It was in 2012 that Jacopo Nordera, 42, who owns a vineyard in Verona, Italy, and Manik Taneja, 40, a software engineer from Bengaluru, made their first trip to Kodencheri, a small town in Kerala’s Kozhikode district. They had driven down from Bengaluru with three other friends. They were after the same thing: the thrill of paddling down the Chalipuzha river.
As they entered the river in their kayaks, villagers screamed at them from the banks. “The locals were shouting at us, telling us it was dangerous, that there were rocks, that people have drowned, that we would die,” recalls Taneja. After a brief pause, he adds, “But that’s exactly what we were looking for.” The madcap sport of recreational kayaking was about to make a splash in this part of small town Kerala.
It didn’t take long for the locals to realise that the outsiders were skilled: they saw them navigating the cascading river with grace, and baffling as it was, these adventurers seemed ready to risk life and limb for their fix of adrenaline. “We came down stream, rounded a bend, and found a bridge full of people waiting for us,” says Taneja. His first thought was that they were going to be arrested. Again. A few months ago they had been detained and presented before the forest officer for doing the Kali river in north Karnataka exactly what they were attempting on the Chalipuzha.
“We scanned the bridge for khaki uniforms. We even considered going into the jungle and waiting there until nightfall. But one of our friends knew a little Malayalam. He spoke to a fisherman, who assured us that the people had gathered just to watch, not to report us to the police,” Taneja adds.
As they paddled downstream, there was an eruption of applause from the bridge. By the third day, the kayakers had become local celebrities. People garlanded them, villagers stopped them for photographs, and they became the topic of conversation in the small tea shops that are ubiquitous in Kerala. That was six years ago. Floored by the reception, the kayakers kept coming back in larger numbers each year.
How it all began
At the heart of the kayaking universe in Kodencheri is an affable 57-year-old known affectionately as Chechi, or ‘elder sister’ in Malayalam. She runs a hole-in-the-wall eatery just minutes from the Chalipuzha, which flows through the lap of the Western Ghats on the Malabar coast, India’s spice garden.
For a few weeks every year, during the monsoon season in Kerala (June to August), as the rivers swell, Chechi’s tea shop becomes the nerve centre of the kayaking community, purely by virtue of being the sole source of food by the river.
Like in all sport, here too, there is a pecking order. At the top are the highly skilled kayaking ‘pros’, then come the ‘weekend warriors’ (hobbyists), and finally the ‘scenies’ or first-timers. Together, the three groups in the kayaking community are quietly transforming this nook of Kerala. For the people of Kodencheri village — home to 4,589 families or around 18,000 people, according to 2011 Census data — the strangers are exotic curiosities, and they follow them with keen anthropological interest.
“When Manik and Jacopo first came here in 2012 , we didn’t quite understand why,” recalls Chechi. But Beneettow Chacko, a local journalist with Malayala Manorama, was the first to demystify the visitors.
“On our first visit, for an entire week the local newspapers carried pictures of us paddling downstream. But not one of them had spoken to us, and they described what we were doing simply as a death-defying stunt,” recalls Nordera, who was somewhat irritated by the locals’ failure to recognise the technique and skill that goes into the fringe sport. “Then one morning Beneettow came to my hotel. He brought his son along to act as the interpreter. He interviewed us and wrote a detailed story. He wrote about the sport, and about us coming down from Bangalore to run the river,” says Nordera. Beneettow also put the kayakers in touch with the district collector, who was interested in tapping the sport for tourism.
Three months later, in October 2012, Nordera and Taneja visited Kodencheri for the second time. This visit was a game-changer for the Bengaluru paddlers. “We were trying to develop things in Karnataka, chasing authorities in the forest department, who kept bouncing us from office to office. After months, we had nothing to show for our efforts. We were losing time. I told the guys, let’s go back to Kerala. It is farther away but we are welcome there. So in October, we came back and met the district collector, who directed us to the sports council, and things quickly picked up steam,” remembers Nordera.
By the monsoon season in 2013, Taneja and Nordera were men on a mission. They set up their companies — GoodWave Adventures being one of them — which offered courses in kayaking and organised river expeditions. They rented a house in Kodencheri and spent two months doing the paperwork necessary to start a river festival.
“Beneettow told us that the tourism department was interested and that we should put together an event. To be honest, he planted the idea of a river festival in my head,” says Taneja. That same year, in 2013, Rishikesh, in Uttarakhand, which is a river-rafting hub, held the first edition of its kayaking competition, the Ganga River Festival. “We went there to kayak. By the end of it, we had made up our minds to hold a similar festival in Kerala,” adds Taneja.
So what began as a weekend trip for five kayaking enthusiasts in 2012 morphed into the Malabar River Festival (MRF), which is today one of Asia’s largest kayaking championships, with participants from 17 countries.
The competition
Now in its sixth year, the MRF offers among the biggest cash prizes for a paddling event worldwide, with over $20,000 to be won. This year, it brought kayaking royalty to Kodencheri, which included Dutch kayaker and freestyle European champion Martina Wegman, Mike Dawson from New Zealand, and Dane Jackson, whose family owns Jackson Kayak, an American producer of kayaks — to Kodencheri.
“I can’t believe Dane Jackson is sitting at Chechi’s, eating paratha and omelette,” says Lukas Gohl, a school teacher from Mumbai. The weekend kayakers spend most of their time hovering around the kayaking ‘royalty’ that has descended for the MRF. A running (and now tired) joke is how most of the hobby kayakers want to flip over in the water, somewhere near Jackson or Dawson or Wegman, for the sheer privilege of being rescued by them.
The organisers, in collaboration with Kerala Tourism, held the competitions on different stretches of the Chalipuzha, Iruvanjipuzha and Kuttiyadi rivers. “We wanted to expose the participants to as many different parts of the region as possible. This strategy also helps us to reach the local people all over the State. Additionally, we have an ‘intermediate’ category where paddlers who are not quite at the professional level can compete and, more importantly, hang out with their heroes,” Nordera said, in an interview to Kayak Session, a magazine dedicated to the sport published out of France.
Catching them young
Leena Ramesh, a 45-year-old housewife, had been keeping a keen eye for news from the paddlers. At the end of the MRF in 2016, the organisers had announced that they would be teaching kayaking to local youngsters who were interested to learn. Nine boys and a girl turned up. One of them was Rashmi, Ramesh’s 20-year-old daughter, and the only girl from the area to sign up.
“They approach the river through my property. So I became curious about kayaking. When they invited locals to register for classes, I enrolled Rashmi. Their only requirement was that the children should know how to swim, and she did,” says Ramesh, whose daughter has been kayaking for the past two years.
A year after Rashmi began kayaking, Ramesh realised that her daughter had no one to compete with. She took up the sport to solve this problem. The mother-daughter duo has become an inspiration to aspiring kayakers. “I was always interested but I don’t know how to swim,” says Ramesh. “Last year, I learnt paddling but I’ll soon have to learn swimming if I want to get better at kayaking.” Ramesh shied away from participating in the MRF this year: “Sometimes people make fun of me for having taken up kayaking at this age.”
In the case of Rashmi, however, the two years she has spent learning the sport seem to have made a big impact on her life. “It has been an adventure to learn kayaking. Going out on the wild river teaches you to be mentally strong when you have problems in your life,” says Rashmi, who is studying to be a nurse.
Three local boys, Nishtul Jose, Nithin Das and Kevin Shaji, who had also signed up for classes with Rashmi in 2016, have become ambassadors of the kayaking community. “We have learnt a lot from them. Every lesson I learn on the river translates into a useful life skill, especially under stressful situations,” says Das, a mechanical engineer.
Showcasing local talent
Nordera estimates India’s kayaking community to consist of not more than 600 people. Like any small community, this one too is closely knit. “Kayaking is mostly about getting together on the river. We explore rivers, meet other kayakers, and share our experiences. That’s how it is done everywhere in the world. We wanted to invite paddlers from north India and around the globe to see India’s splendid rivers,” says Nordera.
In this year’s festival, held July 18-22, the organisers showcased local talent from Kodencheri, drawing loud cheers from the crowds lining the banks of the Chalipuzha. “I was here three years ago, and back then, the skill level of the Indian kayakers was quite low. This year they were far more confident in the water. They have started to form groups and explore the rivers themselves, which is pretty cool. I also don’t remember there being many girls. But this year, we saw India’s girls team in slalom [one of the formats]. They are good and also have a coach now,” says Mike Dawson, the ‘Rapid Rajah’, the title given to the winner of the MRF 2018 in the men’s category.
For the Indian kayaking community, the discovery of paddling talent in the local village community has been a bonus. “Turning local children into kayakers has been a major achievement,” says Taneja, pleased about catching the kids young, and indoctrinating them with a love for the outdoors. “These kids are born to the river. They have no fear of this environment. We’ve seen them swim across the river, navigating strong currents without any safety equipment. We thought if they got gear and training, they would be so good, and that’s exactly what happened,” says Nordera.
Another local success story is of Faizal M.E., 22, a daily wage worker who got interested after he spotted the paddlers streaming down the Iruvanjipuzha river. The kayakers trained him for a week. He has been racing competitively in the intermediate category for the past two years.
After the river run
For the local kayakers, each MRF represents a huge learning curve. Many now want to paddle outside India. In Rishikesh, where people have been kayaking for far longer than in Kodencheri, there are success stories of raft guides learning to kayak and getting certified as whitewater rescue technicians. Pramod Magar is one such example — he got certified as an international safety kayaker and a whitewater rescue technician and now works in Iceland.
“I would also like to kayak outside India,” says Das.
Off the river, loud music, food and drink seem to be the organising principle of the kayaking community. Each evening they return, humbled by the river, sometimes with bruised knuckles, dislocated shoulders and many times with injured pride. The healing touch comes in the ‘after party’, which starts at Chechi’s tea shop and ends at Tushara International, the only hotel in Kodencheri.
The wedding hall at Tushara turns into an auditorium with a large single screen. The organisers put up a projector. The evening’s entertainment consists of kayaking videos shot on GoPro cameras, mounted on the helmets of the paddlers. If one could equate the kayaking community with a cult, these GoPro videos are the propaganda material.
On this particular evening, they are watching riveting footage of Dane Jackson going over a 60-ft waterfall in Mexico. The audience swoons over each impossible manoeuvre, and cheers him on as if this were live footage. They are unlikely to find themselves in such a situation anywhere else — Jackson is sitting right in the front row. “We normally watch these videos on our laptops at home,” says Taneja. “But this is a bit like watching an Amitabh Bachchan movie with him sitting in the same room.”
Two days after the excitement of the river festival, things are quiet in the sleepy little town. The few remaining paddlers — identifiable from the blue t-shirts distributed by the MRF organisers —start talking about their day jobs, deadlines and rush hour traffic. The laptops come out.
At Chechi’s tea shop, the paddlers help themselves to the items on display — sugiyan (a tea time snack in Kerala made with mung bean, coconut and jaggery filling), pazham pori (fried plantain), elai adai (coconut and banana encased in rice flour and steamed in banana leaves). “This is like their house. They come inside the kitchen as they would in their own house, they pick up what they want,” says Chechi. Everyone has a tab.
At the end of the week-long carnival, the paddlers come in one by one, check how much they owe her and settle the bill. She pulls out the exact change but most press the money back into her hands, asking her to rest for a few days.
For Chechi, the paddlers have, over the years, become much more than a source of income. After they are gone, she takes on the mantle of defending them in the conservative village, which is not used to the sight of women roaming around in shorts, or men giving bear hugs to Chechi. “Sometimes, people jokingly remind me that the kayakers will leave. Who are you going to hug then, they say. They used to take offence when everyone would hug me — we don’t do such things here. Some would ask me to tell the girls to dress more appropriately. I tell them to mind their own business, just the same way the paddlers mind theirs when they visit.”