From the Arabs and Chinese to the Portuguese and Dutch: The many stories that make Fort Kochi

Excerpt

The Portuguese named it ‘Little Lisbon’, the Dutch changed it to ‘Homely Holland’, and the British called it ‘Mini England.’ But for legions of chroniclers, the place transcends such transient comparisons. They were simply charmed by its overpowering quaintness, the freshness of its greenery and the gentleness of its people. ‘Pack all of this and a million mosquitoes into one square mile,’ wrote pithily the well-known cartoonist E. P. Unny, ‘and you have Fort Kochi, for sure.’ Despite man-made destruction over the years, much of its old-world charm still remains. That explains why it still attracts itchy feet from all over the globe. It is the leitmotif of ‘God’s own country’.

For all its latter-day glitz and glory, Fort Cochin had a humble past. It was a tiny, nondescript fishing village with little perceived potential for being a tourist hotspot in later years. Records show that it was very much an integral part of the Perumpadappu Swarupam (the Cochin State), till about the arrival of the Portuguese in 1500 CE. On record, the Portuguese were not the first to arrive. The Arabs and the Chinese had made their tryst with it much earlier.

Of them, who came first is still debated. Some historians say that the Arabs were the first to arrive to trade in spices. They often made a detour from Muziris, where they landed first and made their base, to Cochin for cheaper but qualitatively better spices. When Muziris was destroyed by tsunami, they shifted to Cochin for good.

There are others who bet on the Chinese. A host of stories revolve round both the theories. None of them has any substantive proof but remains part of local folklore. There is, for example, the story of the Buddha Vihar located at the mouth of the sea. According to it, the then Maharaja of Cochin allowed the Chinese, being Buddhists, to build a vihar for their religious needs. When the Chinese exited, it was reportedly converted into a temple. The Portuguese, who later took over the place, demolished it, dumped the Buddha idol in the nearby sea and constructed a church (the Santa Cruz Church) on the same site. When the British took over, they dynamited the church as part of cleansing the place of all remnants of the earlier dispensation and used the debris for civil construction works. Yet another proof of early Chinese presence is the fishing nets named after them in and around Fort Cochin.

‘In his book, History of Fort Cochin, historian K.L. Bernard says that the statue of Buddha was fished out by dredger Lord Willingdon and was kept in the office of the harbour executive engineer, Mr Milne, who later took it home in England.’

Not many buy the story of the Chinese having brought the contraption. Their point is that the Chinese parentage would pass muster if they had also put them up in Quilon, where they first landed and traded and stayed for long. Moreover, almost all parts of the contraption bear Portuguese names which suggest the actual parentage.

Evidence of early Arab presence in Fort Cochin seems more religious than temporal. The Thakyavu mosque and the Mukhadham Darga, the Chembitta Palli in nearby Mattancherry and the Calvatty Juma Masjid in Fort Cochin are often mentioned to establish early Arab arrivals and their co-operative co-existence with the local communities and their socio-commercial connections. The Thakyavu mosque, for example, is reportedly constructed by traders from Yemen whose descendants later settled down in and around it. The word ‘Thakyavu’ in Persian means a place of religious congregation. Evidently, they came to the area after the fall of Muziris. They are also believed to have brought labour from the African continent thereby setting the stage for a thriving slave trade in later years.

The absence of historical evidence about the place and people in the pre-Portuguese days is, however, more than made good by legends and gossipy tales. Though much of them may not stand the test of historical scrutiny, latter-day researchers and chroniclers have, nonetheless, drawn from them while trying to recapture life and lifestyle of the people of the period. Possibly, only a thorough archaeological survey using modern tools and methods of investigation might throw up indisputable evidence that will possibly prove or disprove what presently passes off as hearsay.

Recorded history thus starts with the Portuguese. They were the first to stay put here for long. Evidently, they played their cards quite well. First they sought permission of the Cochin Maharaja to put up a factory which was readily granted. They then sought and got permission to construct a fort to help them fortify themselves and their power. First of its kind in the country, the fort was christened ‘Emmanuel’ after the then King of Portugal on 1 October 1503. The town also took its name, Fort Cochin, from it. It was the first European settlement in the subcontinent. In return for all this, the Portuguese promised military help to the Cochin Maharaja in his wars with his bête noire, the Zamorin.

Thus began the story of subjugation, first by the Portuguese and later the Dutch and finally, the British. Their ostensible purpose was trade but they soon got mixed up in local politics which in the event gave them overarching power and authority. They controlled the destiny of this tiny piece of land at the mouth of the Cochin harbour for nearly four and a half centuries. For sheer longevity, it still remains a record unrivalled by any other place in the rest of the country, save Goa. Presumably, it is this long presence of three European powers that gave the place and the people what British chronicler Charles Allen Lawson called an ‘unoriental look’ unseen anywhere in the sub-continent.

There was, however, a certain pattern in the way the Portuguese won over the then Cochin Maharaja, Unni Rama Koil I, and made him concede whatever they asked for in return for military help against the Zamorin. In fairness, the treaty, per se, did not betray use of excessive coercion on the part of the Portuguese representative, Pedro Alverez Cabral. What won the day for him was his sheer power of persuasion cunningly clothed in diplomacy.

The true colour of the Portuguese, however, came into full play by the time the second agreement was signed by the then Maharaja with Vasco Da Gama on his second business mission. Apparently, there was no need for persuasion, he virtually dictated the terms to the Maharaja and wrested exclusive rights to build factories and garrisons at places of his choice, besides monopoly trading rights in spices. A helpless Maharaja had to be content with few valuable presents, primarily a gold crown.

As an aside, Cabral had left for his native land in January 1501 with shiploads of merchandise, primarily spices, and three locals to boot, Edikkela Menon and Parangad Menon, both nairs, and a faithful Syrian Christian, Joseph. They were sent by the Maharaja as a sort of hostage, but on the promise that they would be let off before the fleet sailed for Portugal. But a feared attack by the Zamorin’s fleet and a possible storm forced Cabral to leave in a hurry with the local hostages on board. Though the return of the hostages had been promised, it did not happen. For the native hostages, however, it was destiny at work to their advantage. On reaching Portugal they found the land and the people to their liking and decided to stay put. The two nairs also took to Christianity and lived happily thereafter. According to historian Padmanabha Menon, they were the first set of nairs/Malayalees to have seen Europe and settled down there and, hence, the first non-resident Indians.

Those who followed Cabral to Malabar had a threepoint agenda—colonisation, trading and proselytising—all of which were more than fulfilled with brutal efficiency. Which explains, quite rightly, the popular perception that the Portuguese came to India with a Cross in one hand and a sword in the other. They certainly pursued it with incredible ferocity.

In fairness, the Portuguese did some good to Fort Cochin and its people. They turned what was a fishing village into a township with public conveniences similar to those in their country. The fort was the epicentre of the township, literally and figuratively. In fact, it was the symbol of Portuguese presence as of their authority. Lest the message should get lost, it was built very close to the Maharaja’s palace and named after their king, Emmanuel, to let everyone know as to who called the shots.

The self-contained township itself had been well planned on lines similar to those back home. New streets with Portuguese names were laid out with a string of bungalows arrayed on both sides where their high officials and, possibly, their Indian partners lived. And true to their commitment to their faith, they built two big churches—St. Francis Assisi Church (1503) and Santa Cruz Basilica (1558)—and several smaller churches of other denominations like Franciscans, Jesuits and Augustinians.

When Vasco da Gama and his entourage landed in Kappad in Calicut, they mistook the locals to be some sort of ‘primitive’ Christians. Vasco da Gama even mistook a Hindu temple of Kali to be a Christian church and worshiped there with customary reverence. Even Cabral, who followed Vasco da Gama, initially took the locals to be of his faith but who, nonetheless, needed to be taught in the Roman ways of worship.

While much of what the Portuguese had built was destroyed by the Dutch, two of their creations remained untouched to the everlasting benefit of the locals: one, a post office, the first ever, and, two, a hospital, also first ever, set up in 1503, the former to ensure communication with their masters and relations in Portugal and the latter to take care of their lives in an alien country of unknown elements.

They also served the locals and hence preserved and later improved to be in sync with the changing times. A far more compelling contribution had been in the realm of education. Apart from schools and a college for Jesuit priests, the Portuguese had set up a library, St. Paul’s Library, which, in the words of the French historian Tavernier, was Asia’s largest and the best. It had books and manuscripts from all over the world and in languages as disparate as Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, Indian and Chinese. It was housed in a three-storeyed building south-west of the present Bishop’s Palace and sighted first from the sea by an approaching ship to Cochin.

In any civilised dispensation, such a monumental institution would have been not only preserved regardless of its parentage but also been hugely enriched for posterity. But, what could only be described as barbaric, the Dutch set it on fire that ravaged reportedly for five days leaving no trace of its existence. For sheer savagery, it rivals the notorious burning down of the great library in Alexandria in Egypt by the Roman Emperor Octavius Augustus Caesar in 62 BCE after he defeated Queen Cleopatra in the battle of Actium.

For all their military superiority, the Portuguese were cautious enough to plan escape routes through underground tunnels in the event of emergencies. All the tunnels ended up on the beach from where they could use small canoes to get away from the enemy. One such was used by the British Resident, Col. Macaulay, to escape when his residence was surrounded by the combined army of Travancore and Cochin in 1808. One underground passage that survived till recently linked the Bishop’s House to the beach and remained a tourist attraction.

There are two views as to why the Portuguese, essentially self-seeking colonialists, turned benefactors. One, of course, is that they were only living up to the white man’s burden of civilising the eastern world by bringing in the benefits of western civilization. A more charitable theory is that it was born out of a certain egalitarian desire to construct future metropolises in their colonies with the twin objective of making the locals happy and, in return, earning their loyalty. The same worked for setting up schools, hospitals and infrastructure like roads, is seen as good enough proof.

The Dutch, for their part, did not betray any such idealism, their riveting focus being just on business. Even their frequent interventions in the local power-play had been more to safeguard and promote their commercial and trade interests than to build a self-perpetuating empire. Whether that finally proved to be their undoing has, however, been a subject of endless debate. Being essentially a corporate entity, the Dutch East India Company could not have political ambitions.