Place · port city · India
Thalassery
The Malabar port at Thalassery (Tellicherry) in Kannur district, Kerala, 95 kilometres from Kozhikode — a major British East India Company spice-trade port from 1683 when the Thalassery Fort was built by the EIC under Sir Josiah Child. The port handled pepper, cardamom and cinnamon exports from the Western Ghats hinterland. Thalassery is unusual for being the birthplace of three distinctive South Indian traditions: Thalassery Biryani (the Kerala-Mappila fusion cuisine), the Thalassery cricket tradition (the first cricket club in Kerala, established 1850 by British planters), and the Malayalam printing press (the first Malayalam-script printing press in India, 1821 by Benjamin Bailey of the Church Missionary Society). The Thalassery Fort, Mahe (French enclave 2km away) and the 1870 Thalassery Pier anchor the colonial heritage.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Tradition
- Kerala cultural and Indian Ocean history
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 11.750, 75.490
Connections (3)
- Malabar portsKozhikode / Calicut
Thalassery and Kozhikode are fifty kilometres apart on the Malabar coast, and the English East India Company's factory at Thalassery grew through the eighteenth century as the Zamorin's power at Calicut waned and Mysore pressed down from the interior. Thalassery ended up with the pepper trade, a circus tradition, a cricket ground, and the Malayalam printing press of Hermann Gundert — which is a fair sample of what a small colonial port accumulated.
- Craft tradition ofTranquebar (Tharangambadi)
Gundert at Thalassery and Ziegenbalg at Tranquebar did the same work a century apart on two coasts: learn the language properly, compile a dictionary and grammar nobody had written, start a newspaper, and leave behind the standard in which the language is now printed. Malayalam and Tamil lexicography both begin at a mission station.
- Site adjacencyMahé
Mahé and Thalassery are twenty kilometres apart on the Malabar coast and were French and English respectively, competing for the same pepper and the same access to the Kottayam and Kadathanad chiefs behind them. The English took Mahé four times and gave it back three; Thalassery's factory grew as Mysore pressed down from the interior. Two European powers holding adjacent fishing towns on one coast is what the Carnatic wars looked like locally.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Thalassery”. Serampore and Tranquebar mission press records; Stuart Blackburn, Print, Folklore and Nationalism in Colonial South India.
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