History · Chapter 2 of 10
The Port of Thrissivaperur
Before the railway, Thrissur's goods left by water from the landing at Aranattukara. Sakthan Thampuran's warehouses, the toll posts and the slow decline of an inland port.
Stand today at the southern end of Aranattukara, where the roads run down past the church towards the paddy, and it is hard to picture boats. Yet for centuries this was where the town of Thrissivaperur met the water. Goods came in by cart and on people’s heads; they left by boat for Kochi, Kodungallur and Kozhikode. Aranattukara was Thrissur’s port.
Where the water route ended
Look at a map of the land west of Thrissur and you see why. The kol (low paddy wetlands) spread out towards the backwaters, and in the old days channels and inlets reached right up to the edge of the town’s dry ground. Aranattukara sat on that edge.
The kol fields are a strange and beautiful landscape. They lie two or three feet below sea level. In the book’s account, they were farmed only once a year, from about December to April. From June to November they flooded and lay like a lake, with the tide pushing brackish water in and out. Bunds had to be built across the inlets before each season to keep the salt water out. Later works such as the Enamavu bund made farming easier — and, slowly, closed off the old water roads.
For boats, that seasonal lake was a highway. Kettuvallams (big cargo boats), smaller boats and pathemaris (country sailing vessels) could reach Aranattukara’s kadavu (landing) and leave again loaded. Goods that had crossed the eastern hills from the Tamil country could travel on from here towards Kodungallur and the sea.
Around the landing grew everything a port needs: storehouses, workshops, sathrams (rest houses), a watch-house and toll stations, and a crowd of porters, boatmen and traders.
A map from 1816
One of the earliest pictures we have of the place is a British survey plan of Trichur drawn by John Gould in 1816. At the head of a narrow backwater inlet, south-west of the town, the map shows a small cluster of red-roofed buildings. Beside them is a handwritten label that we read as “Aranaat”.
That reading is ours, and it is not yet certain. The copy we have is not sharp enough to be sure of every letter, and we still need to check it against the original in the British Library. But the position fits well: buildings on the last dry ground, where the water route ends. If the reading holds, it may be the earliest map that names the port.
Records of the landing
The book gathers several mentions of the port in older writings. Historian Pius Malekandathil, it says, has found Portuguese records listing Aranattukara and Chettuva as the main revenue-earning ports of the Kingdom of Cochin.
A British traveller, whom the book names as B.S. Ward, set out from Aranattukara by boat at eight one morning in November 1819, stopped at Kodungallur on the way, and reached Kochi before midnight. A line in an official Malayalam diary at the Regional Archives, Ernakulam, makes the same point plainly: the water route comes as far as Aranattukara, and from there you walk, take a bullock cart, or — if you are lucky — a horse carriage.
Other entries are pure business: an offer to deliver rice to a Captain Robinson at the Aranattukara landing in bales of a set weight, and a pass ordering officials to let a cargo of nearly sixteen thousand bundles of government tobacco travel from Aranattukara to Ernakulam without being stopped. The state granary stood here too. Land tax on paddy was then paid in paddy, and the records suggest it was measured into the government warehouses at Aranattukara.
Sakthan Thampuran’s warehouses
The port’s best years came under Sakthan Thampuran, who ruled Cochin from 1790 to 1805. The kingdom was short of money, and much of the profit from trade was going to outside merchants. His answer was to bring key goods under state control. Tobacco, salt and pepper became government trade, and government warehouses — pandikasalas — were built at the landing.
The book quotes orders that give a sense of the scale: some 1,700 bundles of tobacco a month to be brought in for sale in the Thrissur and Thalappilly areas, and money set aside to buy and store arecanut from Thalappilly, sesame from the north, and coconuts and coconut oil from Enamakkal. Produce from Chittur, far to the east, also came through Aranattukara on its way to Kochi.
Salt had its own story. According to tradition, crews of local Christians rowed big pathemaris all the way to the salt pans at Kozhikode — a round trip of about two weeks — and brought the salt back to stores here. One of those voyages, the parish remembers, brought home the statue of St. Sebastian.
The market that grew up beside the warehouses was, for a time, more famous than anything in Thrissur itself. At one stage the Tharakan family paid to develop it, and it was also known as the “Tharakan Market”. Going there was “going to the aramukham”, the face of the storerooms. (The Tharakans controlled much of the buying and selling at the landing; see The Tharakans.)
The tolls
Trade meant tax. Two chunkams (toll posts) guarded the roads into Aranattukara: the Kanjani toll, for traffic from the north-east, and the Lalur toll, on the Lalur road at the edge of the Thrissur municipality. The Kanjani spot is still called Chunkam today.
At these posts stood chumaduthangis, stone load-rests: two upright slabs with a cross-slab at shoulder height, so a porter could set down his load, pay, and lift it again without help. Not everyone paid willingly. The book enjoys the story of mahouts who tried to slip past by walking close beside their elephants — and, when the toll-keeper came near, quietly making the elephant restless. The last keeper of the Lalur toll, the book says, was Chiramel Panjan Kuriya.
The port falls quiet
Railways ended the port’s life. The book names the start of rail transport as the first blow; the line from Shoranur to Kochi reached Thrissur in 1902. Then the Puthenthodu canal was dug through to Kokkalai, and boat traffic moved to the area now called Vanchikkulam. Lorries and buses finished the job.
The landing found a second, humbler life as a sand depot: sand dug from the water, heaped on the bank, and carted away for building. In the evenings families came down for the breeze, children swam, and people sat on the sand watching steam trains in the distance and the cargo boats, on their new route, passing the church at Nedupuzha.
By the 1950s the maps still showed Aranattukara at the edge of the wetlands, but the port was a memory. Today the pandikasalas and the toll posts have gone. Their places are marked on our walk — the warehouse landing and the toll gate — so that the next generation knows where Thrissur once met the water.
Sources
- Joy Chiramel, Arranadu – Aranadu – Orunadu (2024), ch. 1
- Joy Chiramel, Arranadu – Aranadu – Orunadu (2024), ch. 3 (salt boats from Kozhikode; the kol fields)
- Joy Chiramel, Arranadu – Aranadu – Orunadu (2024), ch. 15 (the chunkams; trade)
- John Gould, plan of Trichur and its environs, 1816 (British Library)
- U.S. Army Map Service, map of the Trichur area, 1955
- Proceedings of the Cochin Legislative Council, 1939
Places and people in this story
The Kadavu and Sakthan Thampuran's Warehouses
The lost landing on the backwaters where Thrissur's goods once met the boats, and where Sakthan Thampuran kept the state's warehouses.
The Chunkam (Toll Gate)
Aranattukara's old toll posts, where travellers once paid duty on their loads; one of them still gives its name to the Chunkam junction.
The Tharakan House
The ancestral home of the Chiramel Tharakan family near the old landing, with its thick walls, palm-leaf medical manuscripts and a remarkable collection of heirlooms.
Sakthan Thampuran
The Cochin ruler (1790–1805) who made Thrissur his capital and turned the Aranattukara landing into a centre of state trade.