What to expect
Highlights
- Heritage experience at Coir villages
- Architecture, local stories and old trade/cultural routes
- Good fit for guided walks and nearby cafes/shops
The story
Coconut husk soaked in the backwater for months, beaten by hand until only fibre remains, then spun into yarn on a wheel at the water's edge. On Munroe Island the spinning is real paid work. The soaking, by the Kerala government's own account, very largely is not — and the fibre on the wheel probably came by lorry from Tamil Nadu.
The story of Coir villages
Coir is the fibre of the coconut husk, and Kerala has made it for centuries. The traditional process is slow in a way that is difficult to credit until you see it: husks are steeped in the brackish shallows for months until the soft tissue rots away, then taken out, beaten with wooden mallets to free the fibre, cleaned, dried and spun into yarn.
That is the chain as it is described to visitors, and it is worth knowing before you take the trip that for most yarn spun in Kerala today the first two steps did not happen in Kerala at all. The fibre arrives dry and machine-extracted from Tamil Nadu. What you are looking at on these banks is not a closed local loop but the last surviving stages of one — which is a more interesting thing to be shown, provided somebody tells you.
The retting frames are the first thing you notice from a canoe — bundles of husk staked out in the shallows, some of them submerged for the better part of a year. The smell is part of it. Retting is decomposition, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest; on a hot afternoon near an active retting bed you will know exactly what is happening.
The spinning is the part most visitors remember. It is usually done by women, often in the shade beside a house, working a wheel that twists two strands of loose fibre into yarn at speed. The rhythm is fast and completely unshowy, and the skill in it is obvious the moment you try to imagine doing it yourself.
This is a household and small-unit economy rather than a factory one. Work happens in yards, on verandahs and at the water's edge, families rather than shifts, and it is fitted around everything else the day contains. There is no visitor centre and no scheduled demonstration — if you come on a day when nobody is spinning, nobody is spinning.
One practical thing to know before you plan: there is no coir village here in the sense of a place you can navigate to. We ran an OpenStreetMap query for any coir-tagged or coir-named feature across the whole Munroe and Ashtamudi area, and there is not one on the island itself. Whatever a canoe trip stops at is a private household yard, reached by an arrangement between your boatman and that family. The access is the boatman. The nearest mapped, named society is the Chittayam Coir Vyavasaya Co-operative Societies unit about five kilometres south, on the Ashtamudi side.
The honest position on visiting is the same as at any working craft, with one addition. You are a guest at someone's job: ask before photographing, accept a refusal without argument, and if someone has stopped work to show you the process, pay them for their time. Buying something is usually more welcome than a tip — and here it does specific good, because household units receive no state grant, keep no accounts, and sell through middlemen. A direct sale removes that layer entirely. Note too that a woman on a ratt earning somewhere between roughly ₹110 and ₹300 a day is under no obligation to be photographed for free, and being asked is the whole difference between a visit and an intrusion.
A small vocabulary point that guides and captions get wrong interchangeably: what you photograph being made on a ratt is usually yarn. Rope is a second stage, twisting two yarns together.
Legend & myth
The fibre in the rope you are being shown was probably grown and extracted in Tamil Nadu. That is the single most important thing to know on this page, and it comes from the Government of Kerala's own labour institute rather than from any critic of the industry.
Coir here is often said to be presented as heritage preserved for visitors when it is really a working industry, the households doing it for income rather than for demonstration. That is half right, and it is right about the wrong half. The Kerala Institute of Labour and Employment's 2015 study of the industry inverts it: the spinning is real paid work, and it is the retting — the months in the water, the thing the canoe trip is built around — that has very largely stopped being production.
The mechanism is documented and blunt. When mechanical de-fibering machines arrived, opposition meant they were not installed in Kerala; Tamil Nadu built them instead. The report then records what followed, verbatim: with retting and manual extraction becoming more and more difficult and costly, the yarn-spinning industry started to use more and more un-retted Tamil Nadu fibre. Initially, it was a 10% TN fibre mixed with 90% Kerala retted fibre, and this equation slowly shifted to 100% TN fibre for most qualities of yarn. Its conclusion is that with the gradual disappearance of retting in Kerala, the scope of fibre production in the State is very minimal.
Un-retted is the key word. Tamil Nadu fibre is crushed from dry husk by machine without soaking, so the husk retting in front of you may not become the yarn being spun nearby; much fibre now arrives by lorry from Pollachi or Tuticorin. Secondary reporting places Tamil Nadu’s share of Kerala’s fibre consumption at around 90%, although primary Coir Board material cited here does not publish that exact percentage. Kerala’s strength remains its finished products and cooperative movement, including about 76% of India’s coir societies.
The productivity gap explains the rest. Hand-spinning in Kerala yields about 10 kg per person per day, a figure the report says has not changed in decades; in mechanised Tamil Nadu it is about 60 kg. Cost to company for the same job is around ₹810 a day in Kerala against ₹368.21 in Tamil Nadu. Kerala subsidises its spinners at roughly ₹150 a day per worker and still cannot compete, and the report frames the choice as either even more subsidy to support a lost cause, or adopting modern and efficient methods. That phrase is the state's own.
Then there is the part nobody says out loud on a canoe. Retting is a documented pollutant of Ashtamudi, and Ashtamudi is a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance. Husk soaking releases pectin, fats, tannins and polyphenols; the bacterial load strips the dissolved oxygen out of the water, and in the anoxic conditions that follow, sulphate-reducing bacteria generate hydrogen sulphide. A 2022 study in the Indian Journal of Environmental Protection, on this estuary specifically, found high values of BOD and polyphenols and low dissolved oxygen at retting sites and concluded that husk retting has increased the organic pollution load in the estuary. Kerala's own report is more direct still: retting is to be discouraged since it strongly pollutes ponds, canals and lakes, and it affects the health of the workers engaged in retting, beating and willowing — who are overwhelmingly women, standing in it.
Which forces an honest correction to something else this page said. We told you the retting smell is not pollution, and that explaining it as pollution is a visitor's mistake. The chemistry does not support that. The smell is hydrogen sulphide from anaerobic decomposition — that much we had right — but the same process is measurably deoxygenating a protected wetland. It is both the point of the craft and a pollutant. Those are not alternatives.
There is a fix, and it was invented forty kilometres up the coast. The Coir Board's Central Coir Research Institute at Kalavoor, Alappuzha developed Coirret, a bacterial consortium reported to cut the retting period to as little as 78 hours. Reported reductions vary by application and we would not lean hard on one figure. It has never displaced either the months-long soak or the Tamil Nadu machines at scale.
And the third pressure is the one this island cannot escape. Retting needs a particular water — shallow, brackish, in a fixed place. Munroe Island is losing land after the damming of the Kallada cut its sediment supply, and more than 500 households have been forced to vacate their homes. Residents who once lived by agriculture, fish farms, coir retting and weaving are now largely daily-wage labourers. So this shore is losing retting three times over: to cheaper machine fibre from another state, to an environmental verdict from its own government, and to the water itself.
None of which makes the trip less worth taking. It makes it a different trip from the one that was advertised. And it leaves an ending with no comfortable shape: Ashtamudi is losing a heritage industry and gaining dissolved oxygen, and there is no framing in which both of those are simply good news.
Read the full history of Coir villages 466 more words
History
Coir — the fibre extracted from coconut husk — has been produced along the Kerala coast for centuries, and the belt around Ashtamudi and the Kollam backwaters is one of its traditional centres.
The traditional process depends on brackish backwater: husks are retted in the shallows for months until the soft tissue decomposes, then beaten to free the fibre, cleaned, dried and spun into yarn, largely by hand and largely in household units.
On Munroe Island this work is carried out on the canal banks and in village yards rather than in factories, with spinning predominantly done by women.
The sector has come under sustained pressure from mechanised production and synthetic substitutes, and hand-processed coir now operates on very narrow margins. The audited figures for the Kollam project office of the Directorate of Coir Development, for 2014-15, give the shape of it: eight circles, 82 working coir cooperative societies, 45,488 members — and 1,404 workers actually engaged in production, for an average of 123 working days each. Coir produced came to 8,182 quintals, at a cost of ₹4,893 per quintal and a loss of ₹293 on each one. Of 159 units in the Kollam circle, 82 were operating, 25 non-operating, 23 had never commenced production and 29 were under liquidation.
Statewide the pattern is the same: of 993 coir societies registered up to 2015, only 536 were working, and the Directorate recorded only 154 generating a profit in 2014 and 164 in 2015. How many people the industry employs is genuinely unknown — Kerala's own report gives a range of between 40,000 and 3.5 lakh, a ninefold spread inside a single government document, and says plainly that the correct number is not available. The majority are women.
On Munroe Island specifically, that pressure compounds with land subsidence and tidal flooding following the interruption of the Kallada river's sediment supply — a process that has already forced more than 500 households to vacate their homes and that directly affects the water conditions retting requires.
Why visit
The stages of a traditional process are visible within a few hundred metres — retting in the shallows, beating, drying and spinning — even though they no longer form a single chain.
The spinning is genuinely impressive to watch, and it is done by people who have been doing it their whole lives rather than by demonstrators.
It is the economic reality behind the scenery: the same canals that make a pretty canoe trip are the retting beds this work depends on.
You can buy the product where it is made, which is both a better souvenir than a shop and a more useful thing to leave behind than a tip.
And it is disappearing, for reasons — mechanisation, synthetics, and an island losing its land — that are documented rather than sentimental.
