Savouring the best of Chettinad food at the Bangala
Me en a ks hi Mey ya pp an, the spirit behind the Bang ala and author of a fine cookbook, believes Ch et tin ad feasts are one way to make the region a magnet for tourists, writes Rahul Jacob
Itis six months since I stayed at the Bang ala, a small boutique hotel in Chettinad, and yet I remember it as if I had just awoken from a dream. The memories are of dining tables with silver cutlery, surrounded by staff in white shirts and white lung is carrying salvers and pressing more food upon hotel guests.Quail curry one moment, crab the next; the Bangala felt a kin to being at the home of my Tamil grandmother who a woke at dawn to prepare enormous feasts of id lisa nd chicken curry if we were visiting.
The first dinner I at eat the Bang ala with a group of friends began with a car rot soup, which was followed by two helping sofa delicious red cabbage and orange salad. After that, we had exceptionally light a pp ams served with fish curry, cashew curry and as am bol. I ate with the abandon of a teenage ron parole from boarding school. The plates were cleared and another wait er arrived offering us a Ch et tin ad chicken bi ry a ni. One becomes quickly acclimatised to this strange custom at the Bang ala of serving two dinners for the price of one, all the while feebly pro testing and promising to eat less at the next meal. And, so it went at breakfast, lunch and dinner for three days of unrestrained gluttony. Every meal was like being at an old-world Indian wedding rooted in thebes to fa local cuisine before “live” pasta/ dos a/ ga lou ti counters took hold.
I have never accomplished lesson a holiday than I did at the Bang ala. We visited no temple sand did very little sightseeing except to visit the fantastic ally grand jumble of styles of nearby Chet tin ad mans ions. Houses in Tudor, Victorian, Art Nouveau and In do crumbling chi calls it side by side as if the town were a large-scale model for an accelerated course in architecture. I swam in the pool regularly, but largely to work up an appetite for the next meal.
By day three, the octogenarian spirit behind the Bang ala, Me en a ks hi Mey ya pp an, whose family own sit, had a quiet word with me. She was worried that I and “the boys ”( my friend’ s sons in their twenties) weren’ t enjoying ourselves because we had done so little. But, erratic Wi-Fi in our wing of the 25-room hotel and epic dinners meant we had more time for conversation; I came to admire the eclectic interests of my friend’ s sons. One found hilarious British Indian words from
Hobson Jobson, the colonial-era dictionary that is a reminder of thek hi ch di that English is, with words like shampoo and in deeder ee having Indian origins. Our favourite phrase was “darwaz ab andh ”, used by the major-do mo when them em sahib and sahib did not wish to be disturbed.
Meyyappan, who will be 84 in a fort night, is a much more en er ge ti cm em sahib than her colonial counterparts. She embarked on her career as a hotelier two decades ago when she was in her sixties, an age when the res tofus are winding down. Mey ya pp an and a relative by marriage, Vis ala ks hi Rama swamy, w ho is responsible for the under stated design of the property, were worried that Ch et tia rs with ties to Karaikudi and the means to maintain 85- room villas were dwindling. Two decades on, their project to rev ive the region as a tourism destination seems about half complete .“tells me to take things day by day, but that is impossible for me. There is too much at stake ,” Mey ya pp an told The New York Times last year.
Ev en if you area laid back underachiever as I am, witnessing the work ethic of this octogenarian, who now doubles as manager of the hotel after her long-time manager retired, is reason enough to visit. When I suggested a sturdy or t hop aedicquadri- pronged walking stick was what she needed after hip surgery last year, she dismissed the idea with the vehement impatience of someone in a hurry. On our last evening, I asked if she ever felt lonely living away from her family in Chen nai. Her reply was matter-of-fact. After over seeing dinner at the hotel— or rather ensuring that her guests had wildly over eaten while she dined on a small plate of curd rice — shere turned home tired to her family’ s stunning Art Nouveau mansion, with checker floors that look like they have been made for a chess game; she only had time for reading “biographies ”. I doubt there is a hotel in the country with a better collection of books, pro cured from the iconic bookshop that used to beat the Con ne ma rain Chen nai.
Born in Bangalore( now Bengaluru) and raised in colonial Ceylon, Meyyappan could probably run Chen na i if she were younger. Instead, she has focused her energies on helping put Karai ku di, an unremarkable two-hour drive from Madurai mostly through a harsh landscape of dry shrub, on the map by opening the Bang ala and pub li ci sing its cuisine through an exceptional cookbook, The Bang ala Table, published in 2014. A cast of international chefs have been visitors to the property. I was travelling with a Kiwi friend, a well-known chef, and soon got used to her tendency to lap se into a reverential silence at meal-times at the Bangala.
Still, helping India and the world discover Ch et tin ad remains an up hill battle. The Chcommunity had a great run as banker sin colonial times in places such as Burma( Myanmar) and Malaysia, but their genius as the equivalent of the Lehman Brothers and the Gold man Sachs of the 150- year colonial era now seem same re historical curiosity .( The Ch et tia rs became celebrated carnivores on their long sojourns overseas; a barbecued fish recipe in the cookbook uses garlic chill is au ce, re calling the N yon ya cuisine of Malaysia rather than southern India .)
Arevival of a sort is underway. A childhood friend of mine, Pri ya Paul of the Park Hotel group, pi led suggestions upon me of what to do in and around Karai ku di. The Park is restoring a house that will be made into a 21room and suites hotel and open in 2019. The group will open a large café there next month. But get lost, as we did one morning wandering the streets, and Karai ku di does not feel like a place a bout to pole-vault on to a list of “100 places to visit before you die” as, say, Fort Co chin did a couple of decades ago.
This is part of Ch et tin ad’ s charm. Theguides tell you stories shot full of nostalgia and lost for tunes. I took no notes so may have this wrong but in one of the mans ions we visited, I was told that the doors in the back courtyard had to be kept closed because to have the front and back doors open at the same time would result in even more Ch etti ar wealth flowing away. There is the melancholy of at own that looks to the past rather than to the future. Sid hp ur in Gujarat, where the Bo hr a Muslims, a similarly globe-trotting trading community, built mansion sin a very Italian style has much the same feeling. In Chettinad, one sees many wonders: Mu ra no glass chandeliers brought from Italy, teak imported from Burma and used as handsome doors with carving s venerating Shiva and Vishnu. The ti ling on the floors is one of a kind, like carpeting. The tile factory in At hangudi will leave most visitors fan ta si sing about importing a truck load to redo their living room floors.
But, one also often sees large mans ions that are darkened by soot, black mould and dust. We walked into one by mistake. The lady of the house had made a pal try business s el ling savou ry snacks to tourists. In the gloom and squalor, I could see her husband understandably scowling at the intruders. What was once a grand mansion felt like a run down house, like India in microcosm. The other problem is that Karaikud ii sat ho roughly mo fussil town, by passed by industry and prospects. In such a setting, the grand mansions sometimes seemed a reminder, to para phrase Joan Di dion writing about grand houses in Newport built in the early 20 th century by America’ s rob ber baron industrialists, of “how prettily money can be spent” but also “of how harsh ly money is made ”. As admirable as the Chettiar community is today, there is a moral ambiguity to the narrative of Chettinad: being financial intermediaries for the British in dealing with the small trader and farmer in places such as Burma, India and Malaysia must often have required being the very opposite of Robin Hood.
Back at the Bang ala, the ceaseless bust le of a kitchen out of amy th keeps such thought sat bay. Return from sightseeing and you are rewarded with lunch es on banana leaf that include crab curry, crab rasam, muttonapu kari, a pomegranate ra it a and several.( When I looked at my bill as I left, I thought I had been under-charged; lunch and dinner cost just ~1,000 each .) We met families who had been coming back every year to the Bang ala for more than a decade. My friends and I have already spoken about returning. It is an unusual hotelier who leaves guests with the illusion they are re claiming an ancestral home. Against considerable odds, that is what Me en a ks hi Mey ya pan’ s generosity has accomplished at the Bang ala.
‘MY SON TELLS ME TO TAKE THINGS DAY BY DAY, BUT THAT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME. THERE IS TOO MUCH AT STAKE’ MEENAKSHI MEYYAPPAN