On a Grave Digging Mission - again!

We in Kerala seem to have a genius for destroying our heritage so wantonly. How else could one explain the attempt to obliterate all traces of our history - this time by the local government? 

On a trip to Anjengo to trace the history of this early British settlement, I was curious to see the state of the few surviving monuments. Anjengo is an interesting case for many reasons. It was one of the earliest settlements of the East India Company built during the days when the Company was engaged in 'pure trade'. The world view of the Europeans was simple and was best expressed in the term -'peace and pagoda'. 

Yet, within years of the founding of the 'factory' in 1695, the factors had to face attacks from locals, instigated by the powerful 'Ettuveettil Pillais',  a group of local chieftains who weilded more power than the Queen of Attingal who had permitted the EIC to build the fort. Ultimately, all the fortification was of no avail in protecting the 150 odd men who were massacred in a treacherous move on the 14th April 1721. ( This will be topic for another post.)

What remains of the Fort is well-maintained, thanks to the Archeological Survey of India. But the same cannot be said of other notable monuments. 

For instance, James Forbes, the author of Oriental Memoirs  and  the Chief of Anjengo Factory till 1772, has left an engraving of Anjengo as viewed from the sea. The engraving dated 1813 shows the English Cemetery on the beach, prominent with its tall white monuments.

Julian James Cotton's compilation of  'List of Inscriptions on Tombs and Monuments in Madras'  (1905) refers to this cemetery but records that thirty of the tombs had no inscription but 'one of them certainly marks the resting place of J. Whitehill, a relative of Eliza Draper.' Whitehill was the Chief of Anjengo Factory from 1759 to 1769. Cotton also lists two other tombstones - those of Mary Walker (1726) and of Anne Wrench (1773).

Our team was led by Mr. Uday Balakrishnan, the Chief Postmaster General of Kerala Circle      ( who was exploring the possibility of issuing a special commemorative stamp on Anjengo, which was one of the oldest postal sorting and distribution centres in India) and consisted of a dedicated team of Mr. Selvam and Mr. Mohanti from the Archeological Survey of India and Mr.

 Gangadharan Pillai, the keeper of the Anjengo Fort. We spent hours looking for traces of this cemetery.

 At last, Pillai suggested that we look in the premises of the Anjuthengu Panchayat Office. The 60 cents of land which was designated as the Anglican cemetery had been taken over by the Panchayat long back. Locals remembered that in the process, they had uprooted many tombstones. We hoped those uprooted were the unnamed ones mentioned by Cotton and prayed that the three named ones were left in tact.

Our search of the compound did not reveal any evidence of the plot ever having been a cemetery. There was none in the Panchayat Office who could give us more details. We had almost given up when Priya, the sprightly young clerk in the Matsya Bhavan office (which was also located in the Panchayat premises) pointed out to us a protruding piece of granite in front of her office. Could it be one of the tombs? 

We wanted to dig around the stone and find out. Soon, the locals produced a spade and Pillai started removing the soil around the granite stone. Gradually, we could see outlines of letters engraved in the ornate style of 18th century calligraphy:

Here lieth the body of

ANNE WRENCH,

who departed this life 

Nov. 25th Anno 1773,

aged 87.

It was, indeed,the tombstone of Anne Wrench, the beloved wife of P.E.Wrench who was the Chief of Anjengo Factory (1769-1774) after Whitehill. Anne lived to a ripe age of 87, an exception in times when the average life expectancy of a European in India was around 40.

There was no clue, however, about the missing tombs of Mary Walker and J.Whitehill. What did the Panchayat do with those stones? More significantly, how did Anne Wrench escape the fate of the other stones? The latest addition to the Panchayat complex, pretentiously called 'E.K.Nayanar Memorial' had come close to encroaching on the only memorial left of the colonials - a prospect Nayanar would not have relished. But, then, how did the stone survive?

The clue was in the stone itself.The stone was larger than usual tombstones and that was why the sarkari vandals could not dislodge it. It was large, we found out from Cotton, because the epitaph was rather long and only a large stone could accommodate such a long epitaph:

The loss of one let us good people deplore

So famed for virtue, piety, charity and more,

Formed in mind without a single fault,

Scarce any body is free from envy but in part.

Can any one pass by this lifeless tomb

Without reflecting how short it is to come

That everybody must follow her ere soon or late.

To live and be like her may wish to be their fate.

We have separately taken up with the Panchayat leadership and the Tourism department of the state on the need to preserve this and other monuments in Anjengo. Tourism is the only sure means of economic stimulus for Anjuthengu and villages around, due to the decline in the demand for coir products. And they have the 'product' with them. All they need to do is to preserve it and market it!

 

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Trikkulam and the Demise of History

A team from Calicut Heritage Forum, led by Dr.Oliver Noone visited Trikkulam, near Tirurangadi, looking for traces of the bloody battle that took place there between the British forces from Venkitikkotta (present Kottakkal) and the forces of Tipu. We were looking for traces of a Fort which Tipu had built there. No one - including the history professors of the local college- had heard of such a fort in Trikkulam. But, our local guide, the indefatigable Gopi would not give up. He contacted the Village Officer, Shekharan (another history buff, he turned out to be) who confirmed that there was indeed a mention in revenue records of a Fort on a large piece of land on the banks of the Parakkadavu River.

 The land described in the records as 'Kottapparamba' does not have any trace of a fort today and is dominated by some garish bungalows surrounded by a couple of old tiled houses. The plain ground where the battle took place is now a large coconut grove, but the approach to the river showed clearly a strategic eye. There was a story of an underground path to the river but we could not explore the environs in greater detail, as the place was being used as a bathing ghat by women.

While we could not obtain much by way of tangible evidence of Tipu's Fort, we stumbled on living proof of how neglect and prejudice can destroy our history and heritage. The history professor took us to some graves of British soldiers who had laid down their lives in the 1921 revolt. 

The grave of the young 28 year old Assistant Superintendent of Police, Palghat was in front of the Taluk Office and appeared to be fairly well- protected, although weeds were gradually taking over the tombstone. 

The epitaph read: William John Duncan Rowley, Assistant Superintendent of Police, Palghaut, who was killed at Tirurangadi by a mob of mappilas at the outbreak of the Mappila Rebellion on August 20, 1921 - aged 28

The local Tahsildar mentioned that the Tirurangadi Taluk Office (built in 1906) was being vacated and the building will then be handed over to the Archeology Department for conservation. He hoped that along with this, the grave of Rowley in front of his building would also be preserved by the department.

 But the two other soldiers (the professor narrated the barbaric way in which they were cornered and lynched by a violent mob) were not so lucky. Their graves were also 

protected by iron fencing but gradually, the fencing had been stolen presumably by scrap dealers and the tomb stones themselves have been dislodged. We could dig up one of those but the other one in the same enclosure was too deeply buried in rubbish dumped over the last 70 odd years.  

The Professor recounted the touching story which he had heard from locals of how the mother of one of the young soldiers had travelled all the way to Trikkulam from Britain to build the monument for her young boy. Presumably, what remained of the two young soldiers was buried together, for there is only a single epitaph for the two soldiers which reads:sacred to the memory of No.5718896 Pte.F.M.Eley and No.5718762 Pte. H.C. Hutchings 2nd Bn Dorset Regt died of wounds received in action against the moplahs at Tirurangadi 22.8.1921

One wishes a body like the Commonwealth Graves Commission takes care of these neglected and vanishing pieces of history.With the present resources all that Calicut Heritage Forum can do is to highlight the plight of such monuments!

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Chronicling Calicut - Some Challenges

François Pyrard was a man with a strange mission. Born in the Breton town of Laval in France in 1570c., he was fired by a mission to make sure that his country also got its due share of the trade from the east which was being monopolised by the Portuguese and the Spaniards. He observed that the French were 'neglecting countless fair opportunities' in profitting from the trade of 'gold, spices, and the curious things of the East'.

He therefore joined in 1601 as a purser in an expedition consisting of two vessels, Croissant and Corbin. Unfortunately the voyage ended up in a shipwreck off the coast of Madagascar. He, along with the Captain of Corbin and a few others, were rescued but were taken prisoners by the King of Maldives. After serving five years in captivity in Maldives, he was rescued by a fleet from Bengal and brought to Chittagong. From Bengal, he visited various Indian ports and spent about eight months in Calicut.

He found that the Calicut of 1607 was 'a very powerful state, and of great extent: it is the state which has given the greatest trouble and caused most of their reverses to the Portuguese'. Coming from a fairly disinterested observer and that too after peace had been brokered by the Zamorin with the Portuguese by handing over Kunhali Marakkar to them, this is high praise.

After witnessing the disorder and lawlessness in Maldives, Pyrard was impressed by Calicut which was not only a well-administered state, but had an advanced system of keeping and preserving its official records. He observes: Hard by (the palace) is a block of buildings allotted to the secretary and clerk to the King, for keeping all the registers. The order and system is most admirable herein; and I have oftentimes wondered to see the great number of men with no other duty or work all day but writing and registering. These posts are much honour; the clerks all reside in the palace, but in different apartments, and they have different duties. Some make entry of all goods arriving for the King; others the dues and taxes paid day by day; others the expenditure of the King's household; others the most notable incidents of each day, both what happens at court and in the rest of the kingdom; in short, all news, for he has everything registered; and each clerk has his separate room. They also keep a record of all strangers who come there, taking their names and nationalities, the time of their arrival and the business that has brought them, and so they did with us. It is a wonderous thing to observe their number and the perfect order that exists among them, and how fast they write on their palm leaves.

Pyrard was not alone in admiring the perfection in keeping official records in Calicut. Almost a hundred years before him, Duarte Barbosa (1512) found that :The King of Calicut continually keeps a multitude of writers in his palace, who sit in a corner far from him; they write upon a raised platform, everything connected with the King's Exchequer and with the justice and governance of the realm. They write on long and stiff palm leaves, with an iron style without ink ...And there are seven or eight more,

(courtesy Kerla State Archives)

the King's private writers, men held in great esteem, who stand always before the King, with their stylesin their hands and a bundle of leaves under their arms. Each one of them has a number of these leaves in blank, sealed by the King at the top. And when the King desires to give or to do anything as to which he has to provide he tells his wishes to each of these men and they write it down from the royal seal to the bottom, and thus the order is given to whomsoever it concerns.

With such wealth of written records, one would think that interpreting the history of Calicut would be easy. But, sadly it was not to be. Zamorins belonged to different branches of families (thavazhis) and they had a custom of shifting the entire records to the location of the new Zamorin during each change of guard. This was done with the noble purpose of strictly following 'precedents' but many records would be lost during transit. Then there was the destruction caused by invasions. The Central Record Office was burnt down in part by Albuquerque in 1513. Subsequently, in 1766 when the Zamorin committed suicide by setting fire to the magazine in the Palace, much of whatever records remaining was destroyed.

Despite all this, several valuable documents and books were indeed available for the serious researchers. Prof. K.V.Krishna Ayyar, the doyen of Calicut studies did manage to put together whatever records were available and produce his monumental work, 'The Zamorins of Calicut (1938) http://www.universityofcalicut.info/pubDivn/nt.htm. He owed a lot to the painstaking effort made by J.A. Thorne ICS who, as Court of Wards, took charge of the affairs of the Palace (1925-1937) and entrusted the task of copying out all old records on to paper to a temporary clerk, C.R.Kuttikrishnan. The new Thiruvachira Palace in Meenchanda had been completed in 1924 and afforded a safe place for the new record room.

Thorne, like many of his compatriots, was extremely sympathetic to the history and culture of Calicut. He wrote: We foreigners who have lived and worked in Kerala hold ourselves to be singularly fortunate:whatever else India may come to mean to us, we remember with gratitude and affection the country and people whose civilisation is bound up with the dynasty of the Zamorins.

There was no effort, however, to preserve the records after Prof. Krishna Ayyar had done with these. Although the practice initiated by Thorne of copying down all the records on paper was reported to have continued till 1958, the entire records were left to languish in a terrible state of neglect from the time a civil suit for partition was instituted and the Court appointed a Receiver to look after the administration. (What a fall from Thorne's days to our own times!) Over the next decade, the records were allowed to decay through benign neglect and an argument was made out that in order to prevent further decay, these precious records may be sold as scrap! It is being mentioned that two truck loads of these records were indeed sold as raw material to the Gwalior Rayons Pulp Factory at Mavoor!!

It goes to the credit of Prof. N.M.Namboodiri, a Malayalam scholar who incidentally got interested in the history of Calicut as part of his research into place names, that whatever records which had not fallen into the hands of the local philistines were rescued. His determination led to the remaining records being retrieved, documented and preserved safely at the Vallathol Vidya Peethom, Edappal.(Read about his efforts here) The available records provide information on the administrative and political milieu of Calicut from the 16^th Century. The earliest record retrieved is dated 1538 – a mere 40 years after the arrival of Vasco da Gama. According to historians, these records would suggest a re-interpretation of the Mysore interlude in Calicut history, among other historical events.

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