Nineteen Rooms of Travancore: Inside Kuthiramalika

The museum at Kuthiramalika is not a state collection and does not behave like one. It is what a ruling family owned, kept and eventually put behind rope — thrones, weapons, portraits, instruments, imported glass, sculpture — arranged through nineteen of the palace’s eighty rooms with the informality of a house rather than the order of a gallery. That is its charm and also its limitation: labels are sparse, guides fill the gaps, and some of what you are told is family memory rather than catalogue.

Two thrones, two empires

Everything worth knowing about nineteenth-century Travancore is compressed into the pair of thrones. One is built of ivory, described as worked from twenty-four elephant tusks — a wholly local material, from an animal that was itself an instrument of state, and a form of display that only a court with forests and elephant establishments could mount. The other is cut from Bohemian crystal and carries the conch of the Travancore emblem: a European luxury object, ordered from Central Europe, shipped to a port on the Malabar coast and set up in a wooden palace beside a temple.

They are not in competition. They are the same statement made twice, in the two languages a Travancore ruler had to speak — the sacred-dynastic idiom of a kingdom governed in a god’s name, and the mercantile-international one of a state whose pepper, timber and coir paid for it. A visitor who spends five minutes with these two objects will understand the room better than one who reads every panel.

The Kathakali figures

Fourteen life-sized Kathakali figures stand in full painted regalia — the green pacha make-up of the noble characters, the knife-edge chutti built up along the jaw, the towering headdress and the layered white skirt. They are the most photographed thing in the museum and the most misread. Kathakali make-up is not costume in the European sense but a classification system: the colour tells you what kind of being you are looking at before a single gesture is made. Standing still and close to a figure, you can see how the chutti is constructed in layers, which is impossible to observe during a performance and is the whole reason these figures earn their space.

Glass, mirrors and the harpoon

Then there is the imported material: tall Belgian and Italian mirrors, crystal chandeliers, marble sculpture, European statuary, and — a genuine oddity — a large Belgian harpoon. It is easy to file all this as colonial-era clutter, and easy to be wrong about it. Travancore was not a passive recipient of European goods; it was a trading state with its own agents, its own revenue and a long habit of buying what it wanted from whoever sold it. The mirrors are here for the same reason the crystal throne is: because a court that could afford them wished to be seen to have them. What is missing is as telling as what is present — very little of the collection is British official gift-giving.

Instruments, portraits and the musical tree

Cabinets hold veenas, flutes and drums, which in this building are not generic exhibits: they are the working equipment of the court whose music the palace still hosts every January. Portraits of the Travancore line hang through the rooms, including oil paintings associated with Raja Ravi Varma, the Kilimanoor-born painter who did more than anyone to fix what Indian gods and Indian aristocrats look like in the popular imagination. And in one room stands a carved wooden “musical tree” said to sound eight distinct notes when struck at different points — a curiosity rather than an instrument, and the single object children remember.

What you cannot see

Nineteen rooms sounds generous until you remember the palace has eighty. The visitor route is a slice, and it is worth going in knowing that so you are not hunting for a way deeper into the building. Photography inside is generally not permitted, which is a nuisance but also the reason the interiors are worth the ticket — you will look harder at objects you cannot photograph. The exterior, the horse brackets and the lawns are free to walk and photograph, and are covered in A Hundred and Twenty-Two Horses.

Allow an hour if you want the thrones, the Kathakali figures and the woodwork rather than a brisk circuit. The museum is closed on Mondays; current hours, tickets and the Swathi Sangeetholsavam dates are on the Kuthiramalika Palace page, and the great temple next door is the obvious pairing — see Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple.