Spatial History of South India: Custom Road in Calicut (4)

Customs Road in Calicut, Kerala is short, beginning at a T intersection with Beach Road at the Arabian Sea and ending at another T junction just two blocks inland. Its name stems from British colonial times when there must have been secondary custom functions here related to international trade in spices. The local nickname is Kashtam, Malaylam for "what a pity", a not entirely inept description in spite of a promising lighthouse on the foot of the street marking the coastline.

Calicut (Kozhikode), the 45' lighthouse from 1903 which
replaced a 90' older lighthouse (Photo: Philipsen)

Regardless whether one sees the road as one to be pittied, or one that goes back to times when Calicut at the Beypore river was a global port and trade center for spices, it was elevated to being an object for research as part of a project for architecture students from Baltimore's Morgan State University conducted together with students from the local MES architecture school.

Research isn't necessarily part of the studies of architecture, a field that, in the eyes of many, is more art than science, but this wasn't the only unusual aspect of this architectural project taking shape in Calicut, unusual enough for all three local papers to reporte about the collaboration, each including a group picture of the students and their faculty.

Morgan State University (MSU) is a historically black college and university (HBCU) in Baltimore and Muslim Education Society (MES) is a system of minority universities in India with an architecture school in Calicut. The two schools signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) in which they vow exchange and collaboration in education and research between students and faculty.

We hadn't even time for a proper nap after 15 hours of flight and a 10.5 hr forward time-shift when our somewhat disoriented crew stumbled across the dense traffic of Mini Bypass towards a bright yellow bus marked MES College of Architecture. we barely dared to open our eyes once the bus lurched through the sea of mopeds, "autos" (small three wheeler yellow taxis), pedestrians and city buses crowding every inch of available road space. It was New Years Day according to the Christian calendar, a time-mark certainly recognized even here where Christians are a minority but one that could be read from the life of this city nor from the fact that we were heading towards a reception at the MES school for which a good part of the faculty appeared and also a handful or so of students. The compact school with its open courtyard sat on top of a hill from where the sprawl of Calicut which we had just traversed looked like nothing but a huge palm forest.
The college bus (Philipsen)
The sun now near its zenith, the temperature near 90F, a nice breeze and the lush green all around made us rub our eyes even more. Before we could sort anything out we had shaken countless hands and were placed under a thatch roof veranda in front of banana leaves which were soon crowded with rice and all kinds of chutneys which helpful hosts explained in the soft English that with its unusual inflections sounded like a foreign language to us. Soon we were instructed in how to stir the sauces, yoghurts and meats into the rice and eat the meal with our fingers. All we had heard about Delhi belly swirled around in our head and we looked questioningly to our Morgan Professor who as a Fulbright scholar had taught in Delhi and was our trusted India expert who just nodded that all is fine and we could eat everything.

The research was centered on a framework that was presented to us what looked like a serendipitous insertion to a museum visit and occurred on day two and after a fast-paced guided tour through parts of historic Calicut. In the IMAX theatre of the museum, which had just been crowded with screeching school children when the 3-D effects were too menacing, scholar and professor Shinoy Jesinth now lectured about the history of this old city based on research the scholar coming from Kozhikode (Calicut) had done at the Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit in Kalady.

Jesinth's topic the is "Urbanity and Spatial Process" specifically exemplifying the story of urbanization in India in historical times as "a story of spatial and temporal discontinuities" illustrated on the Colonial City of Calicut. He talked about how the "the littoral space of Peninsular India was utilized to a large extent for maritime trade, [how] the internal growth process of a second urbanization was contributed by enormous expanded trade networks when India's early contact with Central Asia and the Roman world was at its zenith. The terms of "the sea, the litoral and the hinterland", the sea as the frontier from which conquerors eyed the fertile coastal plains, the literal plains of south India and the hinterland as the lands that provided the boats to build ships but also the fruit and spices to be shipped would become pivotal themes for the research in which the students were about to embark.

Custom Street, Calicut (Cerala)

The "discontinuaties" were such that one shouldn't imagine old Calicut as a pristine historic district in which one could see centuries of historic architecture tell about the layers of history in keeping with Lefevbre's spatial history as outlined in The Production of Space. Instead a few very old, usually religious landmarks that are well protected and preserved are surrounded by a city that is rapidly growing, very fluid and not oriented on protecting "ensembles", "fabric" or the mundane architecture of, for example, an abandoned beautiful weaving company.

Calicut had become an important "medieval port city endowed with a pleasant geography at the coast of Arabian Sea, which had been a great international highway of trade". The importance preceded the European colonial powers and started under "the patronage of Zamorins, Calicut developed into a major seaport on the coast of Kerala by declaring it a Freeport. [It then] became the melting pot of various cultures including Greeks, Romans, Persians, Syrians, Chinese, Arabs, Egyptians, Gujarathis, and Chettis thus reflecting a cosmopolitan nature of an urban centre. [..] By the end of the fifteenth century, the “Vasco da Gama epoch of Indian history”, as Sardar K.M.Panikkar calls it, started with the landing of Gama at Calicut in 1498. [It] marked a new epoch in the history of Indian urbanization. [..] Calicut witnessed the arrival of the Portuguese and then of the Dutch, English, French and Danes. Subsequently, the competition increased and after securing some spaces inside the city from the then ruler, these European commercial groups established their settlements erecting flagstaffs." (all quotes from Jesinth's thesis).

But as Jesinth pointed out, these layers of history were not all taking place in the city as a physical manifestation but much of it now takes only place in the minds of its people. Or in his own words:

[after examinig] the multiple spatial processes that went into the shaping of the city of Calicut in visual form and on the other, [the study] examines the images and symbols constructed about the city in the minds of the colonized, a real-and-imagined place where the colonizers fantasizes the urban image for facilitating and legitimizing their multiple political and economic interests. [...]
...the colonial urban space of Calicut was not simply a physical entity; it was also a relational identity, created by interactions across boundaries of tradition and modernity, between the colonized and the colonizer.

mistaken identity: Not a customs building

On this hot morning and after we have split into the various research teams we enter Custom Street after walking along the beach. The streets seems to wrap its storied past tightly and remains cloaked into what looks to us like Indian everyday, although we have no clue what that means either but assume that the honking vehicles, the cow that chews through some pieces of trash and even the women sorting through a larger pile of trash filling articles into bags to be hauled off for some kind of re-use are part of the everyday make-up. There is no trace of trade, spices or the trade activities another team could study at Big Bazaar. It is tremendously helpful to have Shabnam Sha and Shifa Mustafa as locals on the team. When the two Americans speculate wildly about the age and possible history of a stately building which looks vaguley 80 or so years old, the young women debunk the nonsense quickly by interviewing a food vendor next day who says that the building is less than ten years old, made to look old and is poorly constructed and maintained, hence the cracks and blemishes that give it patina. Gone the helpful fiction that this was the old custom house the British built here. A tree that bisects a garden wall turns out to be a foreign gift for the small buddhist monastery behind its walls. The two natives find out that three tree prevented a street widening.

Trash pickers sorting through a pile of garbage
(Photo: Philipsen)

A formal Portuguese restaurant sits in a fairly elaborate building at the end of Custom Street, away from the water. An architect who has an office on the street and answers our questions explains that no reputable restaurant would open along Beach Street where all the buses run and poor people hang out and that people with more money would seek the privacy a block away from the waterfront. He thinks that Custom Street is far from really being gentrified but that there are plenty of signs that the old uses going back to trade and commodities are replaced by more current day services such as restaurants. His neighbor is a coffee shop named British Cafe, but he says that this name doesn't mean anything really, it is only one in a chain of establishments that have come and gone in the locale, all not making it very long. (another restaurant is named Gelato, obviously not a heritage of colonial conquistadores but, if anything, a sign of a certain cultural homogeneity which envelopes the world and doesn't stop at Custom Street, the Indian urban cow not withstanding, or the fact that Kerala sits in a state governed by communists that were legitimately voted into office.

Ultimately most photos of the various project teams documented a development trajectory of a more recent provenience, the one where architectural modernism continues to conquer the world while it is quite passe where it originated, where global chains put their marks on local cultures, where the technology of automotive mobility, ATMs and self service creates replicable templates the world over and where the laws of capitalism easily overrule the communist government that has been in place here on and off since 1947. In current day Kozhikode the spice trade, pre-colonial, colonial or post-colonial is only a distant memory, a thousand years of history are nothing but faint ghosts that are visible behind the noisy facade of roaring traffic, huge billboards, flashing lights, occasional chique boutiques propagating a modern lifestyle.

The student team on Custom Road
(Photo: Philipsen)

To decipher the layers of history behind the scenes takes a researcher and scholar with patience and the skills of a detective for the physical part and a psychologist for the parts that remain only in the minds of the Malayali, the proud people of the region who vote communists into power and send their sons and daughters to work in Saudi Arabia, Qatar or Dubai because where they are sought after as accountants, nurses, lawyers, doctors and mid-level civil servants for the excellent education they received at home. According to a Washington Post article, more than a third of Kerala's gross domestic product in 2016 came from remittances.

The teams of US and Malayali students discovered as much as they could in a short period of time. It wasn't so much the spatial order of Kozhikode that mattered in the end, but the regrouping of the minds of both groups of students, the cross fertilizing of their very different cultures, that they got to know each other with a depth that only team work can create.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA