The boat, and the family that owns the drawing

A chundan vallam is between about thirty and forty metres of boat — a hull so long and so fine that the stern rears several metres into the air and the whole thing has to be carried, not steered, through a turn. It is generally reckoned the fastest hand-rowed craft in the world. And it is a designed object with an attributed author, which is more than can be said for most traditional boats anywhere.

One carpenter

The design is credited to Kodupunna Venkida Narayanan Achari, master carpenter to the Raja of Chembakassery — the same royal house that appears in Champakulam’s Moolam legend — and the first design is usually dated to around 1614.

The Achari family were vassals of the raja, specialised in boat construction, and the interesting part is what they are said to have held: the rekhachithram, the drawings, spoken of as hereditary family property. Not a guild secret, not an oral tradition — a set of measured drawings kept in a house and passed down. The shape of Kerala’s most famous object was, in effect, intellectual property held by a carpenter caste on this river.

Anjili, and eight months

The wood is anjili, Artocarpus hirsutus, the wild jack of the Western Ghats — light, durable in water, and workable in the very long lengths a chundan needs. A boat takes six to eight months to build.

Champakulam has a working riverside yard and is the home of the Nadubhagam Chundan, named for a locality of the village. The continuity is not abstract: Sabu, a builder there in recent years, is the son of the carpenter Narayana Achari who built the old Nadubhagam.

⚠ One thing we will not do is print a roster of named yards at Champakulam against Nedumudy. The Achari lineage and the Nadubhagam connection are well attested; a tidy list of who builds what where is not, and it would be invented rather than reported.

Eleven months in a shed

What is easy to miss about snake boats is how little of the year they spend on the water. For eleven months of the twelve a chundan sits under a tin roof by the river with its prow rearing towards the rafters and its name painted across the bow, oiled and waited on. Villages own them, not clubs; the rivalry between boats is a rivalry between places.

Then, on Moolam day in Mithunam, it comes out.

The other woodcarvers

There is a second hereditary woodworking economy on the same riverbank, and almost nobody writes about it. A few hundred metres from the boats are workshops carving religious statuary — life-size wooden figures of Christ, half-finished, lying on workshop floors among the shavings.

A photograph taken in one of those workshops in 2006 shows a memorial portrait hanging on the wall above the work, lettered “Artist Late K. K. Chacko, 1908–1983.” So: two inherited woodcarving traditions on one bank of one river, one of them Hindu and royal and producing racing boats, the other Catholic and producing saints, both working in the same timber, both organised around a name passed down.

Seeing it

The race is on Moolam day in the Malayalam month of Mithunam — late June or early July, moving every year with the calendar. If you want to see boats rather than a race, come any other time and ask; a chundan in its shed, seen close up and out of the water, is arguably the more astonishing sight of the two. For the wider racing season, including the Nehru Trophy and the Payippad Jalotsavam, see our guide to Alappuzha’s snake-boat races.