What to expect
Highlights
- Museum visit at David Hall Art Gallery
- Indoor cultural or historical context
- Easy pairing with nearby food and heritage stops
The story
A low white Dutch bungalow on the north side of the Fort Kochi parade ground, David Hall is around three hundred years old and is now a contemporary art gallery with a garden café behind it. It is also the building in Fort Kochi with the most confidently repeated history and the least reliable one: almost every account attaches it to a famous Dutch botanist who was dead before it was built, and explains its name with a man who does not appear in the family records. Both stories are worth unpicking on the spot.
The story of David Hall Art Gallery
The building is a textbook Dutch colonial bungalow for a wet tropical coast: thick walls that hold the cool, a deep shading verandah, high ceilings to let hot air rise, and a low broad roof built for monsoon rather than snow. It is a European plan rewritten for Kerala's climate, and it works — sit on the verandah in July with the rain coming down and you will understand the design better than any caption could explain it.
It faces the parade ground, and that placement is deliberate. This was the drill and assembly space of the European quarter, and the buildings around it were the establishment's buildings. A house on this square was a house belonging to the administration.
Inside it is now a gallery. The programme is contemporary and changes, and it is the reason the doors are open at all — this is a working exhibition space in a private heritage building, not a ticketed monument with a guided historical tour. Behind the house is a garden café, and in practice that is where most visitors end up, under the trees, for considerably longer than they planned.
There is a real pleasure in the modesty of the place. After the Basilica's painted ceiling and the Biennale's warehouse scale, David Hall is domestic. You can see the whole of it in twenty minutes. Its interest is in the fabric — the thickness of a wall, the depth of a verandah, the height of a ceiling — and in the argument about who actually lived here.
It is worth knowing who is running it, because it explains the atmosphere. CGH Earth, the Kerala hotel group, acquired and restored the building in 2003 and operates the gallery as a not-for-profit: young and local artists exhibit here without paying for the space. That is an unusual thing to find in Fort Kochi, where most restored heritage property has been turned to straightforwardly commercial use, and it is why the shows here are frequently by people you have not heard of rather than by names the market has already priced.
What the building conspicuously lacks is any interpretation of its own history, which is a pity, because that history is genuinely contested and rather more interesting than the version on the signage elsewhere.
Legend & myth
Two stories are told about David Hall by almost every source, including official tourism material. Neither survives contact with a date.
The first is that it was the residence of Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede tot Drakenstein, the Dutch commander who compiled the Hortus Malabaricus. The building is usually dated to about 1695. Van Rheede governed Dutch Malabar from 1669 to 1676, and he died at sea on 15 December 1691. A man cannot live in a house raised four years after his death. Either the date is wrong or the residence is — and since the building's date is itself unsettled, with 1665 also proposed, the honest position is that the connection is unproven and the popular version is, as stated, impossible.
It is worth being clear about what is not in doubt. Van Rheede was really here, he really governed Dutch Malabar from Cochin, and the Hortus Malabaricus is real and extraordinary: twelve volumes describing some 740 plants of this coast, compiled with around twenty-five collaborators, printed in Amsterdam between 1678 and 1693, with plant names given in several languages including Malayalam. The scholarship is genuine. Only the address is doubtful.
The second story is the name. You will read almost everywhere that David Hall is named after David Koder, a Jewish businessman who lived there. The difficulty is that the Koder family record does not contain a David Koder: Samuel Koder's sons are named as Elias, Shabdai — the S. S. Koder of Koder House — and Cecil. The David in the name appears instead to come from the other side of the family. The last Jewish owner is given as Gladys Koder, wife of S. S. Koder, and her father was E. D. David, who died in 1958. On that reading the house is named for the David family, not for a Koder called David.
We publish this unresolved rather than settled. The genealogy is well documented and the popular attribution is not, but we have not seen a deed or a contemporary document naming the house, and until we do we will not claim to have closed the question. What we will not do is repeat a name that the family record does not support.
There is a detail about van Rheede that settles the first question rather firmly, and it is oddly moving. He did not die in Kochi and he is not buried here. He died at sea on 15 December 1691 and was interred at Surat, where his tomb still stands: an enormous domed and columned mausoleum in the Dutch cemetery there, built on a scale designed to eclipse the tombs of his English rivals the Oxendens next door. A Dutch admiral who saw it in 1775 wrote that it exceeded every other monument in that ground for size, elegance of architecture, magnificence of ornament and richness of material.
So the man whose supposed Kochi residence this is has a grave nine hundred kilometres north, in a cemetery seventy years older than the one at Fort Kochi, under a monument of exactly the kind the Dutch here refused to build. Whatever van Rheede's connection to this address was, it ended before this house is generally thought to have existed.
None of which touches the achievement. The Hortus Malabaricus is real and enormous: twelve volumes on some 740 plants of this coast, compiled with around twenty-five collaborators, printed at Amsterdam between 1678 and 1693, with names recorded in several languages including Malayalam. It is one of the earliest serious European works of Indian botany and it was built on local knowledge that the volumes themselves acknowledge. The scholarship is not in question here. Only the address is.
Read the full history of David Hall Art Gallery 616 more words
History
The building is generally attributed to the Dutch East India Company and dated to about 1695, although 1665 is also proposed and the true date is not established. It is usually described as the survivor of a group of three houses the Company built in Fort Kochi in the later seventeenth century.
Those houses are said to have been raised partly from the material of demolished churches. That detail is easy to skim past and worth pausing on: the Dutch took Cochin from the Catholic Portuguese in 1663 and pulled down a great deal of Portuguese religious building. Stone from destroyed churches going into Company housing is the physical residue of a change of regime and of religion, recycled into domestic architecture.
During the Dutch period the building is reported to have accommodated military personnel — consistent with its position facing the parade ground, though the sources for this are secondary.
Its later history is Jewish Kochi. The house passed into the hands of a prominent Cochin Jewish family and takes its name from them; the last Jewish owner is given as Gladys Koder, daughter of E. D. David and wife of S. S. Koder of Koder House. Fort Kochi and Mattancherry held one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world, and the near-complete emigration of that community in the twentieth century is the reason such houses changed hands.
That last sentence covers a great deal of ground very quickly, and it is the part of the building's history that most deserves to be slowed down. A house does not pass out of a family because of a transaction alone. The Cochin Jewish community left over a few decades in the middle of the twentieth century, and what remained afterwards was property — synagogues, houses, warehouses, cemeteries — held by people who had gone, in a town that had to decide what to do with it. David Hall is one answer to that question and Koder House is another; the buildings are a few minutes apart and both now serve visitors. Whatever else the naming argument is about, it is an argument about the last family to live here, and there is nobody left in Fort Kochi who can settle it from memory.
The building's present life dates from 2003, when it was acquired and restored by CGH Earth, the Kerala hotel group, and reopened as an art gallery and café. The gallery is run as a not-for-profit venture with a stated focus on young and local artists, who are able to exhibit without paying for the space — which is an unusual arrangement in a quarter where almost every heritage building has been turned to a commercial use, and worth knowing before you assume the café is the point of it.
In 2012 David Hall was one of the venues of the first Kochi-Muziris Biennale, and it has continued to host Biennale and other exhibitions since, alongside its life as a gallery and café.
Why visit
Because it is the best-preserved example in Fort Kochi of how Europeans actually built to live in this climate, rather than how they built to worship or to trade.
Because the garden café behind it is one of the few genuinely quiet corners of a quarter that gets very busy.
Because the contested history is more rewarding than the official one, and you can stand in the building while you weigh it up.
Because it connects the Dutch quarter to Jewish Kochi in a single address — the two stories usually get told in different parts of town.
And because it is free, central, and takes twenty minutes, which makes it the easiest good decision on a Fort Kochi walk.
