Village walks

The story of Village walks

A guided walk here is arranged rather than scheduled. There is no ticket office and no departure board: you fix it through a homestay, a village host or a local guide, and the route is built out of whoever is working that morning. That is why two visitors can do a 'Kumbalangi village walk' on consecutive days and see quite different things, and why asking in advance which working stops are included is the single most useful question you can put.

The toddy tapper is usually the moment people remember. He goes up a coconut palm using a loop of rope between his feet and nothing else — no ladder, no harness — taps the inflorescence, and collects the sap that ferments into toddy through the day. It takes him a couple of minutes and it is genuinely alarming to watch. It is also an ordinary job that several men in the village do several times a day.

Coir is the older trade. Coconut husk is soaked in the backwater for months until it softens, then beaten and the fibre twisted into rope — by hand, or on a simple spinning frame. It is slow, repetitive, badly paid work that built a large part of coastal Kerala's economy, and seeing ten minutes of it tells you more about this coast than a museum case would.

Then there is the least photogenic stop and, for most people, the most interesting: clam shell being burnt for lime. Clams are collected from the creek beds by feel, with the feet, in shallow water; the meat is eaten or sold and the shells accumulate in mounds and are fired to make lime, which goes into building and whitewash. Nothing about it is picturesque. It is a complete little economy running off the bottom of a creek.

The rest of a good route fills in around those: prawn filtration at a sluice gate, with the pokkali cycle explained where you can see the gate; a man building a country boat, or a scale model of one, and the joinery that holds a hull together without a drawing; a net platform; somebody's yard. The walk is two to three hours and it is almost entirely flat. The distance is not what tires people — the heat is.

If the route reaches a Chinese net, stand on the platform rather than photographing it from the bank. There are said to be more than a hundred of them working in the water around this village, and unlike the row at Fort Kochi they are not being dipped for an audience — they go down and come up on the tide, four or five men leaning on the counterweight stones, for whatever the creek gives that hour. The catch is frequently disappointing and nobody pretends otherwise. Watching a lift come up nearly empty, and watching how little fuss is made about it, tells you more about the economics of this coast than a good haul would.

Legend & myth

The most remarkable thing you will walk past here looks like a slightly scruffy paddy field, and it is one of the oldest continuously practised farming systems on earth. Pokkali is a saline-tolerant rice, grown in these waterlogged coastal fields for something on the order of three thousand years, and the way it is farmed is genuinely difficult to believe when you first hear it.

The system alternates. Through the monsoon, when rain pushes the salt back, the fields grow rice — a tall, salt-hardy variety that tolerates water that would kill any ordinary crop. Then the harvest comes, the sluice gates open, and salt water and prawn larvae flood in. For the saline months the same field is a prawn pond. When the prawns are harvested the gates open again, the rains return, and it becomes a rice field. Rice, prawn, rice, prawn, turning with the seasons in the same square of mud.

And nothing is added. No fertiliser, no pesticide. The rice takes its nutrients from what the prawns leave behind; the prawns feed on what the rice stubble leaves behind. It is a closed organic loop that was running for millennia before anyone invented the word organic, and it is the reason pokkali rice carries a Geographical Indication tag, granted in 2007.

The uncomfortable part is that it is going. Pokkali cultivation has contracted sharply — the rice half of the cycle is labour-intensive and poorly paid, prawns alone are more profitable, and a system that only works if both halves keep turning does not survive one of them being abandoned. Commentary in the agricultural press has described the variety as possibly heading for extinction. If your walk takes you past a working pokkali field with the gate being managed, you are looking at something that has been done here since before the Roman ships came for pepper, and that may not be done here in fifty years.

There is an origin story attached to the rice, and it is the kind that sounds invented until you notice how well it fits the geography. Tradition holds that pokkali was not a coastal crop at all: it grew in the upper reaches of the Western Ghats, in what is now Idukki, until a great flood on the Periyar in the fourteenth century carried the seed down the river and spread it across the low ground at Ezhikkara and the coastal villages of Ernakulam, Alappuzha and Thrissur. A grain that came down a river in a disaster and then learned to live in salt is a good deal more interesting than a grain that was simply planted, and it is a story worth asking a farmer about, because the version you get in the field is rarely the version in print.

The name carries the same idea. Pokkam is height in Malayalam and aali is plant, and the rice earns it: to keep its head above the tide it grows to about a metre and a half, far taller than anything in an inland paddy. At harvest only the top thirty centimetres or so is cut — just the panicle — and the whole standing forest of stalk is left in the water to rot down, which is precisely what the prawns arriving in November come to feed on. The apparently careless harvest is the mechanism.

One more thing to look for at the gate. The prawn half of the year is often not worked by the landowner alone. The flooded field is leased or run jointly for those five months — chemmeen kettu, the prawn tie-up, managed by a farmers' collective, a karshaka samajam, or by a single bidder who has taken it for the season. So the man you meet minding a sluice in January may have no connection to the man who grew rice in the same mud in September, and the field changes hands twice a year without changing owner. Ask whose kettu it is; the answer is usually a small local history in itself.