The Kadavu and Sakthan Thampuran's Warehouses

Walk south past St. Thomas Church and the old roads lead down to where the kadavu (boat landing) used to be. Very little is left to see, but for centuries this was the reason Aranattukara mattered.

The port of Thrissur

Thrissur stands inland. Its goods came here by bullock cart and as head-loads, and went on by boat along the backwaters to Kochi, Kodungallur and Kozhikode. Large cargo boats called kettuvallams and pathemaris tied up at the landing. The book cites a scholar who found Aranattukara named in Portuguese records as one of the Kingdom of Cochin’s main revenue ports. An English traveller wrote that he left Aranattukara by boat at eight one morning in November 1819 and reached Kochi at eleven that night.

The pandikasalas

Sakthan Thampuran made the trade in tobacco, salt and pepper a state monopoly and built government warehouses, pandikasalas, at the landing. Records quoted in the book speak of thousands of bundles of tobacco, of arecanut, sesame and coconut oil stored here, and of the state’s paddy taxes being measured into its granary. Rows of aras (storerooms) gave the market its nickname, the aramukham.

On John Gould’s 1816 plan of Trichur, a group of red-roofed buildings marked “Aranaat” sits at the head of a backwater inlet.

Fading away

The railway, and a new canal that moved the boats to Vanchikkulam, took the trade away. The landing became a sandbank, then a place for evening walks, and later silted up. Today a walled public bathing pond, looked after by the Thrissur Corporation, is the main reminder of the old kadavu.