The Palakkad Gap allows passage, erodes rigid orthodoxies, and recognises that we need each other to thrive and prosper

Glancing at the Kerala map, one observes how it transforms from a slender strip at the top into a concave hull in the middle. Much of the State is ensconced between the southern Sahyadri mountain ranges and the Arabian Sea, creating a Petri dish-like geographical enclosure for most parts. Yet, remarkably, in its last leg around Palakkad district in Kerala — a journey that begins from Tapi district in Gujarat — the steep, rain-soaked, and unyielding Sahyadris briefly part, like a curtain in a school play. From an altitude of 1,500 metres of the Nilgiri massif, the Sahyadris drop to 75 to 300 meters, forming a navigable terrain. This low-lying area continues for 25-30 km after which, yet again, the Annamalai Hills begin their ascent to 2,500 metres. This geological indentation — as if the gods of Guruvayur and Palani had pressed their thumbs on the khondalites and charnockite rocks from the Late Proterozoic period that make up the Sahyadris — is called the Palakkad Gap.

A geological funnel

Through this gap arrive trucks ferrying goods from Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu to Palakkad district, and from there to the rest of Kerala and, in some cases, even the world via the Kochi harbour. This is no different than the times when the city of Kovai and the region of Kongu Nadu shipped their goods through the Palakkad Gap onto the harbours of Ponnani and Muziris on Kerala’s seaboard to trade with Arabia, Misr (Egypt), and perhaps even Pompeii in Roman times. Over time, while the Sahyadri ranges have offered a natural boundary which sets in motion the frothing up of distinct self-descriptions of the people on either sides, the Palakkad Gap undermines this easy divide. The Gap became a geological funnel through which people, identities and beliefs sloshed about, mixed, and ultimately coalesced to form a cultural substrate.

The result is a menagerie of liminal subcultures: Palakkad’s Tamil flavoured Malayalam, the mercantilist capitalism of the Chettiars from Sivaganga and Coimbatore who are constants in Kerala’s economic life, and the innumerable generations of Tamil Brahmins who have travelled back and forth across the Gap. An entire economic system revolves around the breeding and rearing of the Kangayam bullocks — tough, lean, with majestic horns. They ferry goods at night from towns in Palakkad such as Thattamangalam and Kollengode, trundling, snorting, ambling, with a lantern tucked under the cart, all the way to Udumalaipettai, Pollachi, and ultimately Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu. Along this route, the scenery changes — coconuts yield to palm trees, cinema posters become bilingual, and communism makes way for Dravidianism.

Watching this world of in-betweens closely forces a recognition that where boundaries begin or end transcends a line on a map, the accoutrements of governmental fiat, or even language itself. In fact, the idea of a ‘border’ is harder to pin down the more one investigates it. Demarcations and taxonomies thrive happily in our minds, often with little resemblance to the lived worlds that they seek to describe. This said, instances such as the Palakkad Gap where geography explicitly provides channels to facilitate communication is rare. In fact, the opposite is the norm. Adam Ferguson, a contemporary of Adam Smith and the other great influence in the Scottish Enlightenment, argued that it was only by closing out the rest of the world and particularly one’s neighbours, by turning them into “barbarians” in our minds, that societies in all stages of development could keep their internal coherence.

Where do boundaries end?

The history of modern states and actors within it — even well meaning ones — is replete with efforts to construct differences, to name categories of imagined realities, irrespective of geographical logic. In India, like elsewhere, boundaries drawn in the name of politics or language or idealised identities haven’t always coincided neatly with lived realities or imagination. Subverting the furies of the language agitation of the 1960s, the Marathi writer Digambar Mokashi wrote, rather evocatively, that the boundaries of Maharashtra end not on a map, but wheresoever the worship of Lord Vitthala of Pandharpur comes to an end. His point is not a theocratic one, wherein India is reduced to a fiefdom of gods, but rather to recognise that people experience differences and cohesiveness in ways that needn’t be as the state mandates. In fact, the consequences of state mandates can be dire. In a recent podcast, the Canadian author Malcolm Gladwell tells us of kids who would swim the Rio Grande river from Mexico into the U.S. with watermelons, sell them during the day, and swim back home. Academics who study Mexican migration into America tell us that the militarisation of the U.S.-Mexico borders has resulted in forcing the Mexicans and other Latinos to stay put in America instead of seasonally returning home leading to the spectre of ‘illegal’ immigration.

Politics, especially in a competitive democracy, is by construction dependent on forming an homogenising whole. Yet, the lived reality underneath each of these differences mandated from above, or from non-local sources, often belies any claim to an overarching homogeneity. The challenge of our times is to find ways and foster institutions that seek to recreate what the Palakkad Gap has done since the Neolithic age — to allow passage, to facilitate exchange, to erode rigid orthodoxies, and ultimately foster the recognition that we need each other to thrive and prosper.