What to expect
Highlights
- Museum visit at Kerala Folklore Museum
- Indoor cultural or historical context
- Easy pairing with nearby food and heritage stops
The story
A private antique dealer spent seven years and 62 craftsmen assembling this museum at Thevara out of roughly 25 dismantled heritage buildings from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century. The three floors are not just floors: the ground is built in the Malabar style, the first in Kochi, the second in Travancore, so you climb through Kerala’s three architectural regions on your way to a top-floor theatre. It opened in 2009 and holds several thousand objects. It is the most interesting building in Ernakulam city, and the way it was made is a genuinely awkward story.
The story of Kerala Folklore Museum
Start with the building, because the building is the exhibit. Carved wooden ceilings, pillars, door frames, beams and whole structural bays were bought from old houses and temples being broken up around Kerala, brought to Thevara and reassembled into a single three-storey structure. Look up constantly — the ceilings are where most of the craftsmanship went.
The floors are organised by region and you should treat that as the tour. The Malabar style of the north, on the ground floor, is heavier and plainer. The Kochi style on the first floor is the transitional middle. Travancore on the second is the most ornate, and it is also where the collection gets richest.
The objects run to several thousand — sources variously say over four thousand and over five thousand — and cover ritual masks, Kathakali and Theyyam costume and headgear, temple bronzes, oil lamps, terracotta, jewellery, manuscripts, musical instruments and everyday utensils. The Theyyam and Kathakali material is the strongest part: seeing the headdresses and face-ornaments at rest, close up and unlit, is a very different experience from seeing them on a performer.
The top floor is a theatre built on the lines of a koothambalam, the temple performance hall, with a painted wooden ceiling. There are regularly scheduled evening performances of Kathakali and other classical forms. If you can time your visit to end there, do — the building was designed to be finished that way.
Practically: it is at Thevara, south of the city centre and away from Fort Kochi, so it needs a deliberate trip rather than being something you pass. There is an entry charge, a separate camera charge, and the performance is usually ticketed separately. Give it two hours if you want to actually look rather than walk.
Give the ceilings one deliberate pass before you look at a single object. The display cases are at eye level and the craftsmanship is not — carved wooden ceilings, beams and door frames from two dozen dismantled buildings are the reason the place is worth the trip out to Thevara, and they are the part almost every visitor walks straight under. Notice where the joinery changes between floors, where the carving suddenly gets denser, and where a beam has obviously arrived from somewhere else entirely.
The performance holdings are the other reason. Theyyam and Kathakali costume, masks and headgear are meant to be met in motion — at night, in firelight or under a stage lamp, worn by someone who has spent hours being transformed. Seen at rest in daylight at arm's length, the same objects become visible as things that were made: joinery, mirror-work, pith, painted wood, cloth and metal, and a weight that makes you wonder how anyone dances in them. That is the other half of the art, and you cannot get it at a performance.
Legend & myth
The strongest thing in this museum is not a legend about the building. It is a belief that the collection itself depends on, and that the display cases cannot show you.
A large part of the performance holding is Theyyam — the ritual form of north Kerala, whose costumes, face-ornaments and towering headdresses are here at rest under glass. In Theyyam the performer is not understood to be portraying a deity. He is understood to become one. The transformation is staged in two steps the tradition is precise about: the mudi, the great headdress, is placed on him only once he is seated before the shrine, and at the completion of the costume he is given a small mirror to look into — the mukhadarshanam, the face-seeing. What he is said to see in it is not himself. From that moment the man is addressed as the god, and villagers who have known him all their lives come to him for blessing and judgement.
Hold that against a display case and the exhibit gets stranger and better. The headdress in front of you is an object whose entire meaning lies in a state it is not currently in. It is the most powerful thing in the room and, sitting still under a light, it is inert — which is either the honest limit of what a museum can do, or the most interesting thing a museum has ever admitted about its own collection. Either way, look at the mirror-work and the pith and the painted wood, and remember that the point of all of it was to stop being craft the moment it was worn.
There is no folklore attached to the building itself, and we have not invented any. What follows is the ordinary sort of uncertainty that surrounds a young private institution.
Two details usually left vague can be settled from the museum's own account. The founder's name, which circulates in several mangled forms including George Thariakan, is George J Thaliath. He came to it through the trade rather than from outside it: his father, Jacob V. Thaliath, dealt in Indian art before him, and the museum was built with his wife, Annie. He describes something over three decades of handling antiquities.
The object count is the second. “Over 4,000” and “over 5,000” both circulate widely, sometimes on the same page, and the museum's own figure for what is on display is around four thousand. Use that. It is worth noticing that a collection assembled by a working dealer will always have a moving boundary between stock and exhibit, which is probably where the discrepancy comes from in the first place.
There is also a persistent impression among visitors that this is a government or state museum, presumably because of the name. It is not. It is a private museum built from a private collection, which is exactly what makes both its ambition and its methods unusual.
That distinction is not pedantry, and the museum's own language gives the game away in an interesting direction. Thaliath calls the place a Temple of Art, and adds that no place of worship in the world sustains itself without believers. Read that as the mission statement of a devotee and it is charming. Read it as a description of the business model and it is candid: a private museum with no state funding is kept alive entirely by the people who choose to walk in and pay. Every ticket, camera fee and performance seat is what stands between four thousand objects and the auction they came from. It is unusual for an institution to say so out loud, and it is a fair thing to keep in mind at the counter.
Read the full history of Kerala Folklore Museum 530 more words
History
The museum opened in 2009 at Thevara in Kochi, the project of a private antique dealer and collector who had spent years acquiring architectural material and artefacts across Kerala.
Construction took about seven years and employed some 62 craftsmen. Rather than building new and filling it with objects, the museum was assembled from roughly 25 antique and heritage structures dating from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, dismantled elsewhere and rebuilt here.
The three storeys were deliberately executed in the three regional architectural traditions of Kerala — Malabar, Kochi and Travancore — making the building itself a comparative exhibit, with the koothambalam-style performance theatre at the top.
The collection has grown to several thousand objects spanning ritual, performance, domestic and decorative material from across the state, with the performance-art holdings — Kathakali, Theyyam, Koodiyattam, Mohiniyattam, Ottamthullal — among the strongest.
There is a legal reason so much carved Kerala timber was available to buy in the first place, and it explains this building better than any account of the founder's taste. The great houses of Kerala — the nalukettu and ettukettu of the Nair and Nambudiri tharavadus — were built for joint families holding property in common. The Kerala Joint Hindu Family System (Abolition) Act, 1975, in force from 1 December 1976, ended that: members of a joint family were deemed thereafter to hold as tenants-in-common, which meant any one of them could demand partition and realise a share. Add the move to nuclear households and the cost of maintaining a timber building in a monsoon climate, and thousands of tharavadu houses became assets to be divided rather than homes to be kept. What could actually be divided was the teak and the anjili. That is the market this museum was assembled out of.
The uncomfortable part of that history is worth stating plainly, because the museum does not hide it either: a museum dedicated to preserving Kerala’s heritage was built out of two dozen dismantled heritage buildings. The defence is that these structures were already being demolished and their carved timber would otherwise have been sold off or burnt, and that is very often true of old Kerala houses. But it means the building is simultaneously an act of rescue and an act of removal — material saved, and saved by being taken somewhere else. Both things are true and the place is more interesting if you hold them together.
Why visit
Because the building is a better exhibit than most of what is in it — three storeys, three regional architectural styles, reassembled from two dozen old structures.
Because the Theyyam and Kathakali costume and headgear, seen at rest and close up, are extraordinary, and you will not get that close at a performance.
Because the top-floor koothambalam-style theatre holds regular evening performances, so the visit can end with the art form rather than a display case about it.
Because it is a genuine change of register from Fort Kochi's colonial trail — this is Kerala looking at itself, not at its visitors.
And because the way it was assembled raises a real question about what preservation costs, which is more than most museums give you to think about.
