Ask anyone in Kozhikode how old Mananchira Square is and the answer will involve the Zamorins and a number with three digits in it. The water deserves that answer. The square does not. Mananchira Square as it exists — the lawns, the walkways, the open-air stage, the sculptures, the little artificial stream and its hill — opened to the public on 9 November 1994. It is younger than a great many of the people walking around in it.
Four things joined into one
The square was not built on empty ground. It was assembled, by taking four existing pieces of central Kozhikode and treating them as a single site: two public gardens, Tagore Park and Ansari Park; the maidan, the open field beside them; and the tank itself. The 1994 project put a design across all four and made them read as one place. This is why the square feels larger than its footprint and why it has several distinct moods in it — you are moving between areas that used to be separate things with separate names and separate users.
It is worth knowing this before you walk it, because once you do, the seams become visible. The formal planted sections, the open lawn, the hard civic frontage near the tank — these are not variations on a theme. They are the old parcels, still faintly arguing with each other under a coat of unified landscaping.
The names are worth a moment too. Tagore Park and Ansari Park are both twentieth-century dedications, and both tell you something about the civic culture that laid them out — a park named for Rabindranath Tagore and another carrying the Ansari name belong to a particular moment of Indian public life, when naming a garden was a way of stating what a town thought of itself. Those identities were absorbed into the single name Mananchira Square in 1994, which is how a place can gain a coherent design and lose two pieces of its own memory in the same act.
What a maidan is, and what it was for
The piece most worth pausing over is the maidan. Every substantial Indian town has one or had one: a flat open field, usually unloved by planners, usually described as underused, and in practice one of the hardest-working pieces of ground in the settlement. A maidan is where the cricket happens. It is also where the political rally happens, the circus pitches, the election meeting is held, the religious procession terminates, and the fair sets up once a year. It works precisely because nothing is built on it. Its emptiness is the amenity.
Maidans are also the first thing to go when a city decides to improve itself, because an empty field is the easiest thing in the world to argue against. Part of Mananchira’s maidan went into the 1994 scheme. Some of its functions moved into the open-air stage and the lawns, which do host performances, festivals and gatherings and do so constantly. Some of them did not move anywhere.
Was it a good trade?
The opening itself was a set-piece of Kerala civic politics. The square was inaugurated on 9 November 1994 by the Chief Minister, K. Karunakaran — a Congress leader from this part of the state and a politician who understood the value of a ribbon in front of a crowd. Projects of this kind get built because somebody senior wants them associated with their name, and it is worth being clear-eyed that Mananchira Square exists partly for that unromantic reason. It is also worth noticing that the calculation was correct: three decades on, the square is the thing people actually use, and the political credit attached to it has long since evaporated into general public benefit, which is the best outcome such schemes can have.
It is a fair question and the honest answer is that the evidence is mostly on the side of yes. The test of civic landscaping is brutally simple — do people use it — and most such schemes fail it comprehensively, producing handsome empty spaces that photograph well and stand deserted at seven in the evening. Mananchira passes. It is genuinely full most evenings, in a way that a park has to earn. The fountain and the stage give people a reason to arrive at a particular hour, and once a place has a reason to arrive it acquires the crowd that makes it feel safe, and the crowd sustains itself.
What was lost is harder to photograph than what was gained, which is generally how these things go. An open field has no advocates and no postcard. But a city that keeps a large sheet of open water and a substantial piece of green at its exact centre, and then persuades its population to actually go there, has done better than most cities of comparable size and pressure.
The sculptures make the point in miniature. Statues of Malayalam writers stand among the planting, and they are not incidental — Kozhikode holds a UNESCO City of Literature designation, and the square is where that claim is made physically visible to people who are mostly there for the fountain. It is a small, rather clever piece of civic argument: put the writers where the families already are, rather than building them a plaza of their own that nobody visits.
That is the general lesson of the 1994 scheme, and it is the reason it works where grander projects fail. Nothing here is a destination in its own right. The stage would be unremarkable without the crowd, the lawns are ordinary lawns, the artificial stream is frankly modest. What the design did was put all of them next to the one thing the city was always going to come and look at anyway, and let the water do the recruiting.
The thing that was never up for redesign
Through all of it, the tank stayed exactly where it was and exactly what it was. It could not be moved, narrowed or paved, because it was not scenery — it was the town’s water, legally protected as such. Everything else on the site has been arranged, re-arranged and unified at least once. The pond set the terms the designers had to work around, and it is the one element of the composition with a genuine claim to six centuries. The rest of old Calicut is on the Kozhikode hub.