Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 4

The footpath between Park Avenue and Subhash Bose Park

The Park Avenue in Ernakulam is flanked by gigantic rain trees with their branches arching over the road like a cathedral of green. They were not so domineering four decades ago when I used to walk beneath their growing canopies. The Park Avenue with its charming, enormous trees has a history too.

King Rama Varma of Kochi ordered trees to be planted on either side of the road and make it look like a European avenue. He also developed a park beside it. The park was named after him, though today it is divided into two parts, with one part named after Subhash Chandra Bose and the other after Indira Gandhi. We can never say how long Indira Gandhi’s name will remain there. Even Sardar Patel, whom the right wing apparently admires, was ousted from the world’s biggest cricket stadium which was renamed Narendra Modi Stadium by Narendra Modi.  

Renaming places and roads and institutions is one of the favourite pastimes of the present dispensation in Delhi. Rewriting history is a concomitant one. I titled this series Re-exploring the Past intentionally. It is not rewriting of the past that any wise leader will do; it is re-exploring. Since the name Park Avenue was given to the road by the British Resident of Kochi, that may be changed too if Modi’s party comes to power in Kerala.

Maharaja Rajarishi Rama Varma didn’t plant those trees in order to prove any cultural superiority. He imagined an elegant road in the heart of the city. He envisioned shade, beauty, and generosity. The trees grew and the city allowed them to grow – season after season, ruler after ruler, generation after generation. They stand today not as monuments to a glorious past, but as evidence that the most enduring legacies are created for those who come after us, not for those who went before.

India’s current obsession with rushing back into a curated past in order to enhance the nation’s image felt strangely out of tune with what I witnessed In Kochi. I walked from one end of the Park Avenue to the other and onward to Kochi’s water metro station from where an airconditioned boat carried me gently over the rippling waters of the Vembanad Lake to Fort Kochi which had a past that was never perfect, never pure, never singular. It was a past as mixed and unpredictable as the winds that brought ships from Arabia, China, and Europe.

The rain trees on the road beautified by an Indian King and christened by a British Resident became a metaphor for me. Those vast canopies are made possible only because they kept reaching outward. Not inward, digging up the tombs of the past, but stretching out and welcoming myriad birds, providing shade to strangers, sheltering conversations, and weaving sunlight into lace. They accepted the rains, winds, salt, and dust – and still grew.

Fort Kochi did the same. Traders and preachers, ideas and faiths, ambitions and anxieties, all met on that shore of the Arabian Ocean. Kochi’s greatness never lay in guarding a past but in welcoming a world. Its history is a mosaic, not a manuscript. Its spirit is a breeze, not a boundary.

I had to cut short my visit because it was getting late and I had travelled entirely by public transport which would take a lot of time to carry me back home where Maggie would be waiting after her return from school. Once again I was on an airconditioned boat of Kochi’s water metro service. 

Pontoon

As I waited off the pontoon for my boat to arrive, I struck up a light conversation with the little schoolboy who sat by my side. He was on a tour from school along with his friends and teachers. They came from a government school in the Western Ghats of Kerala and were now on the way back. The boy said he was amazed by the size of the waterbody as well as the boats and ships that floated on it. The world he had witnessed that day was a wonder for him. Will India offer him more wonders as he grows up? Will India stop looking inward searching for lost glories, and start reaching out to a world whose wonders can be more accessible to this little boy whose heart had acquired some dreams from Fort Kochi? 

Concluded

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3