Work and Industry

Aranattukara grew up as a place of buying and selling. Its markets, its kadavu (boat landing) and its closeness to Thrissur made it rich in trade long before it had anything that could be called a factory. When industry did arrive in the twentieth century, it came in a handful of workshops and foundries, most of them making heavy iron parts for the oil mills of the district. This chapter follows that working life: the factories, the bakeries, the merchants and banks, the farms and the houses they paid for.

Iron and fire: the foundries

The best known of them was Cochin Malleables, at Kizhakkeppuram. Joy Chiramel describes it as the largest iron-casting works in South India. It was owned by Unni Menon of Thrissur. Pig iron was melted in big furnaces and poured into large castings. Many local families depended on it, and workers could get breakfast, lunch and an evening snack for a few paise. The factory even ran a strong football team, which once held Punjab Police to a draw in the Chakkola Trophy.

Factory work was dangerous. The author remembers from his school days a furnace bursting, and two workers who lived near the kadavu dying of their burns. Labour disputes followed in later years and the company closed. Many people lost steady jobs, and the site was left to rust and jungle.

Several smaller foundries grew up around the same trade. In the days before cheap steel, oil was pressed in a chakku (oil press) with a heavy pestle, the kana. These were once made of wood, but later of cast iron.

Mookken’s Mill Engineering, where the road to Kizhakkeppuram leaves Calvary Road, cast and machined this equipment. The Mookken family of Thrissur started it. Later it was run by a Menon who could design machines to order, the father-in-law of the singer P. Jayachandran. At its height it employed about sixty people. After his death his son kept it going for a few years, but newer technology overtook it.
Hindustan Foundry, a little east of Poothole Calvary Road, made cast-iron parts for the industries of Thrissur, including the oil-press sets.
St. Joseph’s Foundry Works, opposite the Poothole Government U.P. School, made oil presses and the dies used for retreading tyres.

All three met the same end. Castings could be made more cheaply in Coimbatore, iron work grew expensive, and one by one the furnaces went cold.

Tiles, tablets and enamel plates

Opposite Mookken’s stood the Mahalakshmi Tile Company, known locally as Swami’s tile company. For a long time a tiled roof was what every new house needed, and the company was busy. Concrete roofs changed that, and the clay for tile-making became hard to find. Like many tile works across Kerala, it closed.

Near the crematorium on the Lalur cemetery road there was once a works making enamelled iron plates, bowls and cups. These were the everyday dishes of the time, cheaper than porcelain, though a chip in the enamel soon rusted into a hole. The book says the family of Kurur Neelakantan Namboodiripad ran it. When aluminium vessels arrived, people switched to them and the works closed.

One factory is still working. Trinity Pharmaceuticals, beside the Netaji Ground, makes allopathic tablets. Most of its jobs have always been done by women, though the book notes that fewer of its workers now come from Aranattukara itself.

Bread from the borma

Baking has lasted better than iron. Kurian’s Bakers, started at Valiyangadi with its own borma (wood-fired bakery oven), was one of the early bakeries and later opened a shop in Thrissur town. Another oven-bakery still works in the Aranattukara market. Kokkan’s Bakers & Confectioneries bakes on a large scale on Chungam Road and sells from Kanjani Road. More recently P.V. Sebastian, a native of Aranattukara, started Mango Bakers and built up a wider distribution network.

Merchants, carts and banks

Behind the factories lay an older and larger story of trade. The book says the Syrian Christian families of Aranattukara were leading names in Kerala in salt, tobacco, leather, electroplating, elephant caparisons, silk parasols and church vestments. They were also prominent in groceries and hill produce. The merchants of the grocery bazaars of Thrissur were often Aranattukara men. Some families built large businesses in copra and coconut oil. Burmah Shell made the Ainikkal Poothokkaran family its distributor of kerosene and engine oil for Cochin State.

Mani & Company on Poothole Road was a wholesale house for rice, oil and copra. In its day a line of bullock carts waited outside, their neck-bells ringing. When lorries replaced carts, wholesale trade like this moved into town.

Trade needed credit, and for a time moneylenders filled that need. To break their hold, local merchants started the Aranattukara Catholic Oriental Bank in 1919. The same year saw the Aranattukara Union Bank, which dealt mainly in kuri (chit funds). In each chit, one draw went to the bank and another to the parish church, so clergy and people alike supported it. When the Reserve Bank later pushed small banks to merge, both were absorbed into the South Indian Bank. The chit business carried on, and still runs as Aranattukara Kuries. The book also mentions the Catholic Social Bank and the Vidyabhivardhini Sangham Bank.

Fields and harvests

Farming mattered as much as trade. Families from Aranattukara were known for the harvests they won from the kayal (backwater) paddy fields and the kol (low-lying wetland paddy). The book counts the Erinjeri, Kanjanikkaran, Chiriyankandath Kada and Kuruthukulangara Koola families among them. The next chapters show how much of that farmland has since been filled in.

Houses that trade built

The earliest homes here were thatched huts. Tiled houses probably began to appear in the nineteenth century, as trading families prospered. Some rose to two or three storeys. The book names the Chungath house at Valiyangadi and the S.M.S. house at Thoppinmoola as three-storeyed. Walls were of laterite or of mud bricks trodden with old rice-water. The roofs rested on carefully cut rafters that met at the corners, and a mistake of half an inch could spoil the whole frame.

Old tiled houses like this one were built on the profits of trade. Photo to come

The carpenters who did this work were remembered too. The Tharakans brought some from the Tamil country. One of them, Thampu, kept coming to Aranattukara with his tool bag into old age, working for small wages and cooking his supper of rice and dal after a bath in the Pottakkulam pond at Karyattukara.

What the factories left behind

Of Aranattukara’s industries, only the pharmaceutical company and the bakeries are still working. The foundries, the tile works and the enamel works are gone. They lost out to cheaper castings, concrete roofs and aluminium pans, and to the lorry, which pulled trade into town. What lasted was the commercial instinct that started them, along with a chit fund that is now more than a century old.

If you or your family worked at Cochin Malleables, Mookken’s, Hindustan Foundry, St. Joseph’s, Mahalakshmi Tiles or one of the old bakeries, we would love to hear from you.

Sources

Joy Chiramel, Arranadu – Aranadu – Orunadu (2024), ch. 13
Joy Chiramel, Arranadu – Aranadu – Orunadu (2024), ch. 15 (drawing in part on C.T. Antony, Oonnuvadikal)
Joy Chiramel, Arranadu – Aranadu – Orunadu (2024), ch. 16 (the Cochin Malleables football team)