Alappuzha

The backwater villages around Alappuzha are old — Kuttanad has grown rice for centuries and Champakulam's church and the Ambalappuzha temple predate the town — but Alappuzha itself was planned. The port opened in 1762 under Raja Kesavadas, the Travancore minister who later became the state's first dewan, on the sandy strip between the sea and the lagoon, with canals cut inland so that goods could move from the backwaters to ocean-going ships. The grid of waterways and the warehouse fronts along them date from that scheme, and the town became Travancore's main commercial harbour.

Coir made it rich. Coconut husk fibre, retted in the backwaters and spun in the villages, was woven into matting and rope, and from 1859, when the first coir mat factory opened, European firms ran factories and export houses along the canals. A pier ran out into the shallow sea, with the lighthouse beside it from 1862, because there was no natural harbour; ships anchored offshore and cargo was lightered out to them. The trade brought in Gujarati and other merchant communities and gave the town its warehouses, offices and bungalows.

Labour organisation followed the factories, and Alappuzha became a centre of the trade union movement in Travancore. The Punnapra-Vayalar uprising of 1946, in which workers confronted the state forces with heavy loss of life, is commemorated across the district and was formative for Kerala's communist politics. The opening of the modern port at Kochi drew shipping away and the pier fell out of use. Coir remains an industry, though a smaller one, and from the 1990s the conversion of rice barges into houseboats turned the backwaters into the town's main source of income.

Water shapes the culture. The snake boats, or chundan vallam, are village-owned craft of 100 to 138 feet, rowed by sixty-four paddlers and on occasion twice that number, and the races through the monsoon months are a matter of intense local loyalty, with training, boat songs called vanchipattu and long-running rivalries between villages. The Nehru Trophy race on Punnamada Lake in August is the largest, but Champakulam's race is older and closer to the temple calendar that spawned them.

Alappuzha is a plural town. Temple festivals with caparisoned elephants and percussion ensembles, Syrian Christian churches whose congregations trace their faith back many centuries, and mosques in the northern quarters all keep their own calendars, and Onam in late summer is shared by everyone. Kerala's political culture is strongly felt here: flags, wall writing and union offices are part of the street scene, and the district's history of labour militancy is openly commemorated.

The everyday manners are Kerala's — unhurried, reserved and literate, with newspapers and tea shops as institutions. Craft traditions centre on coir: spinning, weaving mats and rope, and more recently design products made from the same fibre. Visitors are a normal part of life in the houseboat season, and homestays run by families are as common as hotels, which gives most stays a domestic rather than resort character.

About 240,000 people live in the town and its outgrowths, with many more in the villages and panchayats that spread along the canals, and the wider district is among Kerala's most densely settled. Work divides between tourism, coir and cashew processing, fishing in the lagoons and the sea, rice farming in Kuttanad, and the remittances sent home by family members working in the Gulf, on which many households across Kerala depend.

Days begin early, with fishing canoes out before dawn, ferries running to school and market, and coir yarn hung along village paths. Rice farming in Kuttanad follows an unusual cycle, since the fields lie below sea level behind bunds and must be drained before sowing, and the region is one of very few places in the world where this is done. Houseboat crews load at the jetties in the morning and moor for the night in the villages, which has given several hamlets a second economy of small shops and kitchens.

The pressures are environmental. Vembanad has silted and shrunk, water hyacinth chokes the canals, and the number of houseboats has raised long-standing questions about sewage and diesel in the lagoon. Floods hit Kuttanad hard in 2018 and again in the years that followed, and saltwater intrusion is controlled by a barrier across the lake. Coir employment has declined from its peak, and younger people leave for Kochi or abroad.

Alappuzha eats from the water. Karimeen, the pearl-spot fish of the backwaters, is the local speciality, most often cooked as karimeen pollichathu, coated in chilli and spice paste, wrapped in a banana leaf and grilled. Prawns, clams from the lake bed and sea fish appear in coconut-milk curries or in the sour red fish curry made with kudampuli, the smoked rind of Malabar tamarind, which is the everyday taste of Kerala cooking.

Breakfast is appam, a lacy fermented rice pancake with a soft centre, or puttu, steamed cylinders of rice flour and coconut, eaten with stew, black chickpea curry or fish. Rice is the base of lunch, with thoran of shredded vegetables and coconut, olan, avial and buttermilk. Duck, raised in flocks on the Kuttanad canals, is roasted or curried and is a regional signature; beef is widely eaten here as in the rest of Kerala, often dry-fried with coconut slivers and served with tapioca, or kappa.

The toddy shop is an institution of the backwaters: a plain room beside a canal serving kallu, the mildly alcoholic sap of the coconut palm, with cooking hotter than restaurant food. Sweets are milk-based — the payasam distributed at Ambalappuzha temple is famous across the state — and the Onam sadya, a vegetarian feast of many dishes served in order on a banana leaf, is the meal by which Kerala cooking is judged.