A note on the name before anything else. The man was Revi Karunakaran, with an E — the spelling used by Kerala Tourism, by Wikipedia and by his family. Ravi, with an A, is used by OpenStreetMap and by the Government of India’s own Incredible India portal, and it is the spelling this page’s web address was built on. It is wrong, and we have left the address alone only so that saved links keep working.

What the family actually did

To see why this museum matters you have to know what the coir trade looked like before it.

From 1859, when James Darragh opened India’s first coir factory at Alleppey, the profitable end of the business — the exporting — belonged largely to European houses. Pierce Lesley, William Goodacre & Sons, Volkart Brothers, Aspinwall, the Bombay Company. Kerala grew the coconuts, retted the husks, spun the yarn and wove the mats. Europeans sold them.

Revi Karunakaran’s grandfather, Krishnan Muthalaly — recorded by some sources as Aandiyara Krishnan — is credited as India’s first native coir exporter. In this town, that is not a minor line in a biography. It is the moment the value of the trade started staying here.

The middle generation

What followed is more cosmopolitan than the phrase “Kerala coir family” suggests. Revi’s father, K. C. Karunakaran, studied at Heidelberg. His mother was German.

Revi himself was born at Alleppey on 22 November 1931, educated in Surrey, then Lausanne, then took a business degree at Babson College in Massachusetts, and is reported to have spoken seven languages. His father died in 1952 and he took over the Karan Group at the age of twenty.

The name on the wall of the other museum

Here is the detail that closes the circle, and it is our favourite thing in this batch of pages.

The Karan Group that Revi Karunakaran ran controlled Kerala Balers, the Alleppey Company — and William Goodacre & Sons.

Eight kilometres north, at the International Coir Museum at Kalavoor, there is a wall panel headed History of Coir Factories. It lists the European firms that followed Darragh into Alappuzha after 1859. William Goodacre & Sons is on it.

So: a European house arrives in the 1860s as part of the wave that takes over the trade. A local family breaks into that trade a generation or two later. And within a lifetime, that family is running the European firm. The two museums are describing the same story from opposite ends, and neither of them tells you the other half.

Revi Karunakaran went on to represent India at the FAO and at UNCTAD, and served as an FAO consultant on hard fibres. He died at Ernakulam on 25 November 2003.

And then a museum with no coir in it

What his widow built as his memorial contains crystal, ivory, porcelain, jade, Tanjore paintings, a 1948 Buick and a gold-plated tea service. There is no coir in it.

We do not think that is an omission or an embarrassment. Three generations of a family took a commodity trade away from the people who had monopolised it, and the third generation spent the proceeds on Swarovski and Meissen and a Greco-Roman colonnade on the Alappuzha bypass. That is a completely coherent ending, and it is a more honest monument to what the coir trade actually produced than another display of husks would have been.

Frequently asked questions

Is it Revi or Ravi Karunakaran?

Revi. That is the spelling used by Kerala Tourism, Wikipedia and the family. OpenStreetMap and the Incredible India portal use Ravi, and that is the form this page’s URL was built on — we corrected the text and kept the address so existing links do not break.

Who was Revi Karunakaran?

A coir exporter and industrialist, born at Alleppey on 22 November 1931 and died at Ernakulam on 25 November 2003. He was educated in Surrey, Lausanne and at Babson College in Massachusetts, took over the Karan Group in 1952 at the age of twenty, and represented India at the FAO and UNCTAD.

What is the family’s connection to the coir trade?

His grandfather, Krishnan Muthalaly, is credited as India’s first native coir exporter, breaking into a trade that European firms had dominated since 1859. The Karan Group later controlled Kerala Balers, the Alleppey Company and William Goodacre & Sons — the last of which is listed on the International Coir Museum’s own panel as one of the European firms that followed James Darragh.