Looking back at Kannur’s almost-forgotten Dutch history

With each passing day, the historical heritage of Kerala is vanishing into the sands of time. While cities like Kochi have managed to preserve many historical buildings and there is a great awareness of a complicated past, there is a near-total erasure in smaller towns and cities.

In Philippus Baldaeus’s illustrated book 'Description of the East Indian Countries of Malabar, Coromandel, Ceylon', there is a beautiful engraving of Kannur titled 'De Stadt Cananore'.

A minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, Baldaeus lived in Jaffna and mastered Tamil. He visited Kannur or Cananore in 1663, according to Indo-Dutch cultural anthropologist and historian Bauke Van Der Pol. Baldaeus’s book, first published in Dutch in 1672, gave Europeans a rare glimpse of the Tamil people who lived in Ceylon and southern India.

The image of Kannur shows the St Angelo Fort and a city that looked almost entirely Dutch. The fort was built in 1505 by the Portuguese and taken over by the Dutch in 1663. Their modifications of the fort included the construction of a chapel.

One can only imagine how it would have felt to see a mini-Holland in the tropical surroundings of Kerala. There are enough accounts of European cruelty towards the people in the lands they colonised to understand that a Dutch colony or outpost in the Malabar Coast would not have been some kind of Utopia.

Historian Van Der Pol’s book (and labour of love), Dutch Heritage in Fort Cochin, Cannanore and Quilon, gives the reader a good understanding of the period when the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) or Dutch East India Company had a major presence in Kerala.

“In Cannanore, about 230 kilometres north of Fort Cochin, the VOC had an unconquerable fortress…which in the whole of India has no match...inaccessible because of the rocks that surround it and with solid walls at the landside,” Van Der Pol wrote, citing the words of Marie Antoinette P Roelofsz in the 1942 book 'De vestiging der Nederlanders ter kuste Malabar'.

The Dutch had a presence on the Malabar Coast till 1795. They sold the Kannur fort to Ali Raja of the Arakkal dynasty in 1771, and it was probably from then that the slow erasure of the Dutch heritage in Kannur began, but some traces of the VOC still stubbornly remain.

“The entrance gate within the imposing walls of the Hollandia Bastion is still at the same place as depicted on all Dutch maps,” Van Der Pol wrote. “The wall and the moat between the Hollandia and Zeelandia Bastion can be clearly seen from Google Earth.”

The fort has the only surviving Dutch gravestone in Kannur - that of the wife of the then commander of Malabar, Susanna Weijerman, who died at the age of 17 while giving birth to a stillborn child in 1745. “On an elevation within the fort is the former Governors’ House and a nearby church,” Van Der Pol added in his book.

“This church already existed during the VOC period, although there was no Dutch chaplain in Cannanore, except for a zickentrooster (comforter of the sick). The church was made of local laterite stone as the rest of the fort; it was used by the British after the Dutch left.” The Arakkal Museum in the city contains a lot of memorabilia from the time of the Dutch presence in Kannur and would definitely be worth a visit.

There are also small traces of Dutch heritage in the village of Cheruvathur, located 50 km north of Kannur. In the 1980s, when Van Der Pol went to the village to conduct anthropological studies, his local friends showed him rough foundation stones that were covered with bushes on a hill.

“Now I know that it was most probably the remnant of a Dutch post strategically on the top of the hill to control the river below.” There could be a few more Dutch period ruins in the vicinity of Kannur that are just waiting to be discovered by visitors.

Of course, heritage goes well beyond old buildings, ruins and memorabilia. It will take a lot more research to understand how the Dutch influenced Kannur culturally and its surroundings over a period that lasted just under one and a half centuries. Did any Dutch words enter the local Malayalam dialect, and is there a remote VOC connection to any of the foods eaten there? The answers to these questions would require a new anthropological study.