, and then the stages in processing. The wet, green leaves are crushed, and then for green tea they are simply dried. Black tea involves a fermentation process during which the unwanted stems are taken away as a sort of fluff, used as fertiliser, and the tea is dried and crushed to the required grade. Fermentation can take as little as 40 minutes and tea delivered to a factory in the afternoon is processed and packed by the following afternoon.

In spite of the fact that nearly all tea made in Kerala is black, and even that is mostly local dust, the Tata tea Museum in Munnar extols the benefits of drinking green tea:

“Enjoy your perfect cup of green tea:
Fill a non-reactive pot or pan with water and heat, when the air bubble come (80 to 85OC)Switch off the power or gas put the green tea 2 to 3 grams for 1.litre close the lid for 3minutes filter it and use 2 to 3 grams for 1.litre for one day is enough to kill the bacteria’s which is generating daily in our body frequently. Use small quantity at a time 2 to 3 ounce because you want to kill that much bacteria’s at a time.”
Tata Tea Museum, Munnar

Item No. 9: Tea, part 1.

Some of the most popular places for tourists, especially as the weather begins to warm, are the hill stations and tea plantations of the Western Ghats. It is easy to see why they are called "tea gardens". The finely sculpted bushes make patterns across the steep slopes of the hills, interspersed with shade trees. The chatter of the women picking the tea carries cheerfully across the valleys, and occasionally you can hear the clack-clack of the scissors which cut the poorer quality teas and drop the leaves into a small bag underneath the blades.
Tea had been introduced to India under the direction of the East India Company in about 1850 to break the stranglehold China had on the valuable commodity, which was gaining in popularity at home. Green and black tea were thought to be different plants, but undercover work by agents of the Company in China established that, although there were varieties of the tea plant, the processing
determined the final product. Successful plantations were established in Assam, and before long, tea was being planted in other suitable locations in India. Many independent estates were converted to tea and still today, as you drive round the mountainsides you come across small, family owned
plantations, many still bearing the names of their original, usually Scottish, owners. The monsoons often caused hardship in the plantations, landslides and flooding wiping out areas of tea wholesale, but on the whole they flourished, nourished by the growing demand for strong, Indian tea in
England.
Every visitor to Munnar must visit the Tata Tea Factory, now a working museum. The tea factory still processes freshly-picked leaves using chunky and old-fashioned looking machines, recently painted a cheerful orange. The leaves are tipped into large hoppers where they are dried and fermented and then graded. The better the quality, the larger the leaf, although most local Indians were adamant that the best tea was to be got from dust and that is what Tata makes now at Munnar. In the tea-tasters’ laboratory the equipment looks archaic, but it was still in use here until the recent hand-over to the new workers' co-operative. In 1964 the Tata group, owners of the Tetley brand, began its takeover of plantations in the area. They entered into an agreement with the large Finlay Company, Tata Tea being formed as a separate entity in 1983. In 2005, faced with a drop in auction prices of over thirty percent, increasing difficulties with labour, and a market concentration on branded products, Tata created the Kenan Devan Hills Produce Company Pvt. A confused and confusing hybrid, the company works as a co-operative. Workers received shares in the company. Since then there have been ups and downs, the plantations having problems recruiting workers. All the pickers are women and most come from Tamil Nadu. Tea picking is skilled and back-breaking work and is mostly done by families who have been here since they were brought in from Tamil Nadu over a hundred years ago. The workers' villages dot the landscape all over this area, their occupants producing tea mostly for the home market.

Picking tea near Munnar

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.

Off to Kerala again!

We are in the usual chaos of packing to go to India next week. I keep thinking that I have done this so many times that it should only take me an hour or so. I remember writing about my packing in my book, and nothing has changed much.

I looked to John Murray, a nineteenth century expert:"Murray’s advice on packing initially reflected my own need to put everything into my suitcase “just in case,” but my luggage was not a patch on the Murray inventory. He helpfully divides the lists into two, one for men and one for women. I doubt whether any woman’s wardrobe today contains the vast numbers of garments essential for a visit
to India: huge amounts of underclothes including mosquito trousers for sleeping, flannel petticoats, four dressing gowns and a morning robe, forty-six handkerchiefs and quantities of thick lisle  stockings. For the long sea voyage the 3 cwt, or over one hundred and fifty kilograms of baggage
allowance did not include the furniture required in the cabin, but did include three sofa covers and mattresses and a bag with a hammer and nails. This was more like it. I thought that a hammer and nails would be useful for getting the mosquito net to stick to hotel fittings, but Murray added them as an essential for nailing your cabin furniture to the floor in case of rough seas."
A recent visit to SS Great Britain in Bristol made me rethink the hardiness of these early travellers. The cabins were cramped and claustrophobic, even in first class and I couldn't imagine where they put the furniture.
"Current baggage allowances did not faze me, but there were things which I would not throw out of my case. The medical kit, at first crammed with disinfectant, water purifying tablets, of which I used precisely none, antibiotics, medication for various kinds of internal disorder, antihistamines and so on gradually shrunk to a manageable size. It still held enough stomach upset medication in it to Mr Modi. a large ox, even though we never have had a tummy bug in all our visits, lots of anti-insect products, high factor sun screen and pain killers. James kept telling me you could get anything in India where there was little restriction on the sale of pharmaceuticals, but I had seen an Indian pharmacy where everything sat jumbled together in the heat. The mosquito net remained a packing essential. I would have relinquished my pants quicker than those reassuring white billows. If the air-conditioning worked, the mosquitoes went away, but electricity was a fickle commodity and mosquitoes weren’t the only things which menaced me in the night. Geckos and detritus from their wriggling meals and on one occasion, a tree frog, fell on us. Mice raced around the rafters in the more eco-friendly places and there were tell-tale bits of ecological stuff on the bedspreads. An empty bag went into the large suitcase to take account of purchases and to hold the dirty washing, festering in the heat, kept apart from the things I have managed to get to the dhobi."

I would now add a couple of clean pillow cases and a wind-up torch.
As well as looking forward to seeing how the biennale is progressing, I am interested to see what the people are making of their new Prime Minister, Mr Modi. On our last visit I was fascinated that everyone, Muslim, Christian or of no faith had decided that Narendra Modi was the one to turn the economy round, as he had done in Gujerat. A year in, some of my less optimistic prophesies are beginning to come about, as he divides the country via the language, proposing to make Hindi the official language of government and turning a blind eye to some of the excesses of his ultra-conservative party members. His apparent move towards Pakistan and developing relationship with the USA look good in terms of global capital, his desire to get rid of organisations like Greenpeace which upset the status quo, less so.

Object No. 8: The palm tree

Many years ago, before I had caught the travel bug, I made a bucket list of all the things I wanted to see in the world. I did not go in for activities or places, but rather humble things  that I wanted to experience. Along with the coral reef, (Tick!) a rain forest, (Tick!) and a growing pineapple (Tick) was a coconut growing on a tree.
Now it seems crazy that I should have picked out something so available as special, but then I had only seen coconuts in pictures of tropical beaches and wild lagoons. The coconut is special when thinking about Kerala. It is a resource that has sustained the country for millennia and is still locally important, although the market value of coconut products varies wildly and is generally low.
The food of the South relies heavily on coconut oil. The many fried snacks are prepared using coconut oil, which takes the place of the Northern clarified butter in traditional dishes. The palm tree has an important part to play in the reclamation of the backwater paddy fields. Palm trees are planted, along with bananas, along the clay bunds, helping to take the water out of the soil and to stabilise the boundaries. AS well as providing a crop, the precious land is enough to tether a cow or two.

There are two products which are all-important. The coir, which forms the basis of the coconut matting trade, experiencing a great resurgence with the demand for sustainable products, and which has always been in demand for rope, and toddy, the fermented palm wine which is drunk all over the South and wherever palm trees are found. The tourist on a houseboat ride is sometimes taken into a dank and noisome den to sample the toddy.

In "dry" Kerala, toddy drinking is sometimes seen as an embarrassing workman's habit, and there is no doubt that is adds to the total of alcohol-related problems. It persists, though, and provides employment for nearly a thousand in the skilled work of tapping the trees, and several thousand in the toddy shops. It is a treat to watch the tappers shin up the trees, a breath-holding circus act, as they are without any kind of safety rope and some of the trees are very tall. The sap of a cut bud is collected as it weeps into the jar during the day. By nightfall the sap has fermented in the heat and toddy is made, all by itself. Toddy collected from palms other than the coconut takes longer to mature.

Recent moves to make Kerala a dry state and to close the grudgingly licensed liquor shops led to plans to expand the toddy industry and to clean up the bars and shops which sold it.

http://zeenews.india.com/news/kerala/kerala-eyes-toddy-to-fill-liquors-gap_1470233.html

Since announcing the ban on alcohol, which would have mant that only 20 five-star hotels would have been able to sell it, and none on Sundays, the government has faced challenges in the High Court which means that the state will stay damp, but not quite dry.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-30544717

Seeing my coconuts on the trees has led me to an appreciation of the essential nature of the trees and their part in the life of South India

Object Number 7: Houseboat Food

I am not sure that any aspect of the huge range of the food in Kerala can be contained under the heading of a single object, but if there is one thing that resounds and reminds when you are back home, it is the memory of the food.
Often, the most memorable meals are the ones taken on the houseboat. The houseboat cooks are not trained chefs, but often village men who have learned their craft from the best cooks of all, their mothers and wives.

A selection of vegetable dishes, often a chicken curry and, if you are lucky, a kareemi fish cooked wrapped in its own banana leaf appear, accompanied by the huge, red-streaked grains of Kerala rice. Anything and everything can appear on your banana leaf plate, beetroot, cabbage, bitter gourds, yard-long beans, tiny, puffy papadums and a red-hot sambal, and it all keeps coming. A plate of raw cucumber, onion, tomato and carrots will probably be safe to eat, and when you are so stuffed that it is a good job that your only task will be to sit and watch the backwaters go by, the leaves are thrown overboard to add to the pollution and to feed the fish and the crew go astern to finish up what's left over.
A plate of carved pineapple and bananas appear next to finish you off completely.
The lucky passenger will have a dedicated cook who pulls out all the stops at breakfast too. A traditional breakfast of curries and sambal will be available, but if you are like me and can't face hot and spicy breakfasts, you might get appam, a tapioca pancake, puffy, fermented iddlies along with floppy toast and an omelette,
Although the food is moderated for pathetic Western palates it will still be fiery with pepper and aromatic with all the spices which have been grown here for millennia. Each spice is worthy of an object in its own right, as are the dhosas and parathas and variations of coconut products, the lethally fried snacks and street food. I still have plenty of objects to go!