In Kerala, a postcard village that juggles stories, nostalgia and reels

Last summer vacation, Chellan chettan sold around a thousand cups of tea a day. (Express photo/Sandip G)

The 70-year-old’s tea shop, with its palm-leaf thatched roofs and red mud floors and walls baked hard, has soared into popularity after the sleepy town become a tourists’ haunt, made popular by vloggers as well as the success of a Malayalam coming-of-age romantic movie (Hridayam) released in 2022.

There are other shacks — like Aiyappetan’s kada (shop) that tourists come searching for. Chellan chettan though has neither watched the movie nor seen the vlogs. “I don’t have a smartphone, and I don’t see movies,” he says, though he has served chai to multitudes of movie-stars who frequent the town, a popular movie-shooting locale from the 80s but but now mostly draws hordes of youngsters making reels for Instagram and other social media platforms.

Tourists flock to Kollengode in Palakkad to be marveled by the quaint countryside and the slender palmyra trees that pierce the crisp-blue skies. (Express photo/Sandip G)

Last summer vacation, Chellan chettan says he sold around a thousand cups of tea a day. He hopes business will pick up by the end of the Onam holidays, when people usually devote their time between textile shops and homes.

Some of the tourists had offered to renovate Chellan chettan’s shop, only for him to refuse it. “That would destroy the charm. Besides, the concrete roof would make the room hot in summer,” he says.

It’s the precise reason tourists flock to the village on the edge Palakkad, 10 kilometres from the Tamil Nadu border — to be marveled by the quaint countryside, lush columns of paddy fields stretching endlessly, the slender palmyra trees that pierce the crisp-blue skies, the slumberous Nelliyampathy Hills that’s covered in a blanket of green and dotted with waterfalls that, from a distance, gleams like a silver necklace.

Some of the tourists had offered to renovate Chellan chettan’s shop, but he refused. “That will destroy the charm,” he says. (Express photo/Sandip G)

There are only a couple of lodges since most tourists spend not more than a day here, soaking in the town’s natural beauty and travelling back in time. “We come here for nostalgia, to live through the sights and sounds that marked our lives in the 90s,” says Aravind Parameshwaran, an engineer in Kochi’s InfoPark who has driven from his home in Thiruvananthapuram with his three friends.

 

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The largest building here is the Kalari Kovilakom, an ayurveda hospital that was once the palace of the local rulers, the Venganad Nambidis. A small but rich and powerful dynasty, the family boasted a fleet of Rolls Royce and a herd of tuskers. All of these were the default setting of most Malayalam movies shot in the 90s and 2000s that premised on villages.

In Kollengode, lush columns of paddy fields stretch endlessly with the slumberous Nelliyampathy Hills in the distance (Express photo/Sandip G)

Ironically, it took a relocation of new-age movies to urban landscapes for Kollengode to woo fame and tourists.

Ayyappan Nair, who runs a lottery stall, one of the hundreds in the town square that hardly spans a few hundred metres, says: “Villages have disappeared from Kerala, that’s perhaps why tourists flock here, to see a village they have only seen in old movies.” He points out another reason why it’s a village set in the 90s: “It could be the only place in Kerala where you would not find a Bengali (migrant labourers)!”

It has not yet transformed into a full-blown tourist spot so as to change the lives of people. Most of the locals are farmers, most of them have either paddy fields or mango groves. Like most border towns, culture and language blend seamlessly. The dialect of Malayalam is heavily Tamil-influenced and the Tamil spoken here is thickly Malayalam-coated. So is the cuisine — flat and not fluffy idli, typical to some parts of Palakkad, but served with spicy kaara chutney like in Tamil Nadu. Most temples have Tamil lineage and names, but the architecture is predominantly Kerala-style.

Tourists come looking for Chellan chettan’s tea shop and Aiyappetan’s kada (shop) — made famous by Insta reel makers (Express photo/Sandip G)

There are a few nature temples too, the most thronged being the Chingachira Karuppuswamy Temple. The swarming banyan trees that canopy the locality reveal the temple’s age, estimated to be around 300 years. Every year, during the Karkidaka Vavu (when rites are performed for ancestors), thousands flock from different parts of Palakkad as well as beyond the borders to perform rites and rituals like sacrificing goats and hens. “The only time we used to see a crowd here was during the Vavu. Now, almost every other weekend we get to see such a crowd,” says lottery stall owner Nair.

 

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So religious is the town that there is at least one temple at every bend. At the heart of the town is the Ayyapankavu with its sprawling pond. Stone-carved idols under banyan trees are almost everywhere. The most famous is a Ganapathy idol near the Railway Station, installed by Kurukkuswamy, a local housekeeper who used to cook for the late Malayalam poet P Kunhiraman Nair, who spent nearly two decades as a teacher at the Raja’s school.

A poet of nature and love, it was natural that Kunhiraman Nair fell in love with the hypnotic greenery of Kollengode. The school he taught and the house he lived in still remain, but the poet exists only in the mind of old-timers, that too not as a poet but as a colourful personality. Chellan chettan remembers: “I have not read his poetry, but he used to drink chai from my shop whenever he went to Seetharkund (the waterfalls, another tourist haunt). He often came with his friends and used to chat merrily. He had a strong personality that you would not forget him.”

The Chingachira Karuppuswamy Temple, with banyan trees that serve as a canopy, is estimated to be around 300 years old. (Express photo/Sandip G)

The story, among the locals, goes that Kunhiraman Nair used to take Kurukkuswamy up the hills and stay in a hut to write poetry. One of his finest works, Thamarathoni, was written largely from the nearby Anamala. Just before his death, he is said to have handed out a couple of Rs 100 notes and advised Kurukkuswamy to leave the town and secure a life elsewhere. He did, but after straddling different jobs and tasting the different flavours of life, he returned to his hometown and installed the idol of Ganapathi under a banyan tree. Around 80, he keeps disappearing and reappearing in the town like an urban myth.

Just 16 kilometres from Kollengode is Thasrak, the fabled village of Khasak in O V Vijayan’s Khasakkinte Ithihasam, widely considered the finest novel written in Malayalam. The old house where Vijayan had stayed with his sister has been converted into a memorial. “There should be one for ‘P’ (as P Kunhiraman Nair is popularly known) in Kollengode too,” says Ayyappan Nair. Like the mythical village of Koomankavu in Vijayan’s Khasak, Kollengode inhabits a semi-magical, semi-real space.

Some of the locals fear the sudden influx of fame for Kollengode, sprinkled with palm-leaf thatched huts and bucolic eateries, might disturb their quiet life. (Express photo/Sandip G)

But the town is tracing a different trajectory, that of an old-world village with rustic charm, sprinkled with palm-leaf thatched huts and bucolic eateries, one of simple and contented people, unstained by the sudden influx of fame. There are those that fear the gradual disturbance of their quiet life.

Palaniswamy is angered by the littering the crowd leaves behind. “Our cows have begun to eat plastic bottles and discarded chips’ packets because people just hurl those into our fields. Last month a shard of a broken whiskey bottle pierced my youngest son’s leg. We like people to enjoy our land and hills, but not at the expense of our peace,” he says.

In a sense, the town is trapped in the past, and functions as a time shelter for those that want to travel back into the past, or often as the backdrop of a reel that hits one million views in the snap of a second.