What to expect
Highlights
- Museum visit at Durbar Hall Art Centre
- Indoor cultural or historical context
- Easy pairing with nearby food and heritage stops
The story
The Maharaja of Cochin built this hall in the 1850s to hold his durbar — the formal royal court, with the ruler inside and the public assembled on the open ground outside. Today it is a free contemporary art gallery run by the Kerala Lalithakala Akademi, and after an overhaul by the Kochi Biennale Foundation it is the best-equipped exhibition space in the city. The ground it stands on is where the Cochin state's 1938 constitution was proclaimed, and where, until temple entry was thrown open, people of lower caste were not permitted to walk.
The story of Durbar Hall Art Centre
The hall sits on a two-acre compound in the middle of Ernakulam, close to Ernakulam South railway station and hard against the open Durbar Hall Ground. The setting is unglamorous — city traffic, a sports ground, a low nineteenth-century building — which is part of why visitors miss it entirely, and why the art inside is often a surprise.
Read the site as two things and it makes far more sense. There is the hall, which was the audience chamber, and there is the ground, which was the audience. The durbar was held in the building that now holds the gallery, while the public gathered outside on the maidan — which is why almost everything that happened here historically happened on grass rather than under a roof.
What is on show changes constantly. This is a working gallery, not a permanent collection, so there is no fixed thing to come and see. It runs a programme of national and international exhibitions through the year, along with shows by Kerala artists, and it has served as a venue during the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Check what is hanging before you go; that is the whole visit.
The renovation matters more than it sounds. The Kochi Biennale Foundation's work turned what had been a handsome but limited old hall into a space with museum-standard lighting, wall surfaces and climate handling — the practical difference between a building that can host a serious touring exhibition and one that cannot. The Biennale's effect on Kochi is usually described in terms of attention; this is one of the places where it is visible as infrastructure.
Outside, the ground has its own long life as the city's main open space: exhibitions, military parades, the processions of the Ernakulam Shiva Temple festival, football between the local Town Club and British army sides, and for years the principal cricket venue in Kochi, with a small band shed at the north-east corner as its pavilion. At one end stands the Kulapuramalika, where Appan Thampuran and Kunjukuttan Thampuran launched the literary magazine Rasikaranjini.
Entry to the gallery is free, which is unusual for a space of this standard and is the single most persuasive reason to drop in. If there is nothing on that interests you, you have lost twenty minutes and no money.
It pairs naturally with the rest of mainland Ernakulam rather than with Fort Kochi — Marine Drive, Broadway and the city-centre food and shopping are all a short auto ride away.
Legend & myth
“Durbar Hall” is often assumed to be a palace. It is not, and never was a residence: a durbar hall is the room where a ruler holds court and receives people, which is a different kind of building with a different purpose. The Cochin royal residences are elsewhere — Hill Palace at Tripunithura is the one most visitors mean.
The 1850s date is repeated everywhere and sourced nowhere we can find. No account names a year, an architect or a commissioning maharaja by name, and the building has been reworked repeatedly across roughly a century and a half of changing use. What you walk into is a much-altered interior inside an old shell, not a preserved 1850s room, and “the 1850s” should be read as a received decade rather than a dated fact.
The commonest error, though, is treating the hall and the ground as one story. Most of the history attached to the name belongs to the maidan, not the building: the administrative reforms of 4 January 1938, the new constitution of the Cochin State of 17 June 1938 and the formation of the Cochin State Central War Committee on 28 June 1940 were all proclaimed on that ground. So was the exclusion — the ground, and the path leading from it to the Shiva temple, were closed to those of lower caste until temple entry was opened. A gallery guide that skips all of this and calls the site “a heritage art space” is describing a roof and ignoring a field.
Two acres is also a survivor's figure rather than an original one. Roughly half the ground was taken over for residential quarters for the District Collector and for High Court judges, and more went to the widening of Durbar Hall Road and to parking for the Rama Varma Club. The compound you see is what is left.
And there is a third history on this site that gets a single clause almost everywhere, including on our own page until now. At one end of the ground stands the Kulapuramalika, and what happened there was the launch of Rasikaranjini, a Malayalam literary monthly that ran from 1903 to 1907. Five years is nothing, and the two men behind it were not nothing at all. Kodungallur Kunjikkuttan Thampuran, who lived from 1864 to 1914, is the man Kerala calls Kerala Vyasa, for translating the entire Mahabharata into Malayalam word by word and metre by metre in 874 days. Appan Thampuran, of the Cochin royal house, went on to write Bhaskara Menon, published in 1924 and generally reckoned the first detective novel in Malayalam. So this compound has a political history, a caste history, a sporting history and a literary one, and the literary one is the only that left no mark on the ground at all.
The detail that makes it worth the paragraph is a contradiction inside Kunjikkuttan himself. He was among the finest Sanskrit scholars Kerala produced, and he was also the moving force behind Pacha Malayalam — pure Malayalam — a movement to write the language with its Sanskrit borrowings stripped out. A man arguing that Malayalam should stand without Sanskrit, while personally hauling the largest Sanskrit text in existence into Malayalam, is not a hypocrite; he is somebody who had thought about what a language is for. That argument was being run out of a building on this maidan while the Cochin durbar met in the hall next door.
Finally, “restored” covers two different projects with two different reputations. The Kochi Biennale Foundation's upgrade of the gallery is a genuine success and is why the building can host touring exhibitions. The District Tourism Promotion Council's ₹49.94 lakh beautification of the ground is not universally admired: it demolished the old band house and put car parking inside the ground, and local accounts record it as a loss of character. Both are called restoration; only one is uncontested.
Read the full history of Durbar Hall Art Centre 545 more words
History
The Durbar Hall was built in the 1850s by the Maharaja of Cochin as the venue for his royal court, on a two-acre site in what was then the growing mainland town of Ernakulam. The durbar itself was held in the building that now houses the gallery, with the public assembled on the open ground outside.
That ground was the state's public stage. The administrative reforms of 4 January 1938, the new constitution of the Cochin State of 17 June 1938 and the formation of the Cochin State Central War Committee on 28 June 1940 were all proclaimed here, and during the Second World War the war committee staged a large war exhibition on the site.
It was also a place of exclusion. The ground and the path running from it to the nearby Ernakulam Shiva temple were out of bounds to people of the lower castes, and that restriction lifted only with the opening of temple entry.
Alongside the official use it became the city's main open space: exhibitions, military parades, temple festival processions, football matches between the local Town Club and British army sides, and for many years the principal cricket ground in Kochi, with a band shed at the north-east corner as its pavilion. At one end, the Kulapuramalika was where Appan Thampuran and Kunjukuttan Thampuran launched the literary magazine Rasikaranjini.
The compound shrank across the twentieth century. Close to half of the original ground went to residential quarters for the District Collector and for judges of the Kerala High Court, and further land was lost to the widening of Durbar Hall Road and to parking for the Rama Varma Club.
In 1989 the first floor of the hall was handed to the Kerala Lalithakala Akademi, the state academy of fine arts, and the building's principal function became that of an art gallery showing national and international exhibitions alongside work by Kerala artists.
The ground, by then neglected and used partly as a dumping area, was restored and beautified by the District Tourism Promotion Council at a cost of about ₹49.94 lakh, adding an open-air auditorium, a band stand, light towers and pay-and-park facilities. It is now held by the Revenue Department.
The Kochi Biennale Foundation subsequently carried out an extensive renovation of the hall itself, upgrading it to a museum-quality exhibition venue, and it has been used as a Biennale site — including in the 2014 edition.
Why visit
Because it is free, central, and after the Biennale Foundation's renovation it is genuinely the best-equipped gallery space in Kochi.
Because the programme is real contemporary art — national and international shows, not a tourist display of handicrafts.
Because the building is an 1850s royal court hall, and the transformation from durbar to public gallery is the more interesting exhibit.
Because the ground outside is where the Cochin state was proclaimed into its modern shape in 1938, and where, on the same grass, whole castes were forbidden to walk.
Because it takes twenty to forty minutes and sits in the middle of mainland Ernakulam, so it costs you almost nothing to look in.
And because it is one of the few places in the city where you see what Kochi's art scene is doing now rather than what Kochi did in the sixteenth century.
