A House Credited to a Dead Man, Named After Someone Who May Not Exist

David Hall is a modest Dutch bungalow on the Fort Kochi parade ground with two famous facts attached to it. Both are printed everywhere, including in official tourism material. Neither survives being checked.

Problem one: the arithmetic

The first claim is that this was the residence of Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede tot Drakenstein, the Dutch commander who compiled the Hortus Malabaricus.

Van Rheede governed Dutch Malabar from 1669 to 1676. He died at sea on 15 December 1691. The building is usually dated to about 1695. A man cannot live in a house raised four years after his death.

There is a way out of that, and it is not a comfortable one: the date of the building is itself unsettled, with 1665 also proposed. So either the date is wrong or the residence is. What cannot be true is the version everybody prints — the 1695 house that van Rheede lived in.

Where van Rheede actually is

He is at Surat, nine hundred kilometres north, under one of the more extravagant European tombs in India: a domed, columned, galleried mausoleum in the Dutch cemetery there, built on a scale meant to eclipse the tombs of his English rivals, the Oxendens, alongside it. A Dutch admiral who visited in 1775 recorded that it exceeded every other monument in that ground for size, elegance of architecture, magnificence of ornament and richness of material.

Which is worth setting against the Dutch Cemetery a few minutes from David Hall, where the graves are flat, heavy, unornamented slabs and many carry no cross at all. Same company, same century, two completely different ideas of how a Dutchman should be buried in India.

Problem two: the genealogy

The second claim is the name. You will read almost everywhere that the house is named after David Koder, a Jewish businessman who lived here.

The Koder family record does not contain a David Koder. Samuel Koder’s sons are named as Elias, Shabdai — the S. S. Koder of Koder House — and Cecil. The last Jewish owner of David Hall is given as Gladys Koder, wife of S. S. Koder. Her father was E. D. David, who died in 1958.

On that reading the David in David Hall comes from the David family, her father’s side, and not from a Koder called David at all. It is a small correction that quietly changes whose house this is remembered as.

What is not in doubt

Van Rheede was genuinely here, and the Hortus Malabaricus is genuinely extraordinary — twelve volumes covering some 740 plants of this coast, compiled with around twenty-five collaborators and printed at Amsterdam between 1678 and 1693, with plant names recorded in several languages including Malayalam. Look at any plate and the Malayalam is right there beside the Latin.

That multilingual naming is the tell. This was not a European looking at Indian plants; it was a European project resting on Kerala botanical knowledge, and the book admits as much on its own pages. The scholarship is real. Only the address is doubtful.

Why the building says nothing about any of this

David Hall carries no interpretation of its own history. It was acquired and restored in 2003 by CGH Earth, the Kerala hotel group, and runs as a gallery and garden café — the gallery operated as a not-for-profit showing young and local artists who exhibit without paying for the space. That is a genuinely good use of a heritage building and it is not a museum, so nobody is employed to argue about a seventeenth-century date on the wall.

The result is that the corrected version exists mostly in genealogies and dates, while the tidy version is on the signage everywhere else in town. Go for the architecture — the thick walls, the deep verandah, the high ceilings, the monsoon roof — sit in the garden, and know that the two things you were told at the gate are the two things that do not check out.