A colourful passage through time: Photos from Fort Kochi
Photo: Karan Madhok
Photo Gallery: No place in the world is quite like Fort Kochi—A collage of Indian, Portuguese, Dutch, English, and Chinese cultural and architectural influences, a humming postcard from the past.
My map tells me that Fort Kochi is one place, a region in the southwestern coast of India. a part of Kochi, Kerala’s financial and commercial capital.
But, within this one segment of a city contains multitudes, a living history that presents the future as much as it celebrates the past, a minor miracle of culture and architecture to have sustained and survived with its unique personality, a sleepy old town, a bustling beachside, a humming postcard that spans centuries.
Known in Cochin Portuguese creole as Cochim de Baixo, Fort Kochi was the first European fort on Indian soil, annexed into the Portuguese in the early 1500s. But this was not before Chinese traders and fishermen also landed on the shores, allegedly giving the region its name (Co-chin means ‘like China) and popularizing the Chinese fishing nets which are still used for fresh catch by the beach. With every century or two, the multicultural hue of Fort Kochi got even more colourful. There were Portuguese Catholics, there were the Dutch, there was the Kingdom of Mysore, the British Raj, and finally, the government of Independent India.
Today’s Fort Kochi is an agglomeration of all of these influences—and more. There are museums celebrating Indo-Portuguese history, a Dutch cemetery, Syrian churches, synagogues, Jain temples, Brahmin temples, and palaces. And added to this mix is the fusion of quaint modern-day commercial enterprises, from teahouses and hotels to beachside shacks to art museums. Fort Kochi is also the setting of the beloved Kochi-Muziris Biennale and the Cochin Carnival.
It was mindboggling for me to imagine how a relatively small region could fit all of these personalities into one firm hold. And yet, Fort Kochi manages to do just that. Walking around the old streets, every turn presented a structure—manmade or natural—that could take my breath away. The breeze from the Arabian Sea carries the spice of culture blended over centuries.
Perhaps the map was correct in telling me that Fort Kochi is, indeed, one; it is one of one, with no second on Earth quite like it.
Photo: Karan Madhok
Photo: Karan Madhok
Photo: Karan Madhok
Photo: Karan Madhok
Photo: Karan Madhok
Photo: Karan Madhok
Photo: Karan Madhok
Photo: Karan Madhok
Photo: Karan Madhok
Photo: Karan Madhok
Photo: Karan Madhok
Photo: Karan Madhok
Photo: Karan Madhok
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Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar, whose creative work has appeared in Epiphany, Gargoyle, The Literary Review, The Bombay Review, The Lantern Review, F(r)iction, and more. He is the founder of the Indian basketball blog Hoopistani and has contributed to NBA India, SLAM Magazine, Fifty Two, FirstPost, and more. Karan’s debut novel A Beautiful Decay will be published by the Aleph Book Company in 2022. You can find him on Twitter: @karanmadhok1 and Instagram: @karanmadhok.
