Place · merchant village cluster · India
Chettinad village clusters
The 76-village cluster in Sivaganga district, Tamil Nadu, home of the Nagarathar (Nattukottai Chettiar) merchant caste who built palatial mansions on fortunes earned in Burma, Malaya, Singapore, Ceylon, Siam and Vietnam between 1870 and 1930. The 11,000 Chettinad palatial houses use Italian marble floors, Belgian mirrors, Burmese teak columns, Chinese tiles, Japanese enamel and English cast-iron, assembled by Tamil craftsmen with Athangudi floor tiles and local lime plaster. The region's distinctive Chettinad cuisine with its 20+ spice combinations grew out of long sea-voyage preserved foods. The community lost most of its Southeast Asian wealth to Japanese occupation (1941-45), Burmese nationalisation (1948) and Indonesian Chinese pogroms. UNESCO tentative list since 2014.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 10.160, 78.780
Connections (4)
- Patronage networkKāshī / Vārānasī / Banāras
The Nāttukōttai Nagarathar — the Chettiars of the Sivaganga and Pudukkottai country — financed temples, chattrams and feeding houses far beyond Tamil Nadu, and the Tamil establishments at Kāshī are among them. Their money came from banking across Burma, Ceylon, Malaya and Indo-China, and it was spent on temple building at home and on maintaining the Tamil Śaiva presence in the north. Chettinad's mansions and Banāras's Tamil mathas were paid for out of the same ledgers.
- Patronage networkDharmapuram Ādhīnam
The Chettiar banking families endowed the Kāveri delta ādhīnams and the temples they administer, and the ādhīnams supplied the priests and the ritual expertise those endowments paid for. It is a division of labour between two communities a hundred and fifty kilometres apart — one with the capital and the mercantile network, the other with the hereditary priesthood and the schools — and between them they carried Tamil Śaivism as far as Banāras and as far as Rangoon.
- AnaloguePadmanābhapuram Palace
The Chettinad mansions and Padmanabhapuram are the two great timber and imported-material nominations of the far south, and both are losing their fabric. Chettinad's houses were built on Burmese teak and Chettiar banking profits from Burma, Ceylon and Malaya, and are now sold for their timber; Padmanabhapuram is a state museum in a state it no longer belongs to.
- Site withinChettinad cuisine
The Chettinad cuisine tradition is centred on the 76 Chettinad villages of Sivaganga district, Tamil Nadu — the Nagarathar Chettiar merchant caste's culinary heritage built on Southeast Asian trade fortunes between 1870 and 1930. The traditional kudhu veedu (private family mansion) kitchens preserved the Chettinad cuisine's distinctive 20+ spice preparations across the 20-century; the 1980s commercial restaurant expansion made Chettinad one of the chief South Indian regional cuisines.
On these journeys
Sources
List of World Heritage Sites in India — Wikipedia
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