What to expect
Highlights
- Heritage experience at Broadway Market
- Architecture, local stories and old trade/cultural routes
- Good fit for guided walks and nearby cafes/shops
The story
Almost every visitor to Kochi crosses the harbour to Fort Kochi and never walks the one road where the city actually shops. Broadway runs a few minutes inland from Marine Drive: pedestrianised, a century old, and packed with something like a thousand shops selling textiles, provisions, spices, gold and hardware to people who live here. It is also, despite the name, narrow — which is a decent introduction to how much of what is said about Broadway holds up.
The story of Broadway Market
Broadway changes character as you walk it, and walking the whole length is the only sensible way to do it. One stretch is textiles, bolt after bolt of it, with shopkeepers who will unroll fifteen things you did not ask for. Another is provisions and spices — sacks open at the mouth, tea and coffee sold by weight, prices that make the tourist counters in Fort Kochi look absurd. Then gold, then household goods and hardware. It is not zoned by design; it accreted.
What holds it together is that Broadway is primarily a wholesale market that also sells retail. Most of the wholesale dealers in Kochi are based in or around here, which is why local retailers from across the district buy on it, and why the spice market at the Broadway end is a wholesale market rather than a souvenir counter. You are shopping in the supply chain, not at the end of it, and that is the whole reason the prices are what they are.
It runs in a rough two-kilometre band between Marine Drive and MG Road, with the old market canal cutting through Broadway and Market Road, and it adjoins Ernakulam Market — more wholesale again — on its northern side. Treat the whole block as one thing.
It is car-free, which is what makes it pleasant, and it is at its best and worst in the evening. From about six it fills with people who have finished work, and the noise and press of it is the real Broadway — but if you actually want to buy something and have the shopkeeper talk to you, come in the morning.
The old trade is still legible if you look for it. Broadway had a set of celebrated tailors from the beginning of the twentieth century — J. Newfield and Company, whose three-piece suits were the best in the city; Koya Hassan; the Bharatha Tailoring Company, which made the uniforms for the State chauffeurs. The White Hall Silk Palace, set up in the 1920s by a Muslim trader from Palakkad, was the textile address. Valavi and Company opened here in 1899 dealing in paper, tyres and liquor imported from Europe. Some of those names have gone and some have not, and the mix of survivals and replacements is most of what makes it interesting to walk.
Among the newer shopfronts there are still old provision stores with wooden counters and glass jars, trading much as they have for decades. They are worth going into. So are the small eating places in the lanes off it, which do better Kerala food than a great deal of what is cooked for visitors across the water.
Ask for shops by name and the place opens up, because the old ones are still trading and people will point you to them. Prabhusons, the general merchants, has been going roughly ninety years in a building said to be a good deal older than that. Pen House has been selling pens for over half a century and has a local reputation of the kind that cannot be bought — a retired banker's line about it, that if you cannot find a refill there you will not find it anywhere in Kerala, is the sort of thing people in Kochi actually say. Pai and Company for books, Bharat Coffee House, Caravan for ice cream and the Cochin Cycle Emporium are the other names that come up unprompted from anyone who grew up here. None of them is a heritage attraction and none is presented as one, which is precisely why walking in works.
The practical case for Broadway is that it is ten minutes from the Ernakulam boat jetty. If you are staying on the mainland — as most people on a budget in Kochi are — this is what you do with an evening, and it pairs naturally with a walk up Marine Drive for the sunset afterwards.
Legend & myth
The name first, because it is the thing everybody asks and nobody can answer. The standard explanation is that it was the broadest road in the young town, when most of central Ernakulam including MG Road was open ground. The difficulty is that Broadway is conspicuously narrow — narrow enough that it eventually had to be closed to cars. The alternative reading is the obvious one: Broadway is a name the British Empire exported to dozens of colonial towns. Neither version has a source behind it we would call settled.
Broadway is regularly described as one of the oldest shopping areas in Kochi. On the Ernakulam mainland that is true; for the city as a whole it is not. The market this street descends from was at Mattancherry, across the water, and is centuries older. Broadway is the successor, not the origin.
The dating of that move is looser than the telling suggests. It is usually put at the British takeover of Cochin from the Dutch, in the closing years of the eighteenth century. But every Broadway business whose founding is documented — Valavi in 1899, the tailoring houses from around 1900, White Hall Silk Palace in the 1920s — belongs to the turn of the twentieth century. As a street of shops Broadway looks about a hundred and twenty years old, not two hundred and thirty.
One much-repeated statistic is worth reading twice. The street is said to see a minimum of 5,000 people on holidays but up to 20,000 on working days — the reverse of what anyone who has stood here on an Onam weekend would expect. Most likely these are trade counts from a wholesale street rather than shopper counts, but the figure circulates without that caveat, as does the ₹5 crore monthly sales average the Broadway Shop Owners Association gave for 2016.
Finally, Broadway is sometimes written up as a conserved heritage street. It is not: two conservation schemes were drawn up, in 2009 and 2013, and neither was carried out. What you walk down is an unconserved working street — arguably the better outcome, but it should not be called restored.
There is a better answer to the name question than either of the ones usually offered, and it is that the question is the wrong one. Broadway was not built as a road at all. It grew up beside water. The Market Canal ran through here to Vembanad, and a jetty at the market end took large canoes bringing goods down from Kottayam, Changanassery and Alappuzha — which is how a wholesale market on this spot makes any sense, given that the street is too narrow to have ever been a serious cart route. Mondays and Fridays were the market days. The width of the lane was never the point; the depth of the canal was. The canal is still there, running black now and carrying the city's waste, and almost nobody walking the shops connects the two.
The largest omission, though, is not about the street's shape but about who traded on it. The Jewish story of Kochi is told almost entirely across the water at the Paradesi synagogue in Mattancherry, and that is not where most of Kerala's Jews were. The older and far larger Malabari community was on this side, and by one well-known account held the upper hand in the Ernakulam market trade until the migrations to Israel of the 1950s and 60s emptied it. Two of their synagogues stand on Jew Street, between Market Road and Broadway — inside this block, a few minutes from the shops. Kadavumbhagam, traditionally dated to 1200 and rebuilt many times on the same ground, closed around 1972 when its Torah scrolls went to Israel; it survives behind a plant and aquarium shop called Cochin Blossoms, kept by Elias Josephai, known locally as Babu, and was renovated in 2018. Thekkumbhagam, alongside, is closed. A visitor can spend a whole day on the Jewish heritage of Kochi and never learn that the community's Ernakulam half is standing behind a fish tank on a market lane.
Read the full history of Broadway Market 474 more words
History
Broadway's ancestor was not on this side of the water. The main market of the Kochi area was at Mattancherry, and it was under the British — after they took Cochin from the Dutch — that the commercial centre of gravity shifted across to the Ernakulam mainland and this street became the retail heart of the city.
For much of the early twentieth century it was the only shopping street in Ernakulam. Valavi and Company opened on it in 1899; a cluster of celebrated tailors followed from around 1900, and the White Hall Silk Palace, founded in the 1920s by a Muslim trader from Palakkad, established the textile character the street has never lost.
It has been the city's principal shopping street for more than a century, absorbing every retail change of that period without losing the basic form of a narrow pedestrian lane lined with small independent shops. Roughly a thousand of them trade within about a two-kilometre radius, and most of Kochi's wholesale dealers are based here.
The market's original logistics were waterborne. The Market Canal, connected through to Vembanad, ran to a jetty at the market end, and large canoes brought produce and goods down from Kottayam, Changanassery and Alappuzha; Mondays and Fridays were the market days. The Jewish community of Ernakulam — the Malabari Jews, distinct from the Paradesi community at Mattancherry — were prominent in this trade until the migrations to Israel of the 1950s and 60s, and two of their synagogues, Kadavumbhagam and Thekkumbhagam, stand on Jew Street between Market Road and Broadway. Kadavumbhagam closed around 1972 and was renovated in 2018; Thekkumbhagam remains closed.
In 2009 the Centre for Heritage, Environment and Development and the Kerala Sustainable Urban Development Project submitted a ₹30-crore conservation scheme for Broadway under JNNURM. It failed on cost escalation and defects in the detailed project report, and a revised report of roughly ₹25 crore followed in 2013. The street remains substantially unconserved.
Why visit
It is the city Kochi's visitors almost entirely miss, and it is a ten-minute walk from the ferry they took to miss it.
Spices, tea and coffee are markedly better value here than at any tourist-facing counter in Fort Kochi, because this is a wholesale street and this is where the city buys them.
Being car-free makes it one of the few genuinely pleasant street walks in central Ernakulam.
The century-old trade is still readable in the shopfronts — tailors, silk houses and provision merchants that date to the turn of the twentieth century, sitting between the phone shops.
The food in the lanes off it is honest, cheap and mostly aimed at shoppers rather than visitors.
It is free, central, open late, and works as an evening when the museums have shut.
In the run-up to Vishu, Onam and Christmas it is one of the liveliest places in Kerala.
