What to expect
Highlights
- Heritage experience at Spice markets
- Architecture, local stories and old trade/cultural routes
- Good fit for guided walks and nearby cafes/shops
The story
Bazaar Road does not look like anything. It is a narrow, shabby, lorry-clogged street of shuttered warehouses running north from Jew Town, and most visitors walk it for four minutes on the way to somewhere else. Then a shutter goes up and the smell hits — ginger, then turmeric, then, unmistakably, pepper — and you understand that you are standing in what was, for six hundred years, one of the busiest trading corridors on the Indian Ocean. Rather less of it is trading now. That is the story.
The story of Spice markets
The spice quarter is not a market in the sense of stalls. It is a street of godowns — warehouses, mostly Dutch- and British-era, with the original loading doors still in place — where consignments arrived from the hills to be dried, cleaned, graded, sacked, weighed and sold on. The work is done on the floor: pepper spread out, sorted by hand and by eye, sacked and stacked. There is no counter and no display. If a shutter is up, you are looking into a business, not a shop.
Walk it in the morning on a weekday and you get the whole thing — handcarts, lorries reversing badly, men carrying sacks that clearly weigh more than they do, and the smell changing every twenty metres depending on whose doors are open. Walk it at four in the afternoon and you get a street of closed shutters and a few antique dealers. The single decision that determines whether this visit works is what time you arrive.
The trading method the street is remembered for is worth knowing about even though you will not see it. Buyer and seller would join hands and a cloth would be thrown over them; the price was then negotiated by finger pressure, hidden under the fabric, so that no one else in the room learned what was paid. The world's first pepper exchange was established a few hundred metres from here, and an international pepper trade still has a presence in the quarter.
What you are mostly seeing now, though, is contraction. Reporting on the quarter describes almost all the godowns as closed and much of the Gujarati community that ran the spice business as having left. The causes were not local: volatile international demand, competition from Southeast Asian markets, and the rise of spice industries in Latin America and Africa. Kochi did not stop being good at this. The world stopped needing it to be.
The buildings survived by becoming something else. Some godowns are galleries now — several sea-facing warehouses were sold to Kochi-Muziris Biennale venues. Others are cafes. A good many became antique shops feeding the Jew Town trade at the southern end. It makes for an odd walk: a working street where a decreasing share of the work is the work it was built for.
Two small details reward looking for. The bazaar's traditional extent runs from the Boundary Canal down to the Mattancherry bus stand, which is a longer stretch than the tourist section anyone walks. And the men moving sacks between the godowns and the vans carry a kol — a short stick — tucked behind the ear, which is a tally: one notch of the day's count per load, in a trade that ran on trust and finger-signals long before it ran on invoices.
Legend & myth
Bazaar Road has no folklore. It has claims, which is a different thing, and the claims are the most interesting reading on the street because they are repeated everywhere and checked almost nowhere. It is worth walking it knowing which of the things you will be told are documented and which are marketing that has hardened into fact.
The biggest is that this is the site of the world's first pepper exchange. You will see it in Kerala tourism copy, in newspaper features and on shop signage. We can now put a real institution behind the sentence, though not the superlative. The India Pepper and Spice Trade Association, IPSTA, sits in Kochi and ran organised pepper futures from 1957; it was recognised as a commodity derivative exchange under the Forward Contracts (Regulation) Act of 1952, and the Government of India granted it permanent recognition for futures trading in pepper on 8 December 1961. It is described as the oldest commodity exchange in the country and the first recognised regional commodity exchange for black pepper. First in India is documented. First in the world is not, and pepper was being brokered on this coast for centuries before any exchange existed to formalise it.
What the signage never mentions is that the exchange stopped. In 2012 a consignment was seized after being found adulterated with mineral oil; confidence collapsed, litigation followed, and organised pepper futures effectively froze. Reported turnover on IPSTA's platform was ₹12.58 crore in 2014–15 and ₹63.13 crore in 2015–16, and there has been no trading on it since April 2016. SEBI issued an order in respect of IPSTA on 10 January 2018. So the street's proudest institutional claim is real, older than most people assume, and dormant — which is a more accurate summary of Bazaar Road than the claim it replaces.
The second is the architecture. Guides routinely describe the warehouses as Portuguese-built, which flatters the street by about a century. Some of the fabric here is genuinely old, but the surviving godown frontages with their heavy loading doors are overwhelmingly Dutch- and British-period commercial building, put up when the volume of the trade justified them. A sixteenth-century date on a nineteenth-century warehouse is an easy thing to say and an easy thing to disprove: look at the brickwork.
The third is a number. Mattancherry is often said to have once handled half of all the cardamom Europe consumed. It may well have; the figure circulates without a source attached and we cannot trace it to one, and figures of that shape are exactly the ones that get invented and then quoted forever. We repeat it here only to flag it, not to endorse it.
And the fourth is the tense. Almost everything written about Bazaar Road describes a market unchanged for five hundred years. What is actually here is a quarter in steep and recent contraction, with most godowns shut, much of the Gujarati trading community gone, and the buildings converted to galleries, cafes and antique shops. The romance is real, but it is largely in the past tense, and a visitor who arrives expecting a bazaar in full cry has been misled by the writing rather than by the street.
Read the full history of Spice markets 586 more words
History
Kochi's spice trade is the reason Europe came to India at all, and Bazaar Road is where the physical end of it happened. Pepper, cardamom, cinnamon, ginger and turmeric came down from the Western Ghats to this waterfront, and merchants have dealt in them along this street for something over five hundred years — through Arab, Portuguese, Dutch and British periods, with the ownership of the port changing and the trade largely continuing regardless.
The Gujarati and Kutchi merchant families who dominated the twentieth-century spice business in Mattancherry are the reason the quarter has a Jain temple and a distinct commercial character; they came for this trade and settled around it. The godowns, the grading floors and the brokerage houses were the infrastructure of that community's business.
The decline is recent and steep. As international competition intensified and demand shifted, godowns closed, families left, and the warehouses were sold or converted. The Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which began in 2012, accelerated the conversion by making these buildings attractive as exhibition space — an ironic rescue, in that art preserved the architecture of a trade it replaced.
The institutional history runs alongside the physical one and is easier to date. The India Pepper and Spice Trade Association was recognised as a commodity derivative exchange under the Forward Contracts (Regulation) Act of 1952, ran organised pepper futures from 1957, and received permanent government recognition for pepper futures on 8 December 1961 — making it the oldest commodity exchange in India and the first recognised regional commodity exchange for black pepper. For half a century the price of Indian pepper was, in a real sense, set in this quarter.
That ended within living memory and for an unglamorous reason. In 2012 a consignment was seized after being found adulterated with mineral oil. Trust in the delivery system collapsed, disputes and litigation followed, and organised pepper futures froze. Turnover on IPSTA's platform was reported at ₹12.58 crore in 2014–15 and ₹63.13 crore in 2015–16, and there has been no trading on it since April 2016; SEBI issued an order in respect of the exchange on 10 January 2018. The godowns emptied because global demand moved; the exchange stopped for reasons entirely internal to the trade.
The two halves belong together. A quarter can lose its warehouses and still be the place where a commodity is priced, and it can keep its warehouses and lose the pricing. Bazaar Road has, within about a decade, lost both — and what has moved into the buildings instead is galleries, cafes and the antique trade feeding Jew Town at the southern end.
Why visit
It is the most sensory ten minutes in Kochi. Nothing else in the city hits you the way an open pepper godown does.
It is the actual, physical spice trade — not a spice garden laid on for visitors, not a shop with jars, but the warehouses where the stuff was graded and sold.
The architecture is worth the walk on its own: colonial-era warehouse fronts with their loading doors, in a street too poor to have prettified them.
It is the honest version of a story every Kerala itinerary tells and few show. You get the decline as well as the romance, and the decline is the more interesting half.
It runs straight into Jew Town at its southern end, so it costs nothing to add to a visit you are already making.
Buying spices here is genuinely better value than the tourist counters, if you bargain and check what you are getting.
