In Kerala, a break from urban India
THE 80-year-old Indian yogi was doing his best to suggest ways I might adjust my ample 55-year-old body into a passable downward dog.
I admired his ambition. I’m an enthusiastic but generally bad practitioner of yoga. But here in the darkened yoga hut at Spice Village, a botanically focused resort on 5.5 organic hectares in the middle of the Cardamom Hills of Kerala, on India’s southwestern coast, I thought I had found a kindred soul on the mat next to me. Her downward dog wasn’t looking so good, either. We smiled at each other in that awkward, supportive way tourists sometimes do.
After class, we chatted. I asked her where she was from. She looked to have Indian roots, but her English was perfect. I thought maybe she was from Los Angeles or London. The 37-year-old mum told me she was from Mumbai.
She and her husband, both born and raised in India, had left their young son with relatives for the weekend and headed south to this land of coconuts and clear air.
I ran into more than one citybound Indian tourist like her as I roamed through the spice plantations, tea estates and beaches in this slice of India. Younger Indians, flush with disposable income and a newfound appreciation of organic food, holistic living and the cultural riches within their own borders, have discovered Kerala.
“All of this has happened in the last six or seven years,” said Shelton Pinheiro, executive creative director at Stark Communications, a tourism and marketing agency working with the region. “There has been a revival in local, regional things, especially among people who have traveled abroad and come home to discover what they have here is just as special.”
We were talking over lime sodas and chunks of chicken, curry leaves and shallots fried in coconut oil at the Marari Beach Resort, a seaside resort near the Malabar coastal vil- lage of Maraikulum, where city dwellers come to get Ayurvedic treatments and swim in the Arabian Sea.
The chef and cooking teacher Asha Gomez was sitting with us, taking a break from the intense, late-spring South Indian sun. The author of a well-received cookbook called My Two Souths: Blending the Flavors of India Into a Southern Kitchen, she is the brightest light in a room. She has been pestering me to travel to Kerala almost from the day I met her a halfdozen years ago at a restaurant she used to run in Atlanta.
“Kim,” she would say, grabbing my hands, “you must come discover why we call it God’s own country.”
I finally took her up on it. After 14 hours in a plane, we found ourselves in this beach resort dissecting the new wave of Indian travel over fried chicken.
Gomez grew up in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala’s capital. Many of the beaches along the Kerala coast are rustic and inviting. A pleasant morning can be spent watching wooden fishing boats come and go.
After her father died of a heart attack when she was 16, Gomez and her mother moved to Michigan, where her older brothers were in college. She made her way to New York before landing in Atlanta, where she has made a career out of blending the food of the Indian South with the American South, first in Atlanta and now out of a private kitchen called Third Space.
The hot, vinegary sauce in a dish of pork vindaloo is not far from the one that moistens a whole-hog barbecue sandwich in North Carolina. The black pepper that grows everywhere here helps tame the innate sweetness in a Southern-style carrot cake. And for both American southerners and Indian southerners, eating fried chicken is woven into the cultural fabric.
“When I was younger, no one from Madras or even Goa was thinking about going to Kerala to eat for vacation,” she said. “Travelling for pleasure was wasting money. Now anyone you talk to has either been or is planning to go.”
Travellers from the US and Europe who might have a specific interest in tea or the vast nature preserves that hold tigers and elephants have long made their way to Kerala, starting and ending their trips in Kochi, a city of about 600,000 that is easier to navigate and less tradition-bound than New Delhi, Mumbai or Bangalore.
Even outside the city, Kerala is more distinctly laid-back than most of the other 36 states in India. It’s the most religiously diverse part, and the literacy rate among its 33 million residents is the country’s highest. In some parts of the state, American rock edges out Bollywood soundtracks.
There are plenty of small resorts along its coastline, and a series of river communities called the backwater that feature wooden houseboats furnished with cooks and nice furniture that provide a base for family vacations. Kerala’s cooking is light and infused with chili and coconut; its dishes are built largely around rice and fish.
“Most of my friends say Kerala is the soft landing for India because then you are used to India and ready for all of its glorious chaos in other places,” Pinheiro said.
It is also religiously diverse – more than half of the people here practise Hinduism, but there are plenty of Muslims, a handful of Jewish neighbourhoods and lots of Catholics .
The Portuguese, who landed here in the 15th century and took up the spice trade, introduced Catholicism. They also brought with them a love of pork and the chilies that would come to define Kerala’s food. It’s how Gomez’s family got its name and why she grew up a meat-eating Catholic in a land where vegetarianism reigns.
It makes sense, then, that Kerala and its food are increasingly attractive to younger people from India’s huge, sprawling cities who, like travellers in many parts of the world, are increasingly using food as an organising principal for their vacations.