How a boat is tied together

The first thing that surprises people at Alumkadavu is the size. A Kerala houseboat runs to something like ninety-five to a hundred and seven feet long and thirteen to nineteen feet across the middle, and out of the water, propped on timber, it is enormously larger than it looks drifting past a paddy field. The second surprise is how little machinery is involved in making one.

The wood

The hull is anjili — Artocarpus hirsutus, the wild jack, a tree of the Western Ghats foothills and of every second Kerala houseyard. It is chosen for one specific virtue: it tolerates immersion. Jackwood is used alongside it. Neither is teak, and that is worth noticing, because the great teak story of this coast belongs further north, to the Nilambur plantations and the uru shipyards of Beypore. The backwater barge is a humbler build in a humbler timber, and it was always meant to be.

Planks are cut long, shaped, and edge-joined into a hull without a fixed internal frame in the European sense — the shell comes first and takes its form from the planking itself. This is a shell-first tradition, and it is old.

The tying

Then comes the part the boat is named after. Kettu means to tie. The planks are drawn together with cord spun from coconut husk — coir, the district’s other industry and, at Karunagappally, effectively the same industry — with coir fibre packed into the seams as caulking, so that the hull is stitched rather than fastened. Miles of it go into a single boat.

The logic is better than it sounds. A stitched hull flexes. It can work in a seaway or against a bank without splitting along a rigid fastening, and it can be opened, re-stitched and repaired plank by plank by anyone with cord and a needle rather than by a yard with metal. And coir in salt and brackish water is durable in a way that iron emphatically is not: this is a coast where the traditional answer to corrosion was simply not to use metal.

The joined hull is then sealed. The classic finish is a black resin cooked from cashew — the caustic oil of the shell, boiled — brushed over the timber, and it is genuinely effective as well as being free at source in a district full of cashew processing. Kerala Tourism’s own descriptions mention it; so do the builders’ accounts. With maintenance, the boats are said to last for generations.

The roof

Above the hull goes the part that makes the silhouette. Bamboo poles are bent into the long barrel vault and thatched with palm leaf, with woven cane or split-bamboo screens forming the walls. On a cargo boat this was a cover for the load and a shelter for the crew. On a tourist boat it became the ceiling of a bedroom, but the shape did not change, which is why the modern houseboat still reads instantly as the old barge.

It is a small crew and a long job. One local account puts a build at seven or eight craftsmen working over a period of months. There is very little that could be sped up: the shaping is by hand, the stitching is by hand, and the thatching is by hand.

And the part the brochures leave out

The line you will read everywhere — planks lashed with coir and not a single nail — is a description of an inherited method. It is not a description of a boat delivered this year, and it is worth saying so, because we have printed that line ourselves on our Alappuzha and Kumarakom pages in the present tense.

Kerala Tourism’s own account of how houseboats are made today includes tar and tar sheets applied to the outer surface for waterproofing, aluminium sheets "of late" for added protection, and a powerful engine running on kerosene or petrol for propulsion. Various builders describe steel-pipe roof frames and plywood interior partitions as normal practice, though those accounts are commercial and we would not print them as fact. What is not in dispute is that the modern boat is a hybrid, and that the pre-industrial hull sits underneath a superstructure that is not.

None of this is scandalous. Working boats have always absorbed whatever performs, and a vessel that now carries paying guests overnight has obligations — a bathroom, a galley, a schedule — that a rice barge did not. The only thing worth objecting to is the marketing, which sells a purely traditional object and leaves a visitor to be quietly disappointed by a man with a tar bucket.

What to look for when you are standing there

Look at the seams first: on an unplanked or partly planked hull you can see the stitch holes and the coir before anything covers them, and that is the single most informative thing on the site. Look at the ribs and the way the shell holds its shape. Look at the thatch frame if one is going up, because the bending of the bamboo is the most skilled-looking part of the whole operation and takes about ten minutes to admire properly.

And then look at where you are. This is a bank, not a workshop with a door on it. The hulls are propped, the tools are hand tools, the timber is heavy and things get moved by rope and muscle. Keep back from anything under load, keep children close, and do not climb on an unfinished boat. Ask before you photograph anyone: what you are watching is a livelihood, and it is the reason there is anything here to look at.