Subhash Park

The story of Subhash Park

The park works because of where it sits. Ernakulam Boat Jetty is immediately alongside — the busiest passenger water in Kerala, with ferries running to Fort Kochi, Vypin and Willingdon Island — so the park is both a waiting room and a viewing platform for one of the more watchable bits of the city's daily traffic.

Its western edge looks out over the harbour and the Vembanad water, which is the whole reason to walk to that side. From there the Marine Drive promenade runs north, and it is about fifteen minutes on foot up to the Rainbow Bridge, which makes the park the southern anchor of the city's best waterfront walk.

The thing worth slowing down for is in the southern part of the grounds. In 1990 the park hosted the first International Symposium of Sculptors held here — a sculptors' camp run jointly by Kerala Kalapeedom and the Kochi Municipal Corporation, coordinated by the Japanese sculptor Hiroshi Mikami with Kalapeedom's director. Fourteen artists took part, seven from abroad and seven Indian, and rather than shipping finished work in they made it on site, in the park, over the course of the camp. The results were installed across the southern quarter and are still standing. They are not municipal ornament, though that is how nearly every visitor reads them.

By the 2010s a good many of them were damaged and weathered. A restoration camp ran on site from 23 January to 4 February 2018, with artists repairing the works in the open where the public could watch and ask questions, and a handbook was produced to document what was there. The restored sculptures were formally rededicated to the city on 6 February 2018.

The park itself has been renovated over the same period — ornamental lighting, musical walkways, new landscaping — and it fills up in the evening with families, which is either the appeal or the reason to come at five rather than seven. Alongside it there is a children's park with ride-on attractions, a small train and a layout built to teach traffic rules, which is a genuinely useful hour if you are travelling with children.

Day to day it is managed on the Kochi Municipal Corporation's behalf by the Centre for Heritage, Environment and Development, the same city body involved in the sculpture restoration — which is why the maintenance here has a heritage flavour that most corporation parks do not.

Set expectations correctly and it is a good stop. It is not a destination the way Fort Kochi or Mattancherry are, and it is not worth crossing the harbour for. It is the amenity that makes staying on the mainland pleasant, and mainland Ernakulam is where most visitors to Kochi actually sleep.

Legend & myth

The park has no folklore, but it has a dating problem, and we published it here unresolved before we could resolve it. The two claims repeated on every listing are that the park was started in 1903 by the Kochi Maharaja Rajarshi Rama Varma, and that it was called Irwin Park after Lord Irwin, Viceroy of India. Both cannot describe the same act, because Irwin was not appointed Viceroy until 3 April 1926. The answer is that the park had a third name first, and the city has quietly dropped it: when it opened it was Rama Varma Park, named for the Maharaja who ordered it. The Irwin name was applied more than two decades later, during Irwin's viceroyalty of 1926 to 1931, to a park that already existed. So the park has had three names, not two, and the founding date and the colonial name were never in conflict — they simply belong to different events, and the first name fell out of the story.

The 1903 date itself has a context worth having. That is the year of the Delhi Durbar, the imperial assembly at which Rama Varma XV was made a Knight Grand Commander of the Star of India, and the park is said to have been conceived on the journey to a durbar — the Maharaja wanting for Ernakulam the tree-lined public avenues he had seen described in Europe and America. The same impulse produced the road: the British Resident of Cochin was sufficiently taken with the flowering trees along it that he renamed the street Park Avenue, which is still what it is called. Rama Varma XV went on to abdicate in 1914, an almost unheard-of act for an Indian ruling prince, and lived another eighteen years as the Ozhinja Valiya Thampuran, the Abdicated Highness, dying at Thrissur in January 1932. His statue stands in the park he ordered, above a lawn that no longer carries his name.

The size is the second soft figure. Eleven and a half acres is quoted on essentially every listing, including our own dossier, and no source we have found defines what those acres contain. The fenced green does not read as eleven and a half acres on the ground; the figure appears to describe the whole waterfront block — park, children's park and the adjoining maidan — rather than the garden itself.

The third is a misattribution, and a documentation failure behind it. The sculptures in the southern part of the park are almost universally taken for decorative civic furniture, and are described that way in the few guides that mention them at all. They are the works of the 1990 international sculptors' camp, carved on site by fourteen artists. What makes this worse is that we cannot tell you who those fourteen were: no published source we can find lists them, the works carry no labels in the park, and the handbook produced during the 2018 restoration does not appear to be online. A city commissioned an international sculpture collection, then mislaid the names. Do not, incidentally, believe anyone who tells you Kanayi Kunhiraman's Mukkola Perumal is here — that one stands at the GCDA complex in Kadavanthra.

And a word on the name change itself, because it is usually presented as a simple post-independence swap. It was that, but it was not neutral: a park attached to the name of a serving Viceroy was rededicated to Subhash Chandra Bose, the nationalist who raised an army against British India. On a piece of ground where students had been beaten in 1930 for protesting against the princely government, the choice reads less like renaming and more like an answer.