The Geography of a Drowned Coast
What travel brochures call simply "the backwaters" is in fact a hydrologically complex system of estuaries, brackish-water lakes, freshwater rivers, and a chain of artificial canals dug between them over the last two centuries. Five large lakes — Vembanad, Ashtamudi, Kayamkulam, Veli, and Sasthamkotta — form the core, connected to each other and to the Arabian Sea by a web of natural and constructed waterways. Forty-four rivers flow westward out of the Western Ghats; almost all of them widen, just before reaching the sea, into brackish lagoons protected from the open ocean by long parallel sand barriers. The result is an inland marine landscape stretching from Kollam in the south to almost as far north as Kozhikode.
Vembanad, which spans Alappuzha, Kottayam, and Ernakulam districts, is the longest lake in India — nearly ninety-six kilometres from end to end and covering an area that varies between 230 and 2,000 square kilometres depending on the season. It is also one of the most biologically productive coastal wetlands in South Asia, supporting a fishery that lands tens of thousands of tonnes of pearl spot, prawn, and mussel each year and a riparian agriculture (the Kuttanad rice belt) that is one of only two regions in the world where farming is conducted below sea level.
Alappuzha — the Venice of the East
Alappuzha (Alleppey) was laid out as a planned canal city in the late eighteenth century by the Travancore minister Raja Kesavadas, who recognised that a grid of internal waterways would solve simultaneously the problems of drainage, transport, and warehouse access for the rapidly expanding coir trade. By the mid-nineteenth century the town was the busiest port on the Malabar Coast, with British, German, and Italian trading firms maintaining offices along the Mullakkal canal and the smell of coir fibre drying in the sun pervading every street. The town's nickname — the Venice of the East — was coined by Lord Curzon during a viceregal visit in 1900 and has stuck ever since.
The commercial port has long since shifted to Kochi, but Alappuzha remains the natural starting point for backwater journeys. The town's annual snake-boat race (the Nehru Trophy, held on the second Saturday of August) draws crowds of upward of two hundred thousand spectators along the banks of the Punnamada Lake; the boats themselves — chundan vallams, slim 100-foot war canoes crewed by 110 oarsmen and 25 supporting roles — are owned by individual villages and are the focus of fierce communal pride.
The Kettuvallam Houseboat
The traditional kettuvallam ("knot boat") is a flat-bottomed cargo barge whose hull was originally constructed entirely without nails — the planks of jackwood and anjili were stitched together with coir rope and the seams sealed with a mixture of cashew-nut resin, lime, and fish oil. The bamboo-and-palm-thatch superstructure protected sacks of rice and bales of coir from the monsoon during the long inland voyages between Alappuzha and Kollam, Kottayam, and the river ports of the interior.
From the 1990s onward, the rapid decline of waterborne freight (replaced by road transport) coincided with a rapid rise in tourism, and the kettuvallam was reinvented as the floating houseboat that visitors now associate with Kerala. A modern luxury houseboat retains the silhouette and the woven-palm exterior of the original but is fitted out with one to five air-conditioned bedrooms, en-suite bathrooms, an open dining deck, a fibreglass-lined hull (true coir-and-resin construction is now uncommon), and a small diesel engine in place of the old paddle propulsion.
A typical overnight cruise begins around midday with boarding at one of the Alappuzha jetties, follows a slow looping route across Vembanad Lake and into the Kuttanad backwaters, anchors at a quiet riverside spot for the night, and disembarks the following morning. Meals — overwhelmingly fish-based and overwhelmingly Keralan — are prepared on board by a dedicated cook. Two- and three-night itineraries extend further south toward Kollam through the canal-and-lake chain that, until the construction of the coastal highway in the 1960s, was the principal travel route between the two towns.
Kumarakom and the Bird Sanctuary
On the eastern shore of Vembanad Lake, almost directly opposite Alappuzha, the village of Kumarakom is built around a 14-acre bird sanctuary — formerly a private rubber estate, donated to the state in 1971 — that hosts more than 180 species of resident and migratory birds. Cormorants, darters, egrets, and herons breed here in densities that are exceptional even for South Indian wetlands; the sanctuary's flagship migrants are the Siberian crane and the great Indian hornbill, both arriving between November and March. The viewing experience is best at first light, when colonies of darters fish in the shallows and the lake's surface is occasionally broken by the silver flash of a leaping pearl spot.
Kumarakom is also the setting of much of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things; her family's ancestral home in nearby Ayemenem is the model for the novel's "Ayemenem House", and the river described in the book is the Meenachil, which empties into Vembanad just north of Kumarakom.
Kollam and the Southern Backwaters
Kollam, at the southern end of the backwater network, is a coastal town of considerable antiquity — it appears as Kaulam in the works of medieval Arab geographers and may have been the site of one of the original Saint Thomas Christian churches founded in the first century. The Ashtamudi Lake at Kollam ("eight inlets", reflecting the lake's distinctive eight-armed shape) is the second-largest of Kerala's coastal lakes and is the principal source of the small, sweet pearl spot fish that, more than any other ingredient, defines coastal Keralan cuisine.
The eight-hour public ferry between Kollam and Alappuzha — operated by the Alappuzha Tourism Development Cooperative — covers the central section of the backwater system at a small fraction of the cost of a private houseboat. It is a slow, unhurried journey through some of the most rural sections of the network, with stops at small jetties where school children, traders, and the occasional priest with a brass kuthuvilakku embark and disembark.
Life on the Water
For all that the backwaters are now overwhelmingly associated with tourism, more than a million people still live on or immediately beside them, in villages whose daily routines have been organised around the water for many generations. Wash-stone landings descend from the back of every traditional house. Small flat-bottomed canoes are paddled to the morning market, to school, to the fields. Coconut palms lean out from the bank at improbable angles. Fishing nets are hauled in by hand from the bow of paddled craft barely larger than a single fisherman.
Traditional Chinese fishing nets — the cheena vala, a cantilevered structure of teak and bamboo that lowers a square net into the water and lifts it again with a system of stone counterweights — are still operated along the channels at Fort Kochi, although the working examples are now maintained as much for the visiting tourists as for any fish they may yield. They are believed to have been introduced by Chinese traders during the Ming dynasty and are unique, in India, to this stretch of coast.