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Feel wretched about the Calicut plane crash. Thinking about the families who were waiting for loved ones to come home. Calicut was a very formative place for me. I went back recently only to fall in love with the city again. So, I wanted to write about why it is special. (1)
Calicut / Kozhikode is today mostly remembered as the place where Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese explorer landed in 1498. He “discovered” India, we grew up learning. Which is rubbish, of course. The city was had been an important trading entrepôt for centuries. (2)
Calicut’s prosperity came on the back of the spice trade (and later in textiles; Calicut comes from calico). It was a hub for merchants and traders from China, Arabia and North Africa. The Mapilla Muslim community in Malabar traces it’s roots to Arab traders. (3)
Sanjay Subrahmanyam and @GhoshAmitav (amongst others) have written about the unease of the first encounter between the Portuguese and the Zamorin / Samudriraja, the ruler of Calicut. Typical of European explorers, the Portuguese had ideas of monopoly control and conquest. (4)
“In all the centuries in which it had flourished and grown, no state or king or ruling power had ever tried to gain control of the Indian Ocean trade by force of arms.” @GhoshAmitav writes “In An Antique Land”. (5)
This is what the Portuguese wanted, demanding the expulsion of Muslim traders, bombarding the city when they were refused. They won and established a monopoly over Malabar trade. Tellicherry pepper is a reminder of how profitable “black gold” was for the Portuguese. (6)
Calicut is still shaped by this history. I went back there with @arunmsukumar in January this year, after decades, for the wonderful Kerala Literature Festival and was reminded of all of this. It was great to engage with the city as an adult, albeit with a little nostalgia. (7)
We visited the Mishkal Mosque, built by a merchant shipowner who made a fortune trading with China and Arabia. The mosque was damaged when the Portuguese attacked Calicut in 1510, but it still survives. It’s one of the few examples of a mosque that extensively used timber (8)
The city’s public library is still heavily used. It gave me so much joy to see parents come with their children to check out books. It was also a sad reminder of how public spaces in so many of our other cities have utterly shrivelled up. (9)
We ate a lot because Malabar food is really the best. (10)
And I visited my old school, St Joseph’s, which is still the school I have the fondest memories of (and I moved schools a lot). (Kerala is also where Christianity first arrived in India with St Thomas in AD 52) (11)
This pandemic has been tough for everyone and I’m homesick. Thinking about Calicut today at such a time made me so upset because it is a lovely place with such warm people, and in my memory it is a symbol of all the things I love about my country. (12)