Pazhassi Raja Museum

The story of Pazhassi Raja Museum

The museum occupies the East Hill Bungalow, built in 1812, on rising ground a few kilometres from the centre of Kozhikode. It became an archaeological museum in 1976 and was renamed in 1980, and it is run by the Kerala State Archaeology Department rather than as a tourist attraction — which sets the tone for everything about a visit. Labels are functional. Lighting is what it is. Nobody will hand you an audio guide. What you get instead is a genuine working collection, displayed without theatre.

The megalithic material is the heart of it and the reason to come. Kerala has an extraordinary and distinctive prehistoric burial tradition, and the museum holds examples of its most striking forms: umbrella stones, large dressed stones set over burials and described in the collection as the tomb markers of rulers; dolmenoid cists, quadrangular burial chambers roofed with capstones; and burial urns, the great earthenware jars in which the dead were interred. These are not small objects and they are not delicate. They are heavy, blunt and immediately legible as what they are.

Around them sits the ordinary archaeology of a very old coastline. Pottery, toys, stone and metal sculpture, coins, and models of temples fill out a picture of settled life across a long span, from roughly 1000 BC through to about 200 AD. Panchaloha idols — figures cast in the traditional five-metal alloy — represent the later devotional tradition. Individually many of these are modest. Collectively they do the thing a good regional museum should, which is to make the depth of local time feel real.

There is a stranger and more recent layer too. The collection includes war weapons taken from British soldiers, and official caps belonging to British and French soldiers — the debris of the colonial contest for the Malabar coast, sitting a few rooms away from burial urns three thousand years older. Nothing in the display draws attention to the juxtaposition, and it is all the more effective for that.

Mural painting forms the other significant strand, alongside an art section, and this is where a common confusion arises: the museum sits beside the Krishna Menon Museum and Art Gallery, a separate institution named for the statesman V. K. Krishna Menon, and the two are usually visited together and frequently described as one. If you are specifically hoping to see paintings, check which building you are standing in, because attributions get muddled between the two in a good deal of published writing.

Practically, this is a one-hour museum and a peaceful one. It is rarely busy. It sits on a hill with air moving through it, which is a considerable virtue in Kozhikode. Photography rules vary and should be checked at the desk rather than assumed, opening days and times are those of a state department rather than a commercial attraction and are worth confirming before travelling out, and the entry charge is nominal.

Legend & myth

The most interesting thing about this museum is its name, and almost nobody notices the problem with it. Kerala Varma Pazhassi Raja is among the most celebrated figures in Kerala's history — the Lion of Kerala, the Kottayam raja of the Malabar highlands who fought a long guerrilla resistance against the English East India Company and died in the field in 1805. Naming the state archaeological museum after him is an entirely understandable act of national memory.

The difficulty is the building. The East Hill Bungalow was constructed in 1812. Pazhassi Raja died in 1805. The house that now carries his name was built seven years after he was killed, by the colonial administration whose forces killed him, and it served as a British colonial bungalow through the century that followed — reported in several accounts as a residence for the British Collectors of Kozhikode. He never entered it. He could not have. It did not exist in his lifetime.

The naming came later still. The bungalow was converted into an archaeological museum in 1976, and only in 1980 was it renamed for Pazhassi Raja — a hundred and seventy-five years after his death, and by then a building with no connection to him whatsoever beyond the accident of standing in Malabar. What visitors therefore encounter is a memorial in which the honoured man has no presence at all, housed in the architecture of the power he spent his life fighting.

It is worth being clear that this is not a scandal or a piece of carelessness. Repurposing colonial buildings and renaming them after figures of the resistance is one of the most widespread practices of post-independence India, and it is a deliberate one — an assertion that the building has changed hands and changed meaning. Read that way, the name is not a claim about who lived here. It is a statement about who the place belongs to now.

But the practical consequence catches people out, and it is the reason this belongs on a page about visiting. A significant number of visitors arrive at the Pazhassi Raja Archaeological Museum expecting a museum about Pazhassi Raja — his campaign, his weapons, the guerrilla war in the Wayanad forests, the manner of his death. That is not what is here. This is a general archaeological collection for the region, and its centre of gravity sits three thousand years before he was born. Arrive expecting megalithic burial stones and you will not be disappointed; arrive expecting a biography and you will be.

For anyone who does arrive wanting the man rather than the archaeology, it is worth knowing where to go instead. Pazhassi Raja’s campaign was fought inland, in the forested hills of Wayanad and the old Kottayam country of northern Malabar, not on this coast, and it is there that the sites associated with him survive. His tomb and memorial at Mananthavady in Wayanad — the Pazhassi Smarakam, protected by the Kerala State Archaeology Department since 1980, with a museum added beside it in December 2010 — is the principal place of pilgrimage for those following his story, several hours from Kozhikode by road and up the ghats. The distance is itself instructive: the reason he held out against the Company for as long as he did is precisely that he operated in country the colonial army found almost impossible to campaign in, a long way from comfortable bungalows on breezy hills above a port.

There is a final irony in the collection that rewards a moment’s attention. Among the exhibits are weapons taken from British soldiers and uniform caps belonging to British and French troops — the material residue of the European contest for this coast, now sitting in cases inside a house the British built, in a museum named for the man who fought them. Nothing in the display comments on this. The objects simply sit there, and the building sits around them, and the name sits above the door, and the whole arrangement quietly documents a change of ownership that no label needs to explain.

One further caution about vocabulary, since it recurs across almost everything written about this collection. Kerala's megalithic monuments include several distinct forms with similar names — kudakkallu, the umbrella stone, and topikkallu or thoppikkallu, the hat stone, among them — and published sources treat these terms inconsistently, sometimes using them interchangeably for what specialists regard as different monument types. The museum's own material describes umbrella stones as tomb markers of rulers. Where you see the terms swapped around elsewhere, treat the naming rather than the object as the unreliable part.