Alleppey was a grade of coir before it was a name on your ticket

In 1859 an American of Irish origin named James Darragh, in partnership with Henry Smail, opened a coir factory at Alleppey. It was the first in India. The firm was Darragh Smail & Company, and what it started outgrew the town within a generation.

The firms

Others followed quickly, and the roll-call reads like a shipping register: Pierce Leslie & Co, William Goodacre & Sons, the Madura Company, Coir Yarn Textiles, the Bombay Company, Aspinwall & Co, and Volkart Brothers — a Winterthur house founded in 1851 that had opened in Bombay, then Colombo in 1857 and Cochin in 1859, the same year as Darragh’s factory.

Between them they turned a Travancore port into the centre of a global trade in coir matting, mats and yarn. And they did something subtler to the town’s name.

When a place becomes a grade

If you buy coir in bulk, Alleppey is not primarily a town to you. It is a description of a product — a grade, a spelling that persists in trade catalogues and warehouse paperwork long after the place itself was officially renamed Alappuzha in 1990.

That is a genuinely unusual thing to happen to a settlement, and it is why the anglicised spelling has proved so hard to retire. It is not only nostalgia or tourist branding. The old spelling is load-bearing in an industry, and the railway station code is still ALLP.

(How coir is actually made — the retting of husks in the backwaters, the spinning, the looms — belongs to the International Coir Museum rather than here. This is the story of the port and the payroll.)

What the factory floor produced

Here is the part the trade histories tend to stop short of. Those factories concentrated thousands of workers into a small coastal town, in a princely state that was overwhelmingly agrarian. What Alleppey had that almost nowhere else in Travancore had was a dense, urban, industrial workforce — people who worked shifts together, lived near each other, and could be organised.

In October 1946 that workforce rose. The immediate target was Sir C. P. Ramaswami Iyer, the Dewan, who was pressing a constitution that would have made Travancore independent at the end of British rule; the slogan of the rising was to chuck the American model into the Arabian Sea.

Around 200 people were killed at Punnapra on 24 October 1946, and more than 150 at Vayalar on 27 October. Wider estimates run past a thousand dead. On 20 January 1998 the central government formally recognised the rising as part of the freedom struggle.

A geographic caution that matters, and that a great deal of writing about Alappuzha gets loose: Punnapra and Vayalar are villages to the south and north of the town, and the killings happened there, not in the town itself. What connects the town to them is the payroll. The Punnapra Vayalar Memorial has its own page here, and the rising is told properly there.

It is a straight line, though, and worth seeing whole. A Dewan builds a port in 1762 to sell coir. An Irish-American builds a factory in 1859 to process it. The factories draw a workforce. Eighty-seven years after the factory and one hundred and eighty-four after the port, that workforce takes on the state and is shot. The mats went to Europe; what stayed behind was a town that had learned to organise.