From The Sunday Times Travel Magazine Dec, 2007, issue

Outside our hotel was a holy man selling brilliant crimson medicine in old vaccine phials. He sat under a vast rain tree, and every now and then, the house crows would wander over to monitor his takings. Most of his customers were rickshaw drivers, although none could tell me exactly what his medicine did.

Such sights would be familiar to old India hands. But to me, it was all still beautifully baffling. Within an hour of arriving in Cochin, the seaside capital of Kerala state, I’d spotted a ‘Ladies Frisking Booth’, an advertisement for a surrogate mother, some porters wearing shirts embroidered with the words ‘NO TIPS’, and a supermodel digging a trench in her sari. With all its robes and elephants and public works, I’ve always imagined that India is what Ancient Rome would have been like if it hadn’t been so… ancient.

But then, in the middle of this Neoclassical reverie – wham! – I found myself falling down the great rabbit-hole of time, and ending up in the wonderland that’s modern India: satellite launches, BMW factories, hip hotels and new travel outfits – such as Jet Airways – whose names may be straight out of Toytown but whose service is confidently slick.

The Sunday Times Travel Magazine - July

10 classic India stories

The travel editor at Times Online delves into the collection to choose his favourite features on India in 2007

BACKGROUND

• Mumbai: a city of two tales

• At home in the Himalayas

• A wild time in India's tiger territory

• Tamil Nadu hotels and temples

BACKGROUND

• Planning travel to India

• Is it safe to drive in India?

• Can you recommend a Delhi travel agent?

• A train passage through India

It’s always been like this in Kerala, for millennia a gateway to the continent. Its beauty, greenery and balmy climate brought early traders from Greece, Arabia and the shores of the Caspian Sea, and it was Kerala, too, that attracted India’s first Europeans. Pliny described it as the place for teak and peacocks, and Columbus had been heading here when he bumped into the Americas. Among the first to take it seriously, though, were the courtiers of the Kublai Khan, who left behind their great creaking fishing machines (‘The Chinese Nets’). A skipper invited me up to have a look, and before I knew it, we were tottering around in the superstructure, high above the waters of Cochin.

‘It feels like an elephant trap,’ I told the skipper.

He laughed. ‘All this, just to catch some tiddlers!’

Each of the great powers left odds and ends behind – and accidentally created a place where Asia and Europe now seem to overlap. We found a Portuguese fort, a Dutch Palace, a 16th-century Jewish synagogue and a whole street of old British mock-Tudor clubs and ‘godowns’, as they call warehouses here. My wife, Jayne, even spotted Vasco da Gama’s grave, into which he’d been inserted by relieved locals on Christmas Day 1524. He was never the best ambassador for Europe. He once made a curry out of Keralite hands and noses; and when the local Zamorin leaders sent him an envoy, da Gama sent the man back with his ears cut off and those of a dog sewn on.

The Keralite character survived the incursions intact, though. People here are spiritual and sensuous: there are shrines to snakes, and the men go to beauty parlours. We even went to watch some Kathakali, an eye-popping, sinew-snapping dance unchanged for several thousand years. But, in every other way, the Keralites are gluttons for innovation. They enjoy a literacy rate of 90 per cent and – in India – they were the first Christians, the first Jews, and the first Communists. They are also the most prosperous, and the irresistible urge to work has now thrown their invasions into reverse. These days there are around three million Keralites working abroad, most of them in the Gulf.

I’ll remember their pungent, spicy old capital for its shady banyan trees, dugout canoes, merchants in dhoti ‘skirts’ and a pair of exquisite brass scales I bought for about 80p. But for every medicine man and purveyor of magic beads, there’s a returning worker who’s built himself a spanking new little Abu Dhabi. Judging from the small ads, even the local prostitutes have undergone a little re-branding: these days, the only attributes they ever advance are ‘hygienic’ or ‘English spoken’.

Modernity, it seems, is now galloping ahead at such a pace that often hotels are forced to re-invent the past. Ours, The Brunton Boatyard, is a case in point. It had started out as industrial premises in 1840, but shipbuilding was never like this. We had four-poster beds, planters’ chairs, punkah fans (with palm leaf-shaped blades) and spice chests (each the size of a family saloon). It was all so tastefully antiqued and boutiqued, it felt like wandering around in a sepia print. Only our dinner re-ignited a sense of the present: plump prawns deliciously perfumed with spices, and served with chilled Chardonnay (Indian, of course). In a country where ‘colonial’ used to mean ‘the plumbing doesn’t work’ (and ‘historic’ meant ‘nothing works at all’), here was unexpected pleasure indeed.

I wanted to travel further back in time – and that meant a drive up into the Western Ghats. The higher our little car climbed, the more decades seemed to fall away. First, the city broke up into tiny factories (with bizarre names such as ‘The Infant Jesus Radiator Works’), and then we were in the plantations. Our driver said that here forest people still wash their houses out with cow dung (an early germicide) and consider it a sin to kill a squirrel. They’d even believed in their Robin Hood for a while (although when police finally chased him to Earth, he turned out to be no more than a mountain rustler called Veerappan). These are simple, public lives consisting of baths taken in the river and sheets dried on the grass. Up here, the buses have names like ‘St Anthony’, and the only time we stopped was to let a snake cross the road.