the Spice vendors & their displays

In the old days, at Kumily, it was heaps of cardamom and pepper that you passed by as you walked the main street. Today, strings of spice packets make the displays in shops. The spices are the same, the packaging is new.

In the informal sector in the towns and cities in India, one finds a different display each day that you go into the bazaar. In the vegetable and fruits bazaar, sometimes it is only the heap of tomatoes that attract attention. At other times, it is the bananas that hang in bunches that are the most eye-catching. As you walk into the streets around the central core of the vegetable market, you see brass pots that sit outside a shop and on the footpath. There are often aluminium utensils of all shapes that begin to form a screen outside the shop, a “shop window” that is outside the shop.

It’s the quantum of brass or quantum of steel that must fill the display to catch the eye. It is afterwards the nature of the arrangement. So it is with spice vendors. The shop windows are first filled with spices and more spices. They create their own pattern. Glass and plastic are used extensively in urban shopfronts, their transparency making the showcasing of spices and other goods, more attractive. The spices are either in glass jars, in small glass containers or behind a glass front or panel of glass. Often, spices are in small plastic packets that hold in one string, more than ten packets, each with its names written, so that foreign tourists can take these back as “spices from india”

Business spaces in Spice Tourism

Any bazaar must have an array of enterprises that supplement each other. In the town of Kumily, between the spice shops are small restaurants. Some sell Kerala food. Others sell Gujarati and Marwari food. A few eat at the Kerala thali places. Others enjoy being at the Jungle café, that overlooks the forest. Food for buyers and vendors, textiles for the locals, the drug stores, the internet cafes that are tourist necessities and Convenience stores that must sell camera rolls, digital camera transfers and CD writing facilities for recording with ease the traveller experiences.

In the main street, business is good for the retailers for almost eight months in a year. However, the land price here is Rs.6 lakhs/cent. So, a shop can cost upto Rs.6 lakhs to Rs.8 lakhs. This main area is known as Kumily town. A short distance away is Thekkady which has shops that also sell spices. This area is less expensive in terms of land prices. Here, a trader can buy one cent for Rs.4 lakhs. With the establishing of five-star hotels such as Taj Retreat and Spice Village, the shops here sell both spices and crafts at a price higher than on the ‘Kumily town’ bazaar street.

When one looks at the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, it is the organic nature of the plan, the ingenuity of the vendors in their marketing strategies and their creativity of displays that lend vibrancy to the spatial experience. In Kumily, it would be good to have a street that is less wide, one that is for pedestrians only, shops that have transition spaces i.e. there is a open space, a semi-enclosed verandah and perhaps an enclosed space within for storage, or those goods that need to be scrutinised carefully or for making a deal with the wholesaler or retail that goes beyond the ordinary.

Shelter forms in Kumily Bazaar

The shops that line the Bazaar in Kumily are private enterprises. Traders in the Spice market rent or lease a property along the main street. They construct a shelter as a shop, with bricks and cement mortar for walls and a concrete roof. In most of urban India, there are no architectural guidelines or principles that govern the streetscape of our changing times.

In the towns that have still retained their medieval character, the space between the shelters on either side of the street relates to the height of the structures, to create some shaded and some sun-lit spaces for the people on the street. The streets of Jaisalmer in Rajasthan and the pols in Ahmedabad are good examples of streets with aesthetic and functional characteristics. The principles that were applied to architecture, to the built-form, generated a life on the street that reflected its architecture, with its hierarchy of open spaces and its responses to the sun and the wind.

In search of the earlier built-forms of Kumily town, one finds one way into the “Bar” at the elite Spice Village hotel which one is told has old black and white photographs of Kumily and Thekkady (thekku, or teak trees). There are many framed photographs that cover its walls. They are pictures of the inhabitants of the wildlife sanctuary, family portraits from Kumily households of the 50’s and 60’s. There are no pictures of streets and houses. One learns that there was no “main street” until a few decades ago. Was this tourist town only forest and the lake till recent times?

Today, the Spice bazaar is dominated by a wide vehicular road, between two rows of shops on either side. This is the road that leads to the Bus stand at one end. Could the Spice bazaar be re-planned as a pedestrianised marketplace and detailed architecturally using stone walls and tiled roofs or brick walls with stabilised mud plaster and grass roof? Can the architecture for Spice Tourism develop its own contemporary vernacular vocabulary?

a cardamom town of Kerala

Kumily is a cardamom town in Kerala. There is the auction market where heaps of cardamom await the bidding of merchants from all over India. During ‘season time’ the auction takes place twice a week. One finds rows of women cleaning the cardamom. It is a native of the town of Kumily.

Although the Spice bazaar in Kumily sells many different spices and nuts, they come from different parts of Kerala. Cashew production is the largest in Kollam. Pepper and coffee have auction markets at Cochin. Eucalptus oil is brought from Kodaikanal.

In Kumily, as also in other tourist towns in Kerala, menu cards always carry ‘cardamom tea’. It is tea with milk with the flavour of cardamom. Of course, there is also ginger tea, lemon tea, black coffee and so on.

One day in the life of a cardamom is an interesting story. There are places for cleaning, places for auction, places for wholesalers and places for retailers. It has travelled through them all. Anything that is a part of a bazaar at any time has seen places and seen people.