On the walls of old buildings or in the by-lanes of European countries, you will find little circles of information, on who had once lived there, a century or more ago. It catches you by surprise, especially if you are a visitor with a yearning to learn historical tidbits of a foreign land. Bina Thomas was expecting to find some sort of a Heritage Walk group when she moved to Kerala’s capital Thiruvananthapuram a few years ago. When she found that there was none, Bina, an archaeologist and heritage consultant, decided to begin one, to explore the place and while she did, take along others with similar interests.
Heritage Walk Trivandrum is today five-and-a-half-years old, has completed more than 50 walks, held discussions, made house visits and is now doing a few re-walks on request!
“It stems from a larger concern to understand the history of the periphery. We know a lot about the main empires and kingdoms. The Harappan civilisation, the Mauryas and the Guptas and the Mughals. But what happens in the peripheral regions of our country -- we don’t know much. They don’t feature in the mainland history. That has always been my pet passion,” Bina says.
She says that as a true blue heritage person, she does not believe heritage is only in the big monuments but also in the by-lanes and the nooks and corners of a place. In Thiruvananthapuram, therefore, the team went to the Chalai market, the first to come up in the city when the capital of Kerala moved from Padmanabhapuram to Thiruvananthapuram, Valyashala with the Brahmin quarters known as ‘agraharams’, and the Government Hospital which was the first English hospital in the city.
Bina Thomas.
“These are places we pass by every day, but the significance of which we don’t know. So the Chalai market was seen as just another market to buy your stuff from and you don’t go to the General Hospital unless you are a patient,” Bina says.
When talks of heritage come up, it is always the Fort area in Thiruvananthapuram that gets discussed, and the palaces and the Napier Museum. Not the smaller but much more significant places like the first school in Thiruvananthapuram or else the old building where the police headquarters now stand. “Cities are not built in a day. It is important for people to understand that everything doesn’t come as benevolence from the ruling family. There were protests and movements and clashes that put pressure on the ruling classes to bring about the reforms. We need to understand the processes that led to the making of a city,” Bina says.
The group grew in five-and-a-half years. The first walk had been to Pettah on the last Sunday of October in 2013. Most months after that, the group would gather together on the last Sunday – often for walks. They also got together for Heritage Walk group discussions, picking up topics like the first banks in the city or the first missionary activities or the first road transport.
“We have people from these families still living in the city, third or fourth generation descendants passionately keeping track of family heritage. There was even one on cinema – when the descendants of the founders of the Merryland Studio (second film production studio in the Malayalam film industry) came to talk," she says.
There are book readings too, and house visits. They visit houses which are more than a hundred years old. And then there are the unexpected discoveries they make during their Sunday walks. Once when they went through Karamana, they came upon the house of Nagam Aiya, a historian who had worked as a civil servant in Travancore, rising from Tahasildar to Diwan Peishkar. The house was in a bad state but you can guess the thrill the history enthusiasts would have got when they saw that his name board was still there.
Not that they avoided the Fort area – there was a year exclusively for Fort walks. And when they went through quite a bit of the city, they began touring outside of it, to places that had once constituted the princely state of Travancore – like Marthandam and Chitharal.
On Sunday, Heritage Walk Trivandrum will have a trip to the Lalindloch Palace and heritage structures at the Agriculture College in Vellayani. It is a ‘re-walk’, says Bina, for many new members have joined and there have been requests to visit the old places again. They’ll be documenting all this. Bina is writing, and there are others to help her with everything. “Senior journalist Malayinkeezhu Gopalakrishnan, conservation architect Sarath, Hemachandran, retired director in charge of the State Archaeology Department and Achuthsankar, professor of Bioinformatics,” she names a few.