In Pedro Cabral’s Journal

There must be something about this stamp-sized town, Fort Cochin, which grandly squeezes all of itself and a million mosquitoes into one square mile. For over two millennia, it has greeted a fair number of traders, travellers, asylum-seekers, conquerors and chroniclers. As for the last, this town has spawned more compulsive chroniclers than any other its size. So, the latest arrival in the e-cart, E.P. Unny’s Santa and the Scribes: The Making of Fort Kochi, is welcomed with a kind of karmic inevitability. Unny, however, has sidestepped being just another chr­onicler: he has mischievously crafted his book as a critique of his predecessors that includes the Chinese, Dutch and English travel writers, Portuguese chroniclers and new-age digital historians. Unny delightfully interpolates his notes with detailed sketc­hes of everyday life in Fort Kochi.

In his notes, we encounter the absurdities of chronicling the commonplace stuff. It seems when the town was devoid of any heroic action, the colonisers reso­rted to this form of lazy artillery that would bore any reader to death! “For close to four-centuries-and-a-half...the sword was drawn, the gun powder was dry and the quill was in full flow.” Unny divides the 444 years of colonial rule of Fort Kochi into three wordy periods: Little Lisbon, Homely Holland and Mini England and everything else came thereafter. History writing arrived a little late but when it did arrive, it did with great dramatic flourish. It began on Christmas eve in 1500 and the letters that preceded it were considered irrelevant. But BC could well denote ‘Before Cabral’—the reference point being the arrival of Admiral Pedro Alvares Cabral from Lisbon two years after Vasco Da Gama’s landfall north of the Malabar coast. But today, this town cares little for Cabral and has no clue about who he was; it is excessively partial to bloody Da Gama (who is said to have arrived in Kozhikode with six basins in tow as presents for the indifferent Samudiri). Kochi has named the town square after Gama, marked his house and his temporary grave for the benefit of tourists. For this, one can squarely blame the Delhi-centric ‘Nehruvian’ historians who only mention Gama’s arrival in textbooks. When the Dutch walked in a century-and-a-half later, they destroyed everything Portuguese: the large Fort Kochi and its vast library, and set about building a smaller fort. They took it upon themselves to create voluminous records of how they administered this one square mile. “The officials from Holland were obsessive record-keepers. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) which ran Kochi must have spent half a day at work and the rest recording work.” Unny, the enumerator of records and recorders, puts the pages of the Dutch governor Moen’s detailed diary of his tenure at 553! Besides that, the Moens had preserved every mail received and despatched! Another 150 years go by with the Dutch at the helm before the British arrive­—Fort Kochi is soon reduced to a municipal town and stripped of importance.

We gather that once upon a time, Fort Cochin, with its ready mix of classes and races, was a prosperous little town—a most happening place to spend one’s money in and even as late as 1610 one chronicler wrote that there were no rich men in India except in Kochi! Think about that: Forbes’s India list would have all been in this little one-square-mile town.

In his sketches of the now-fortless Fort Kochi, Unny ambles through the little town’s warrens, named and renamed by its many rulers, and peeking in through the windows of taverns, parlours and workshops and bringing alive the regular folks of Fort Kochi. There is Kabir, Nazar and Shemnath at the wayside fish stall; you spot more than once in these pages Aboobacker, cinema operator praying at his mot­her’s grave; and down at the beach two fishermen, Babu and Varghese, lean casually against a piece of antiquity that the town showcases with a puffed-up pride. Unny gently devalues most of the antiquity and dismisses them as neo-antiques. The only thing that can claim antiquity with certitude are the town’s rain trees, says Unny. The rest wear a patina of some ancient dust. Unny is partial to those rain trees, they hog much of the space in his book.