Kochi is the most international city in India

Assume that you are a foreigner who knows very little about India.

You suddenly find yourself in Kochi. Almost the first thing you will wonder is whether you are in a Christian city.

 

The older parts of Kochi are full of beautiful churches and smaller but still lovely buildings all dedicated to the glory of Jesus Christ. They easily outnumber mosques and temples.

 

   But you would be quite wrong about this being a Christian city. The majority of Kochi’s population is Hindu.

 

   Christians do constitute around 38% which is higher than most major Indian cities (outside the Northeast) including Panjim which, in the north Indian imagination, is Christian-dominated but where Christians constitute only 26% of the population. In both those cities, as in the rest of India, Hindus are the clear majority.

 

   That Kochi should be so full of Christian symbols despite being a largely Hindu city is one of the miracles of Kerala, the Indian state with the highest literacy rate (again, excluding the Northeast). It has a tradition, dating back 2000 years, of various communities living together in harmony.

 

   This should not surprise us. Historically Kochi is the most international city in India. When people talk about invaders or traders who came to North India centuries ago, they nearly always mean people from central Asia and the Middle East during the medieval period. Kerala, on the other hand, had trade links that began much earlier and went much further West: with Europe and the ancient Roman Empire. As for the Middle Eastern connection, commerce between Kerala and that region dates back many centuries, long before the birth of Islam.

 

   That may explain why Kerala has one of the world’s oldest Christian communities. Back when Christianity was just a fledgling religion in the Middle East and long before it reached Europe, there was already a flourishing Christian community in Kerala.

 

   Tradition says that it was Saint Thomas, one of Jesus Christ’s apostles (the Doubting Thomas of the Bible) who came to Kerala and converted the higher castes. When the Europeans arrived in Kerala in the mediaeval period with the intention of converting the heathens and pagans to Jesus‘s way, they were astonished to find that there was already a well-established Christian population in the region.

 

   They were even more annoyed by the claim that Saint Thomas himself had come to Kerala to lead the conversions. They could not deny the historicity of Kerala’s Christians so they chose to insist that either some other chap called Thomas had come to Kerala or that the locals just got the name wrong.

 

   In fact, history suggests that it was entirely possible that a Biblical figure came to India and to that region in particular. Many contemporary Christian accounts also say that Thomas went east.

 

   Kochi, as we know it today, was built first by the Portuguese, who arrived in 1503 and then ceded control to the Dutch who, in turn, eventually made a deal with the British in 1814 giving them control of Malaya partly in return for control of Kochi. Every colonial ruler built churches and monuments and parts of today’s Kochi (such as Fort Kochi) may appear to a foreign visitor, to have more in common with such Sri Lankan towns as Galle, rather than say, Kanpur or Hyderabad.

 

   I have loved Kochi from the time I discovered the backwaters of Kerala in the late 1980s and I have watched the city change before my eyes. Its current prosperity is, once again, international in origin. Many Malayalis have made money abroad – especially in the Middle East – and have invested in Kochi.

 

"My position was simple enough: I can eat at fancy restaurants anywhere. Why would I waste the opportunity to wake up to crisp appams and spicy egg roast?"

   The top hotel in Kochi, perhaps in all of Kerala, is now the gleaming Grand Hyatt on Bolghatty Island. It is owned by the Lulu group founded by the world’s richest Malayali, Yusuf Ali (worth 7 billion USD), who made his fortune in the Middle East. The hotel is international in appearance and style and is probably the single best Hyatt hotel in India. It achieved its current prominence when Shrikant Wakharkar ran it and it is still brilliantly run by its current general manager Rajesh Ramdas.

 

   The Grand Hyatt’s cooks make excellent Kerala food. But in keeping with Kochi’s current international prosperity, the Hyatt also has a fancy Thai restaurant (with expat Thai chefs) and prides itself on a champagne and caviar/oyster service. (The oysters are fresh and local.)

 

   The Hyatt is relatively new, which the lovelier parts of Kochi are not, but it reflects the city’s global heritage and it makes the most of its location at the edge of the port running a stylish cruiser (with two bedrooms) that takes you to the most beautiful parts of the back waters.

 

   The growing wealth and internationalisation of Kerala are reflected in the boom in eating out. Being of a somewhat predictable (i.e. boring) disposition myself, I gave the international restaurants a miss and except for one evening when I ate at the Grand Hyatt’s Thai restaurant, I stuck to the local cuisine.

 

   My position was simple enough: I can eat at fancy restaurants anywhere. Why would I waste the opportunity to wake up to crisp appams and spicy egg roast? Where else can you get homestyle Pazham Kanji (fermented rice porridge with crunchy shallots and birdseye chilies) for breakfast?

 

   So I looked for Kerala food. One of the best meals I had was at Karthiyayini a family run seafood restaurant where the owner Jajina Rajan uses family recipes (and some dishes like the Tirutha fish curry, are made in her own home and brought to the restaurant) while her husband Vinoo Vijayan wakes up early each morning to go and buy fresh fish. There are two more branches apart from the original where I ate, but I am assured that standards have been maintained at both.

 

   I love the venerable Grand Hotel on MG Road where the main restaurant has been open since 1963, serving Allepey fish curry and other local specialities to hundreds of happy citizens each day. The restaurant has a capacity of 160 but on the day I went, they must’ve served at least 500 guests for lunch, turning over tables swiftly.

 

   Suresh Pillai is Kerala’s greatest and most famous chef. His flagship restaurant in Kochi mixes traditional dishes with his own creations. I loved the bone marrow and was surprised to find that, though he fills his golgappas with a spiced buttermilk, the dish actually works very well.

 

   At the Taj Malabar, now run to exceptional standards by Lalith Kumar, one of the Taj group’s finest hoteliers, the old Rice Boat restaurant has been shifted to the edge of the water so you feel you really are in a boat and the chef does new things to older dishes: including turning the traditional stew into a foam.

 

   The combination of prosperity and fancy restaurants along with great natural beauty and its own traditions, make Kochi unlike any other Indian city. I would spend hours on my balcony at the Grand Hyatt, staring out at the water and the little boats by the port and wonder: why does the government not make more of the opportunities the waters offer? You need a special permit to operate a boat after 6 pm and cruisers are not encouraged to dock for the night at backwater destinations.

 

   The obvious parallel is not with Venice (though Kochi has a water bus service which is not unlike Venice’s Vaporetto system)but with Bangkok where so much is made of the Chao Praya.

 

   But then Kochi has its paradoxes. The imaginary foreigner who I said might arrive in the city and wonder if it was a Christian enclave, would also wonder if he or she had entered a time warp. Kochi is the only city I can think of where, right next to the historical churches, you will find posters glorifying V. I Lenin. They don’t even do that in Russia any longer!