Column | When a travelling Anglican Bishop saw Italy in Palakkad

For a host of reasons, not the least of which being its distance from the sea, Palakkad has rarely been featured in older travel accounts. One traveller, who managed to briefly visit the district, was a highly influential English clergyman by the name of George Trevor Spencer.

Spencer, who was appointed the Bishop of Madras in 1837, took notes of his journey to Kerala and published them in London in a book titled Journal of a Visitation to the Provinces of Travancore and Tinnevelly, in the Diocese of Madras, 1840-41. It is clear from his writings that Spencer fell in love with Palakkad or Paulghaut as he spelt it.

“After passing through a vast jungle, or rather forest, for it fairly deserves that more ennobling title, and contains some splendid timber, we emerged upon a country almost as Italian as Italy itself,” Spencer wrote. “At one village I could have fancied myself in the neighbourhood of the Lago Maggiore; not that there is a lake, for like almost all Indian scenery, it wants water; but still it is very different from anything I have yet met with here; I think more beautiful, and certainly more humanized.”

The comparisons with Italy continued. “The huts of this village have a particularly neat appearance, thatched with palm-leaves, which might easily be mistaken for those of the Gran Turco, and wreathed with the gourd, rich at once in flowers and fruit, the almost universal ornament of the Italian cottage; and they are all enclosed by a pretty bamboo fence, entwined with the gloriosa superba, and the loveliest convolvulus I ever saw,” Spencer said.

The Anglican bishop was so enamoured with the Palakkad countryside that he nearly seemed to forget where he was.“I quite expected to see the elm supporting its graceful spouse the vine, which would have completed the picture, as far as still life is concerned; for, alas! there was neither the lingua Toscana to listen to, nor the bocca Romana to warble it,” he said.

Spencer made no attempt to hide his own racial prejudices when it came to south Indians. Writing about the residents of Palakkad, he said, “The people here, however, have a very different cast of countenance from those about Coimbatore, and appear of a higher race; they look you full in the face, and walk erect, like those to whom the land ought to belong.” He also wrote about the “fair complexion” of the people of Palakkad, who he said did not have the “unwholesome look” that generally accompanied a lighter complexion in a “native of the tropics.” This cringeworthy obsession with skin colour seemed to be a common theme in older Western accounts of Malayalis.

Low expectations
Before crossing the Palakkad Gap, Spencer did not have high expectations of the town. “I had looked for a picturesque dirty village in the heart of a jungle, halfway up a mountain ghaut, and I found a very comfortable looking town, surrounded by inclosed fields in the highest cultivation, in a country offering that most perfect rural scenery, when the mountains are beginning to subside, and smoothe themselves into the plains, still preserving something of their savageness, and all of their grandeur, as the leading feature of the landscape, and at the same time submitting their fresh fair slopes to ‘the ravage of the gentle plough,’” he added.

After seeing a little more of the areas around Palakkad, Spencer said “the Italian character of the country” was “modified,” but “not lost in the Indian.” He observed how the palm-tree had “re-assumed its just place in the scenery” but without being predominating as it was in the western coast of Ceylon.

Another thing he fell in love with was the green fields of the area. “I thought those of Lombardy beautiful until I came to India; but here they are the very perfection of verdure, and are fine large fields of rice, not the mud-framed inclosures of the Carnatic, looking like so many dried-up fish ponds, compelled to grow grain because they can no longer hold water,” Spencer said.

The bishop kept finding more reasons to admire Palakkad, even praising its roads: “The roads about this pretty town are excellent, and far more extensive than is usual at a ‘station’ in India.”

Among the places he visited was Tipu Sultan’s fort. He wrote, “There is a very pretty fort here, and apparently of some strength, with an esplanade of excellent turf, which would make a noble cricket ground.”

Spencer also took a liking for the architecture of the town, especially its temples and houses of the wealthy. Talking about the roofs of these structures, he said, “I should imagine they took them from the Portuguese: they tend to give the place an European appearance, very pleasing to an European eye.”

Observing that the town had a “very respectable air of business,” Spencer felt it was an ideal “half-way house” between the Coimbatore and Malabar districts.

“The town, for India, is remarkably clean, the result I pursue of an active police, and the people civil,” Spencer wrote. “I walked two or three miles this morning into the country, and every step my admiration of it increased.”

On his second and last day in Palakkad, Spencer conducted a church service for the small English community in the town, mainly consisting of East India Company officials and their families.

Spencer wanted the British to rule over India, and his brief stay in Palakkad only made him reaffirm this stance. He wrote, “India is indeed worth keeping; may we hold it so faithfully that we may not be ashamed to give an account of our stewardship when the time shall come, which we must anticipate, when we may be no longer stewards!”
(Ajay Kamalakaran is a multilingual writer, primarily based in Mumbai)