What to expect
Highlights
- Boat or canoe routes around R Block Kuttanad
- Village life, canals and lake/river scenery
- Good fit for homestays and local food stops
The story
R Block is a letter on a survey map that eight families turned into ground. It is a kayal padasekharam — a polder reclaimed from the bed of Vembanad Lake, ringed by a continuous outer bund, lying permanently below the level of the water outside it and kept dry only by pumping. It is in Kainakari panchayat, in Kuttanad taluk, and it can be reached only by boat. Tourist boats stop at Kamalamoola on its western bund, where a hand-painted board for the Hotel Ayodhya reads R.BLOCK in letters a foot high. What almost nobody stopping there is told is that the four blocks sold as a single destination — Q, S, T and R — were made by two different families two decades apart, and that the state took all of them back.
The story of R Block Kuttanad
Start with what a padasekharam actually is, because the word is doing a lot of work. The Kerala State Planning Board describes it as a single group consisting of an outer bund and a series of small canals that take water into the individual paddy fields, with the outer bund serving the function of flood protection. Water enters through a sluice gate in that bund and moves to the fields through distributing canals and field canals. Everything inside depends on the wall, and the wall is the machine.
The bunds were not always concrete. Traditionally they were clay dug from the canal beds and stabilised with bamboo and coconut trunks, and the planning board is blunt about how that went: there was a high risk of the bunds being breached, and these bunds were indeed breached frequently. From the 1950s the state moved to permanent bunds with a top width of three metres, and the modern form is the pile-and-slab bund — concrete piles driven into the lake bed with slabs spanning between them. The planning board's own photograph of completed pile-and-slab outer bunds is captioned Kainakari North, which is this parish.
Then the water has to be got out again. Dewatering is done, in the board's words, using the old petti and para mechanism or motor pumps, and the pumping station has its own name as a building type: the engine thara, or motor thara, essentially a platform built to carry the dewatering gear. The petti and para is a wooden scoop-wheel arrangement — the successor to the foot-driven chakram and the ancestor of everything with an engine in it.
That sequence sounds like history until you read the project board standing at R Block itself. It carries the sanction code K.E.L. 2, it belongs to the Kerala Water Resources Department, and it covers flood-control work in the kayal areas near the Rani and Chithira blocks under the Kuttanad Package. Its line items are worth reading as a bill of materials: estimate ₹23,95,78,566; area protected 764 hectares; bund length 14,797 metres; new revetment 14,797 metres; granite wall 2,600 metres; motor platforms and sheds, 8 nos.; and — on a state contract in the 2010s — petti and para, 2 nos.
That 764 hectares is not a round number chosen for a signboard. The planning board records that from 2014, for the first time since 1992, paddy cultivation could be restarted in about 764 hectares of kayal land in the Rani and Chithira blocks, which produced 1,402.49 metric tonnes of puncha paddy in 2016–17. The board on the bund and the figure in the report are the same piece of work.
The failure mode here is worth knowing too, because it is not what you would guess. The only breach recorded in the pile-and-slab kayal bunds happened west of D Block, at Puthanarayiram, on 26 November 2016 during the vrischika veliyettam — about fifty metres of bund gone. The cause was traced to a kundarikuzhi: a pit some eighty metres deep dug in the field to trap fish while it was being dewatered, over which the bund had been built. The water did not beat the engineering. The engineering was built on top of something somebody had dug and not recorded.
One more thing about the machine, because it explains why the state keeps coming back to these bunds. A padasekharam is only as strong as its weakest metre of wall, and the bigger the block, the more metres there are to fail and the more owners have to agree before any of it is repaired. The planning board has recommended shrinking padasekharams from around 600 acres to about 250 for exactly that reason — smaller units are easier to maintain, easier to dewater and easier to get a decision out of. R Block, at some 1,400 acres, is more than twice the size the board now thinks is sensible. It was built at a moment when the constraint was capital, and it is maintained in one where the constraint is coordination.
As for who lives here — nobody lives on R Block, exactly, because it is a field. People live on the bunds and in the villages around them. Kainakari panchayat, with its two revenue villages of Kainakary North and South, had 23,696 people in 5,689 households at the 2011 Census, and its own description of itself is that vast paddy lands make up the major part of the village and these paddy lands are below sea water level. ⚠ There is no population figure for R Block itself and we do not print one.
Legend & myth
There is no folklore attached to R Block, and the reason is unusually clear: the place is younger than most people's grandparents. It was made in about 1920 and 1921, out of open lake, by named men with a bank balance and a kerosene engine, on a lot number assigned by a colonial survey. Legends do not attach themselves to a survey lot within a century, and none has attached itself here.
That is a different kind of blank from the ones we usually report. At an old grove or tank, an absence of recorded lore almost always means our search has failed. Here the absence is structural: there was nothing at this coordinate to have a story about, because there was no ground. Everything R Block is, somebody built, and recently enough that the receipts survive.
🚫 We are also refusing a specific temptation. Twelve kilometres north-west, Pathiramanal has a fine legend about a sage raising an island out of Vembanad overnight — an origin story about land appearing where there had been only water, which is very nearly a description of what happened here. Floating that story onto R Block would be easy, and it would be a fabrication. It belongs to that island, it is told there, and it stays there.
What R Block has instead is anecdote — stories attached to named people in printed sources, which is a different category from myth and is labelled as such here rather than dressed up.
The first is the Ponnada Vaakkaal grant, which survives in the account of the consortium's partners and is the sort of detail that only exists because somebody wrote a name down. The second is the one everybody in Kuttanad tells about the reclaimers: that the local people told them plainly they were mad, that rice would not grow in a lake, and that they should stop. In the flattened version this is a story about visionaries and doubters, which is how it is usually retold. Read more carefully it is a story about risk, and the doubters had a case — the bunds of that era breached frequently, the rice price collapsed in the 1920s and reclamation stopped dead for two decades until wartime food policy revived it.
The third is the pond. Joseph Murickan, who made the neighbouring Q, S and T blocks from 1940, is said to have dug a ten-acre freshwater pond because the people working his fields had nothing but salt water to drink. It is a good story and a revealing one, and it points at the thing tourism finds hardest to say about this landscape: the fields were made by capital and worked by labour, and the labour did not own the water it drank any more than it owned the ground it stood on.
There is a fourth, and it is the one we find hardest to place. The tourist boats that stop at Kamalamoola tie up beside a hand-painted hotel sign, and the water they float on is Rani — Murickan's block, named for a queen of Travancore. The bund they photograph is R Block, made by other people, twenty years earlier. And the fields on both sides belong, since 1975, to one thousand five hundred and eighty farmers who were given them. Three claims on the same view, none of them wrong, and no single story that holds all three together. If R Block ever does acquire folklore, that is most likely where it will come from.
That is the honest shape of R Block's mythology. No gods, no sages, no origin legend. A survey letter, eight surnames, a monsoon that could take everything back, and an argument about who the land belonged to that was eventually settled by the state taking it. Those are not myths, and this page does not pretend they are.
Read the full history of R Block Kuttanad 629 more words
History
The Madras government banned further kayal reclamation in 1903 and lifted the ban in 1913, having approved a scheme in 1912 that notified some 19,500 acres of Vembanad for reclamation in blocks, each named with a letter of the English alphabet. That is where the R comes from — a lot on a map. ⚠ Why that particular letter, and what if anything it stood for, is not recorded anywhere we can find, and we are not going to invent an explanation.
R Block belongs to the third of the new-reclamation periods that ran from about 1914 to 1920. Wikipedia's Kuttanad article, sourced to the FAO's GIAHS proposal, records that R Block Kayal covering 1,400 acres was reclaimed by the joint efforts of eight families led by Pallithanam Luca Matthai, then a member of the Sree Moolam Popular Assembly. His named partners were Vachaparampil Mathen, Pazhayaparmpil Chacko, Ettuparayil Xavier, Pattassery P. P. Mathai, Kaarikkuzhi Ponnada Vaakkaal Mathulla Mappila, Meledom, Paruthickal and Kandakudy. A secondary source dates the work to 1921, so we give it as about 1920–21.
⚠ Two figures need care. The reclaimed extent is given as 1,400 acres, while the block as mapped today encloses closer to 1,600 — those are not the same measurement, and the page says 1,400 acres reclaimed and notes the mapped extent is larger. And R Block is repeatedly credited to Joseph Murickan, the Kayal Rajavu. It was not his. Murickan made Q, S and T, from 1940 — two decades later — and the conflation is everywhere online because all four blocks are marketed as a single destination.
Reclamation stopped when the rice price collapsed in the 1920s and did not resume until the early 1940s, when the Grow More Food campaign and electric motors revived it and the last tracts were made. Murickan's blocks were named Chithira, Rani and Marthandam, after the Travancore royal house. ⚠ Their acreages are given as 900/652/600 in some sources and 716/674/568 in others; we print the disagreement rather than choose. He also built Chithira Church, described as the first Christian shrine in Kuttanad.
The land did not stay in private hands. There was an agitation in 1954, an acquisition in 1972, and in 1975 some 1,600 acres were distributed to 1,580 farmers. Whether the reclaimers should be remembered as builders or as landlords is a live argument in Kerala rather than a settled one — it broke out publicly in 2011 over a schoolbook — and this page reports it as an argument. In 2008 the Kuttanad Package brought state money back to the same bunds, which is what the K.E.L. 2 board on the bund records.
Why visit
Because it is the clearest place in Kerala to see what a polder actually is: a wall, a pump, and a crop growing below the level of the water on the other side of the wall.
For the arithmetic nobody says out loud. The lake outside is permanently higher than the field inside, and the only thing between them is maintenance.
Because the boat is the only way in, and the approach across open kayal to a bund line on the horizon is the point of the trip.
For the K.E.L. 2 project board at the bund, which is a better history lesson than most museums manage — including a state contract in the 2010s ordering petti and para, 2 nos.
To see the distinction nobody else draws: Q, S and T are Murickan's, from 1940; R is Pallithanam Luca Matthai's eight-family consortium, from about 1920. Two families, two decades, one boat stop.
For the crop calendar. Green paddy runs roughly December to February, the polder stands bare around October, and it is under water from June to August — three completely different places at one coordinate.
