Pepper Fray

IT SHOULD BE RIGHT ABOUT here,” saysDrPrathimaSreenivasan, professor and head of the Depart­ment of Oral Medicine and Radi­ology at Kannur Dental College, pointing to what looks like a stur­dy water pump on a plinth. It turns out to be a colonial-era distilling unit that, she says, produced fine cinnamon leaf oil up until 2006. The 250-acre campus, which also houses the larger Kannur Medical Col­lege, is engulfed in a warm, steady rain. Un­der our umbrellas, we skip through slush and vegetation to look for vestiges of what was once South India’s largest colonial spice plantation. Given the relatively short life cycles of cash crops like pepper and cinnamon, however, we are clutching at straws—rather, at the lush vines that run amok here. Even today, it is not difficult to fathom why Anjarakandy, a plantation-turned-college campus in Kerala’s Kannur district, came to be the ground zero of the colonial pepper wars. In William Logan’s Malabar Manual, an 1887 publication commissioned by the Government of Ma­dras and compiled during Logan’s tenure as the collector of Malabar, Anjarakandy is described as “one of the most interest­ing amsams in Chirakkal taluk [formerly Kolattanad]”. “In 1797 the Honourable Company decided to open at this place a plantation of coffee, cinnamon, pepper, nutmeg, cassia, sugarcane, and sandal­wood plants, such products as from time immemorial formed the valuable articles of exchange between Malabar and the dis­tant nations. Mr Murdock Brown, the orig­inator of the scheme, a merchant of Mahé, who had joined the Company’s service on the fall of the settlement in 1793, was ap­pointed overseer and manager; and by an agreement signed on December 31, 1797, he agreed that, if the Honourable Court of Directors disapproved, he would take over the plantation on his own account and repay the Company all the money, principal and interest, expended thereon,” Logan records.

The estate, also known as Randattara, was leased to Brown for 99 years and he was granted possession of 459 acres, be­sides the right to clear and occupy “all wasteland within the five taras or desams of the amsam”, and the right to purchase in addition 918 acres from private own­ers. To understand why this land was precious, one need only look at the trade volumes of pepper from North Malabar or Kolattunad, one of the four kingdoms of littoral Malabar, ruled by the Kolattiri family, in the 18th century. “About 20000 kandies of pepper (over 5,000 tonne) a year were traded from Malabar and An­jarakandy contributed a chunk of this. Pepper prices were rising (from Rs 60 a kandy in 1722 to Rs 200 in the 1790s) and many new cultivars that had been developed were adapting well to local conditions,” says historian Abhilash Malayil, who studies the political economy of 18th-century Malabar.

Fortunes, including Brown’s, were made here. Why did the colonial powers vie with one another for control over this fertile patch of land and over Dharmapat­tanam (present-day Dharmadam), a small bay at the mouth of the southern branch of the Anjarakandy river? To effectively gain monopoly over the pepper trade from North Malabar. The English East In­dia Company, which had not only set up a factory in Tellicherry (present-day Thal­assery, a coastal town in Kannur district) but also secured a monopoly over pepper trade granted by the rulers of Kolattunad in the early 18th century, had to wage war, topple rajas and princes, quell rebellion by rulers and peasants alike, and strengthen several forts in the vicinity in the coming decades as the kingdom came under attack from internal and external forces and re­lations soured with the Kolattiri. “Indeed, for most of the 1740s and 1750s Randattara was a flashpoint in Anglo-Kolattunad re­lations, notwithstanding the number of occasions when the factors at Tellicherry had collaborated with the Kolattiri or his Prince Regent against common enemies,” notes historian Bonaventure Swai in a paper on British merchant capital in Telli­cherry from 1694 to 1766. Swai also notes that the British “seemed to be interested not only in trade… but also in acquiring political control of the Kolattunad Raj so as to secure monopoly of the spice trade in Malabar.” Staving off repeated attacks from Canara eventually made the Kolat­tiri cede Dharmadam to the East India Company but it still had to go to war with Hyder Ali, who occupied many parts of Malabar, including Kolattunad in 1766, and later with Tipu Sultan, who ordered a trade blockade, as well as with support­ers of the Mysore kingdom, including Ali Raja of Cannanore (present-day Kan­nur). The English finally gained control of the Malabar Coast in 1790, but the Ran­dattara plantation would soon become a burden, and eventually downright unvi­able after clashes with Kerala Varma, also known as Pazhassi Raja of Cotiote (Kot­tayathu), who raided it in 1803. Luckily, Brown, who had allegedly played both sides by supplying guns to Tipu from Mahé—happened to be around to take Randattara, the crown jewel of North Malabar, off the hands of the English.

“When the college came up in 2005- 2006, there was still a copse of cinnamon trees right around the bend after the dental college. The factory near the old bungalow by the river was still running, although at a loss, and harvesting cinnamon was get­ting difficult—there was no skilled labour to be found,” says Dr Sreenivasan, one of the first faculty members to join the den­tal college. The trees have made way for more buildings, and Brown, who lived for over half a century and died here, is rarely remembered except when his descen­dants are occasionally invited to col­lege events. His “rambling house” by the Anjarakandy river was a wreck when the current owner of the 250-acre campus—NRI businessman M Abdul Jabbar—decided to knock it down and build a guesthouse a few years ago. The entire estate in which the colleges run by Jabbar’s educational trust are located is under legal dispute, with allegations that it was wrongly classified as a garden and an estate when it should really be identified as surplus land and be handed over to the gov­ernment under the state’s land ceiling act. Disused and ominous, the guesthouse is barely accessible in the monsoon. Students do not venture here after dark, for fear of alleged headless ghosts emerging from an old well. Perhaps the ghosts of Murdock Brown’s slaves are still haunting his house, jokes Dr Faizal CP, professor and head of the Department of Paediatric Dentistry at Kan­nur Dental College and an amateur histo­rian who has been collecting local stories in Anjarakandy. “There is also a graveyard with unmarked graves that are said to be of Sri Lankan labourers who were imported to harvest cinnamon,” he says.

Pepper vines wrap nonchalantly around the trees inside a neighbouring compound. Across a road awash with muddy rivulets is the old factory, also inaccessible due to the weather. Outside, the board reads ‘Prestige Educational Trust Project Office – Anjarakandy’. A few paces away, the river runs swollen with rainwa­ter. It originates in the slopes of the West­ern Ghats near Wayanad, a neighbouring district where several villages were wiped out by deadly landslides following heavy rainfall on July 30, leaving over 300 dead and even more missing or injured. The Kerala government has been blamed for the unchecked exploitation of the eco-sen­sitive zone. If swashbuckling adventurers like Murdock Brown were alive and active today, they would likely be implicated in the tragedy. Brown’s exploitative and mercenary nature, however, was com­mon for his time. An autodidact and a much-reviled figure, Murdock Brown is painted all too readily in shades of ava­rice and skulduggery. It is worth noting, though, that locals referred to him as Brown Achan, presumably because they saw him as no outsider, but as one among the Randattara Achanmar—the four Nambiar chieftains (Kandoth, Palliyath, Ayilliath, and Arayath) who had ruled over Anjarakandy before mortgaging their land to the English East India Com­pany. The debt trap was an important tool in the hands of the East India Company, which used it to ma­nipulate local rulers as well as merchant contractors. “The Brit­ish contractual system in which the leading Mappila merchants were essential elements, result­ed ultimately in the contracting of debts and its institutionalisa­tion in the interior of Malabar. Through the contractual system, the pepper prices could always be kept at a low rate. During 1793, the Rajas of northern Malabar who had become the trade partners of the Brit­ish through treaty agreements, were asked to supply pepper at Rs 100 per candy while the rate at Mahe was Rs 170 and the price offered by the Arab merchants stood at Rs 225,” writes historian Sebastian Joseph.

PLANTERS LIKE BROWN, however, were making a killing in what was by and large a seller’s market. A Scot Catholic who had managed to become the emissary of an Austrian empress, he landed in South India in the mid-1770s. He rubbed shoul­ders with the French and married in Mahé, became a Protestant and an English super­intendent in Anjarakandy, and eventually came to be seen as a typical Malabar land­lord, annexing thousands of acres of land— his estate stretched over 5,000 acres at one point in time—keeping and trading slaves, and conducting experiments with Arabian coffee and Brazilian cotton in his spice gar­den. A precursor of imminent globalisa­tion, he was “the first man from the British Isles with property rights in India,” says Malayil. Brown is said to have lost almost all his buildings, productive pepper vines, and coffee plants in the 1803 attack on his plantation by the Cotiote rebels, but he soldiered on and continued to make profits off the land. Francis Buchanan, who visited Malabar in 1801, wrote: “The plantation has of late been much molested by the Nairs, and the eastern part of it has fallen into their hands; so that for the protection of what remains, it has been necessary to station a European Officer, with a company of Se­poys, at Mr Brown’s house. The Nairs are so bold, that at night they frequently fire into Mr Brown’s dwelling: and the last officer sta­tioned there was lately shot dead, as he was walking in front of the house.” Brown— and the East India Company before him— had antagonised a section of the locals who had had their lands taken away. “The occupation of Malabar by the English East India Company in 1792 brought about pop­ular discontent among the people,” writes Malabar historian KKN Kurup. “The ruth­less exploitation of the native resources by the Company culminated in popular revolt against its authority. These revolts, spontaneous and activist, brewed in every part of the region and disturbed the peace and tranquility of the country for nearly ten years. The Company records generally identified these disturbances as Pychy re­volt or Cotiote rebellion after the name of Kerala Varma, Raja of Pazhassi Palace, of Kottayam house.”

Half-an-hour south of Anjarakan­dy, at Thalassery, stands a small fort with mossy walls that overlooks St John’s Anglican Church, the cemetery attached to it, and the rough sea beyond. Murdock Brown, who died in 1828, his son Francis Carnac Brown, and his other descendants rest here, hearing the waves break over the mostly deserted coastline. It was not always this quiet here. The pier and the sea-facing warehouses owned by the Moplah or Mappila merchants of Tellicherry were a riot of activity. The Eng­lish East India Company’s first regular settlement on the Malabar coast in the early 18th century, Tellicherry, was home to its ‘factory’ located at the fort on a cliff overlooking the sea. A major trading post for the Company, the average tonnage here, during Logan’s time, was 355,834 per annum. “The imports average Rs 22,32,437 and the exports Rs 66,55,171. It is a place of considerable trade, of which the most valuable articles of export are coffee and pepper, and the most valuable imports are rice and salt,” Logan wrote. Thanks to pepper, and later other spices and cash crops, Malabar’s balance of payments was always positive, right from the 18th century up to Independence.

As trade flourished, so did traders—as long as they remained loyal to the Compa­ny. In 1792, General Robert Abercromby, governor of British Bombay, wrote that “it was necessary to protect the Moplahs who are a very useful merchant class in Telli­cherry for their own benefits and that of the Company”, notes Santhosh Abraham, in his 2017 paper, ‘The Keyi Mappila Muslim Merchants of Tellicherry and the Making of Coastal Cosmopolitanism on the Mala­bar Coast’. He writes of the transformation of the Muslim merchants of Tellicherry into “a comprador class”. Among them, one Chovvakaran Moosa was the most en­terprising and influential. He was a supply contractor who also extended credit to the Company and to local royals to expand his political power on the coast, even taking over some of the Arackal Bebee’s domain in Cannanore. “More evidence of a curious, ambivalent, and symbiotic relationship of mutual dependence between Moosa and the EEIC [English East India Company] is found in Thalassery Rekhakal [a collection of letters exchanged by the royals and the vassals of North Malabar with Company officials], where the Superintendent of Telli­cherry fort was observed to write to the Raja of Neeleswaram ‘to protect the belongings and the commodities of Moosa, who is a protégé of the Company’,” writes Abraham. He goes on to note that the political econo­my of the Malabar coast was undergoing a marked change, the core of which “was an alliance between foreign capital and rising indigenous merchant capital”.

The Keyi family still owns most build­ings in Thalassery, says Aleppi Keyi, a descendant of one of the branches of Moosa’s family. “Our properties are every­where—from Mumbai’s Malabar Hill to Dubai and Calicut.” His more flamboyant cousin, who divides his time between Calicut and Thalassery, is named after Chovvakaran Moosa. “People tell me that I am my grandfather’s true heir—no one has pioneered cultural tourism in North Malabar as much as my wife and I did for the past several decades until I hung up my boots after undergoing a liver transplant a few years ago,” says Moosa, an affable man in his 70s, sipping sweet black tea on the porch of Ayisha Manzil, an imposing two-storied house facing the sea that is still adorned with some fine colonial fur­niture. It was built in 1862 by none other than Murdock Brown, and the merchant Moosa bought it in 1900. His eponymous grandson and his wife would restore it and run it as a homestay, famously serving up Mappila dishes like tamarind prawns and meat-stuffed box patties to guests who came from all over the world. “The house is up for sale now,” sighs Moosa.

All good things must come to an end— just like the era of pepper in Malabar. Brown saw it coming and recommended that the Company shift focus to coconut, but the Company did not seem to have paid heed. Today, Karnataka produces more pepper than Kerala, and Tamil Nadu leads in the production of coconut. Tellicherry pepper, however, still fetches a premium in the market—not because it is grown here, it never was, but for the way it was graded by the East India Company, which stored it in cellars at the fort. “Garbled, bold, and globu­lar, with a wrinkled surface, it has a pleas­ant sharpness and fruity aroma and isn’t too spicy,” says Prakash Pai, a fourth-generation spice trader in Thalassery. “The export trade benefited a few big traders. Merchants who catered to the domestic market, like our forefathers, ran small businesses and had to work hard to make ends meet.”

MURDOCK BROWN AND Chovvakaran Moosa, the two most successful men in North Malabar, were bitter rivals. Moosa, who was loyal to the Company, was heartbroken when Brown landed the Anjarakandy estate—a proper­ty Moosa had long coveted. Anjarakandy had that effect on many people, including the Pazhassi Raja, who had assumed that he stood a fair chance of being appointed zamindar of the estate. The estate came under attack once again in 1834-35 dur­ing what is known as the Kalyanasamy rebellion that originated in South Canara. “The rebels infiltrated Malabar district and dealt blows to Randattara and the Tellicher­ry factory,” says Abhilash Malayil. Brown’s son Francis, who was a reformer of sorts and challenged the Company on many oc­casions, and two illegitimate heirs ran the plantation, not very successfully, before it changed hands, eventually ending up with a planter from Pala in Kottayam, who then sold it to a Muslim spiritual leader. The present owner is said to have acquired it from him at a competitive price.

“It is no longer feasible to run any plan­tation in Kerala, let alone a cinnamon estate,” says Leonard John, grandson of PI Mathew, a doctor and lieutenant colo­nel in the British Army, who owns a 40- acre cinnamon estate that he inherited from his father, besides a 60-acre rubber plantation. “I didn’t lose this land under the Kerala Land Ceiling Act only because it excluded single-crop plantations like rub­ber, pepper, and cinnamon,” says John. A driven litigant who has been fighting for a ban on the import of cassia, John has laid out barks of cassia and ‘true’ cinnamon on a table in his living room in Kannur. “Real cinnamon is medicinal, whereas cassia has been shown to be toxic. The cost of produc­ing cinnamon at an estate like Randattara today would be about Rs 1,100 per kg but the state government, which runs a 250- acre estate, is selling it for Rs 800. Plantations are running at a loss because cassia is avail­able for just Rs 150 a kg,” he says. Malabar cinnamon, he argues, is superior even to Sri Lankan cinnamon, which is the largest producer and the benchmark for quality cinnamon. “We don’t dunk it in water to extract the bark. Therefore, the active com­pounds and aromas remain intact, giving the product a superior flavour.”

The main reason Brown’s plantation was so successful was slave labour, of which he employed and traded hundreds. While slavery and the slave trade, especially agres­tic bonded labour, were accepted practices in 18th-century Malabar, an order passed in 1793 by Jonathan Duncan, then commis­sioner of Bombay banned “the practice of shipping kidnapped and other natives as slaves”. Brown and his agent Assen Ally were rumoured to have kidnapped natives from other parts of Malabar and enslaved them. They were also found to have treat­ed them with cruelty, despite their claims otherwise. It was Thomas Hervey Baber (1777-1843), the North Malabar magis­trate, who investigated Brown, ordering a search of his premises at Anjarakandy in 1811. He found 71 slaves, some of them children, abducted from southern Malabar. Baber’s team freed 123 slaves. “Anjara­kandy became the site of the debate over slavery at a timewhen the abolitionist lobby in Bombay was gaining voice,” says Malayil. This incident set the stage for the abolishment of slavery in British Mala­bar in 1843. Brown was not convicted, but Baber kept an eye on him—and con­tinues to do so from his resting place in St John’s cemetery, Thalassery.

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