Roman holiday

Browsing in the bazaars in Bengaluru, where everything seems to be on sale, one day I found myself in a curious little currency shop.

Among the coins in the bowls under the glass-topped counter were colonial monies that one normally encounters in museums. Apparently farmers find hoards of the stuff in their fields and sell them off by the kilo. Suddenly, I spotted a Roman denarius.

&ldquoHow on earth did you get hold of that&rdquo I inquired. According to the shopkeeper it washed ashore a riverbank in Tamil Nadu, but I doubted it &mdash after all, a Tamilian river is very far from the Orontes, on the banks of which the coin obviously had been minted, judging by a clearly visible set of letters, &lsquoANT&rsquo, the abbreviation for the Roman regional capital of Antioch. But the shopkeeper, being more learned than I, opened a thick numismatic encyclopedia which devoted a dozen or so pages to the substantial finds of Roman coins in the tiny town of Karur. &ldquoThese coins wash up regularly as people have been sacrificing money to the river gods for thousands of years.&rdquo

Later that day I started reading up on the once lively trade between the Roman Empire and South India. The ancient scholar, Pliny, around the year 77 AD, lamented that he couldn&rsquot understand the craze for the foul and bitter pepper which, by the time it reached the shops in Rome, cost a hundred times more &mdash indeed, almost as much as silver or gold (draining annually 137 million denarii from the Roman coffers which, according to my research, equaled the entire fortune of a very rich man, plus a little more). The Visigoth king Alaric, who laid siege to Rome in 408AD, apparently demanded a ransom which included, besides gold and silk, one-and-a-half tonnes of pepper.

The principal Roman harbour in India was Muziris, in the vicinity of Kodungallur in present-day Kerala. So I booked a train ticket.

The train is only a couple of hours behind schedule when the peddlers of the typical Kerala style banana-fritters hop onboard with mid-morning snacks.

Getting off at Thrissur, which is &ldquoa suburb of Muziris port of Chera Kings mentioned in Silapathikaram&rdquo (Wikipedia), I check into a fairly modern concrete hotel which nevertheless manages to feel old-fashioned because one must sign for the towel, the two clothes hangers and a soap bar in a Soviet-style ledger.

After a nourishing, high-cholesterol lunch of KF, KBF and two flaky KPs, I find the tourist office on Town Hall Road more by accident than purpose. The officer is overjoyed at my arrival. He regrets that they&rsquove run out of brochures, however taking an old letter from a pile of dusty correspondence, he tears off half the sheet and starts to draw his own map on the reverse, an artistic image of Thrissur, if somewhat subjective in its approach to geographical realities.

Despite it I find the museum where almost all signage is in Malayalam. In a display case upstairs are eight Roman denarii of indeterminate age, excavated in Kerala alongside a variety of pottery dating from 200BC to 100AD. There are also some gems unearthed in Kodungallur.

Again, Kodungallur. I&rsquom carrying a newspaper cutting about an excavation in Pattanam village on the outskirts of Kodungallur. There is a blurry black and white photo of a pit. A bit of Google-mapping and I take a bus ride there.

Kodungallur has quite a phenomenal historical record, although sightseeing does make demands on the mind&rsquos eye. For example, unless you&rsquore lucky enough to get to the Marthoma Shrine at darshan time, you&rsquoll gawk at the metal container holding the relic (the apostle&rsquos hand) through bullet-proof glass. But St Thomas&rsquos landing place, where Christianity was first preached in India in 52 AD, is a scenic spot on the banks of the Periyar river.

Then there&rsquos the Cheraman Juma Masjid, which looks like any modern mosque, but tradition has it that it was founded during the Prophet&rsquos lifetime in 629, making it one of the oldest in the world.

Kodungallur also had an early Jewish settlement that moved to Kochi when the harbour silted up. You can see a memorial stone (if you find it). And then there&rsquos the popular Sangam epic Silapathikaram whose author, Ilanko Atikal, possibly lived here. Ilanko wrote eloquently of Yavanas (either Romans or Greeks) who lived in various South Indian cities. Other Tamil epics mention them too, sometimes speaking of how Yavanas moored great ships at Muziris. According to an ancient map, known as the &lsquoPeutinger Table&rsquo, Kodungallur may even have had a temple dedicated to Emperor Augustus.

Despite this substantial multicultural heritage, there is no tourism office and most guidebooks don&rsquot even mention Kodungallur. So I make do with a rickshaw driver who knows a few words of English. Soon enough it turns out that he isn&rsquot especially familiar with his hometown &mdash when he stops for the umpteenth time to ask for directions, this time from a wizened Muslim rickshawallah, and the bearded senior starts off on a detailed explanation, I realise it is time to switch rickshaws.

We explore the southern side of the river, the site of Muziris &mdash known to the ancient Europeans as the greatest harbour of India. The modern name Pattanam seems to refer in local lingo to either &lsquoport&rsquo or &lsquoboating&rsquo.

We ask about and drive this way and that, showing the newspaper clipping with the photo of the excavation pit to everybody we meet. Finally, a plump and homely gentleman in a lungi, loitering outside his bungalow, tells us that it&rsquos down the road. But, the gentleman points out, all this was once Muziris &ldquoYou look anywhere and you&rsquoll find old things. On my own plot I let some American students dig and they discovered 40,000 historical items.&rdquo

The archaeological site, a hundred yards from his garden, is nothing much to look at, just a large waterlogged pit. People insist (I already have an audience of ten) that this was where an old boat was dug up. But they can&rsquot tell if it was a Roman or an Indian boat, thousands of years old or last year&rsquos model.

The Romans didn&rsquot just come for the &lsquoblack gold&rsquo of Malabar. India had more to offer and the trade route went inland via the Palakkad pass through the Ghats. Once upon a time it probably took days to cross the mountains, an endless trek. Today, the train rolls down swiftly on the Tamilian side, past sun-baked rice fields with a distant glimpse of the Nilgiris.

The inland was where much of the merchandise came from &mdash gemstones, especially beryl (a precious sea-green variety), ivory, sandalwood, crystals, iron ore, the finest cloth, quality hair for wig-making (Europeans tend to be balder than Indians), pearls and tortoise shells from the Palk Strait, plus peacocks, lions, panthers, talking parrots and dancing girls. And eunuchs, too, they say, were coveted in Rome and contributed to a brisk trade, bringing in gold and silver, mainly in the shape of Roman coins, but also floating gold &mdash amphorae filled with wines from Italy and the Greek archipelago.

This probably had several interesting side effects on the development of local finances, a surprisingly unexplored subject. (There are, however, some interesting books by Tamilian scholars, for example Dr S. Suresh&rsquos Symbols of Trade Roman and Pseudo-Roman Objects Found in India.)

The Chera capital was known in yore as Vanji, or Karoura to geographers like Ptolemy. For the longest time, historians didn&rsquot know where it was located, until sometime in the 1800s when a treasure trove of Roman coins was unearthed in the otherwise rather unassuming Karur, a Taluk headquarter in a district of the same name and a big textile export town.

Although many of the ancient coins vanished, unsurprisingly since they were made of precious metals, sufficient amounts got scientifically evaluated by museum staff from Madras to suggest that Karur literally had a rich past. After extensive scholarly debates during the 1900s, it was more or less agreed that Karur must be the lost Chera capital. Not unlikely, if you think about it &mdash Karur is almost equidistant from both coasts (roughly 300km from both Kochi and Chennai), near the confluence of two major rivers, the Kaveri and Amaravati.

And ever since, as if to prove the point, the Amaravati has been throwing up more of those precious coins.

Yet not many tourists come here. Like Kodungallur, Karur doesn&rsquot find mention in the usual guidebooks and even on Wiki travel it remains pretty much terra incognita. Of course, there isn&rsquot much left to see of antiquity, though the town continues to have strong banking traditions, most notably the Karur Vysya Bank.

But here I am. I troop down a sloping bazaar, presuming that downhill is the way to the river, and stumble upon the tiny Government Archaeological Chera Karur Site Museum with gems, potsherds and a few bricks from the wall of a Chola fortress. Several glass cabinets appear to have been looted, the lights don&rsquot work, and part of the museum is used for carpet storage.

Using references in Tamil poems, I try my best to dream myself back in time to when Karur was surrounded by a moat full of crocodiles, and the spice-filled bazaars were hectic with incessant trading, measuring and weighing, to a time when shiploads of currency changed hands and ivory was sold by hunters in exchange for wine.

Walking through scruffy palm-leaf hut quarters, there&rsquos the unmistakable odour of night soil, which means that the river is close by. The Amaravati is pretty dry in the winter, a trickle of blackish goo with a reddish chemical tint. I climb down to join the bathers and washerwomen and kids angling after fish in the muck. I don&rsquot see any coins but there are a good number of pits in the sand, perhaps dug by treasure-hunters. When I pick up a potsherd from the ground, people stare &mdash the foreigner poking around in what is obviously their toilet-cum-garbage dump. They probably haven&rsquot seen many weirdos since the last Roman popped by.

Karur is, of course, a living city and doesn&rsquot have time for bygones. To get a better idea of possible Roman colonies, I travel on to Arikamedu, an abandoned trading post on the Bay of Bengal.

Pondicherry, a slice of Europe caught in an Indian time warp, is perhaps the best place for a traveller wanting to get a feel of an old settlement of foreign traders. Street names begin with Rue and the open sewer that runs through the centre is Le Canal (French being as close to Latin as it gets hereabouts).

The town is crowded with winter tourists, so it takes time to find a hotel. Finally I get a cheap room in an alley off Rue Nehru, not far from the old customs&rsquo house. It&rsquos a windowless chamber, with shared bathrooms in an inner courtyard, but it approximates the type of lodgings travelers may have encountered thousands of years ago.

I lie on the cot and stare at the ceiling &mdash I&rsquove reached the other coast and am nearing the end of my journey. Sturdy beams run across the ceiling and there are sharp hooks that wouldn&rsquot look out of place in a gothic horror movie. It dawns on me that this is a converted warehouse. My bedroom must have been used to store sacks of dry spices.

The archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler, after analysing finds at the Madras museum and corroborating them with the ancient Periplus Maris Erythraei, identified a location on the Ariyankuppam river where the port known to Romans as Podouke may have lain. After some digging, he found a 50 AD warehouse stuffed with wine amphorae and a possible quay. Some of these finds are displayed in the Pondicherry museum.

&lsquoRoman dining ware&rsquo, it says on the slip of paper alongside indeterminate fragments. Next to an impossibly small shard, I read &lsquoItalian Terra Sigillata Plate&rsquo (&lsquoImported from Roman Empire&rsquo). Obviously, you could eat your chicken curry on European tableware even in those days. The manufacturer&rsquos seals on these mass-produced artefacts prove that they originated in Arretium, present-day Arezzo. (Such standardised pottery was used throughout the Roman Empire from circa 100BC to 300AD.) There are also Roman coins.

I study an old photo on the wall, from the Arikamedu excavation outside Pondicherry, and decide to have a look. It turns out to be a seven-mile walk on poorly signposted roads through villages that gradually look more and more ancient, concrete giving way to mud huts, roads turning into jungle trails. As I pass through I keep wondering if their proximity to the site might mean that ancestors of these villagers served under foreign merchants. Maybe some are even descended from Romans

The actual settlement is behind a near-impenetrable barricade of thorny bushes that tear holes in my khadi pajamas. Dry twigs grind into the soles of my chappals. I see a striking ruin with arches, possibly an abandoned mission, slowly rotting in the tropical weather.

After fighting through the thickets I realise that there isn&rsquot anything to see &mdash at least not over ground &mdash of the trading post which thrived for at least two hundred years at the beginning of recorded history... Some clearings probably represent the 1940s excavation area perhaps these were market squares. There&rsquos a pit that may have been the underground wine cellar. One can also see a slight bulge in the ground, running parallel to the lagoon, seventy or eighty yards inland, potentially a defensive wall. To protect all that wine against drunkards must have been top priority.

As long as the Roman Empire was around, the trade seems to have continued unabated. Then the empire crumbled, mainly due to financial reasons&mdashthe upkeep of the massive army to protect its borders cost too much, and the empire imported more luxury goods than it produced for export. All came to an abrupt end, and Rome itself was sacked and robbed of its last pepper in the early 400s. Then, as the thing so often seems to be with history, this was all forgotten, the way you sometimes forget things after too many cups of wine.

Until maybe one day we will remember again.

The information

Kodungallur is 39km from Thrissur, which can be reached by train from Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, etc. Frequent buses run from Thrissur to Kodungallur, and as you align at the bus stand it is best to negotiate a half-day or full-day rate for an auto rickshaw (Rs 300-500), as the sights are spread out and it may be hard to get autos elsewhere if you pick an older driver who knows his way around, you&rsquoll have the best guide possible. The nearest airport is at Kochi (78km), and Kodungallur can be visited as a day-trip from Ernakulam/Kochi.

Where to Stay

There are lodges and eateries in the pleasant bazaar around the bus stand, though one may be more comfortable staying in Thrissur (39km) where there&rsquos a good choice of hotels and plenty of restaurants, most of them gathered along Railway Station Road. The Indian Coffee House on South Round is good for coffee and local snacks.

Tours

The Muziris Heritage Tourism Club has recently started guided tours from Kochi, which take you to the various sights including an ancient temple, church, mosque, synagogue, fort ruin, coir factory and the excavation area in Pattanam. The full-day tour (9am&ndash5pm) includes lunch, transport, etc and costs Rs 2,500 per person see muzirisheritagetourism.com.

Karur

Although the town has some good, simple eateries and a handful of lodges, it may be more comfortable to stay at Erode (66km), a textile town on the main railway line between Chennai and Kerala. The nearest airport is at Coimbatore (115km). Frequent buses ply between the towns as well as less frequent trains. There are no guided tours in Karur, but there is an archaeological site museum a short walk from the river.

Arikamedu

Getting there
The ancient town is pretty much part of modern Pondicherry, itself a four-hour bus ride south of Chennai.

Where To Stay

Pondicherry is naturally where you should stay. For elegant colonial ambience, try Hotel de l'Orient (from Rs 3,500 neemranahotels.com). There are, of course, plenty of other options.

Sightseeing

The site itself has no facilities as of now and isn&rsquot really accessible for tourists. There used to be a private museum in a nearby village, but it has shut down. So carry water and snacks, and preferably a map or GPS mapping device so that you don&rsquot get lost in the jungle. Do also keep in mind that it is strictly prohibited to touch or move any object that may look even slightly archaeological. However, there are plans afoot to create a leisure zone with a museum, restaurant, viewing towers, sound and light shows and other activities. Meanwhile, it is possible to inspect some of the finds such as amphora shards and coins at the Pondicherry Museum.