There is a danger to talking about the past. Very often we find ourselves celebrating some violence, inflicted on others or on the land. The Nasaranis of Travancore who scaled the Thamarassery ghat road were poor, but were amongst those who had adapted to Europe’s civilising mission. This was before the Apollo 17 photographed our planet to reveal to us the finite nature of its resources, before the ozone hole was discovered, and much before we began to recognize the sophistication of indigenous knowledge systems that often surpassed the colonizer’s often reductive generalizations. Across the subcontinent, the codification of forest laws with provisions for appropriating the fertile commons for industrial cultivation had already been set into motion by the middle of the 19th century, and Travancore’s farmers saw opportunity in the Malabar which was otherwise the privy of more affluent communities from the North.

When we become aware of such histories as they relate to us, we find ourselves responding to their nostalgia, recognising them as our inheritance, or rejecting their legacies in order to distance ourselves from their problems.  Finding myself in Wayanad to process coffee, with my community, after studying some post-colonial perspectives on land use and ownership, had me feeling the need to immediately define my own positions but to little avail.

Back then, the Malabar had been likened to the biblical promised land that was to be reclaimed by cultivation. Despite various hurdles, this vision had appeared possible for a time. In Wayanad, this was before rising temperatures began to affect the health of most cultivable crops that had been introduced over the previous two centuries. But our Coffea canephora, our old robusta, remained, potentially to the satisfaction of the researchers who developed the varietal in old Peradeniya. 

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that coffee had a longer life in the subcontinent than we remember, around today’s National Capital Region and potentially down into the Deccan, and was one of the first commodities the East India Company found an existing market to invest into in the seventeenth century. This was one of the first steps towards a cosmopolitan culture that would have us understand regional languages as “vernaculars” and, derogatorily in old colonial cities, those who spoke these languages as “vernie” or “vernac”.

The ghosts of colonial pasts manifest differently at different sites. In Wayanad, we inherited the coloniser’s logic, but not their estates and access. I began encountering specialty cafés as they started popping up in Bangalore, Delhi, Bombay and other Indian cities, and I noticed that Wayanad was never represented, even as estate farmers elsewhere were developing their canephora along artisanal lines.

Eco’s vernacular referred to a response to the divergence of Europe away from Latin, and in South and Southeast Asia a similar divergence away from Sanskrit is traced in simultaneity by the Indologist Sheldon Pollock during what he calls the “vernacular millenia”, resulting in the emergence of various literary cultures across the breadth of the Indian Subcontinent and its adjoining islands, the regions that once comprised the Indic cultural sphere. They marked,  in a sense, a popular breaking away from and incorporating into erstwhile cosmopolitanisms promoted by Latinised and Sanskritised cultures. We may be seeing a new “vernacular millenia” as the world diverges from the baggage of empires, with many vernaculars finding representation within the mainstream, having grown with every cross-cultural encounter that has passed. When we try to remember the past, maybe it is important to also consider how long the journey has been and how it continues to forge our everyday