In Kerala’s backwaters, home truths lift spirits

In the backwaters of Alleppey in Kerala, Jobin Akkarakalam stands at the entrance of his grand ancestral house, warmly welcoming tourists. The palatial two-storey structure, built by his great-grandfather over a century ago, doubles up as the gateway to his luxury houseboats, anchored only a few metres from the backyard.

As he sees off a group of visitors for a cruise ride, he stops on an elevated common pathway separating his house from the backwaters. He fixes his sight on the house’s rear wall, and some unusual things around — a window almost touching the ground, the backyard sunken well below the pathway and cracks developing in the connecting stairs.

“The house is sinking — inch by inch, year after year. Over the past four decades, it has gone down by nearly 3 feet. It’s slowly being consumed by the very backwaters that Alleppey is famous for,” he says, with a sigh.

There’s a twist in the tale, though, and it has a Punjab connection. Jobin’s sigh soon turns into a smile. He has found inspiration thousands of kilometres away in Punjab — in Sangrur’s Sukhwinder Singh, who, through a ‘desi jugaad’ back in 2022, using just a jack, wheels and rails, relocated his dream house 500 feet backwards after it faced the threat of demolition due to the Delhi-Amritsar-Katra highway expansion.

Sukhwinder’s unusual solution, which hogged the headlines, has given Jobin hope. He first learnt of it through a news report on television. After a quick Google search, he came across a video, including one on The Tribune’s YouTube channel, which showed how the house was lifted and moved 10 inches daily. The process was completed in several months.

The video further cemented Jobin’s determination to save his eight-bedroom house, which spans over 2 kanals. “While I only need to lift my house, Sukhwinder actually moved his. The extraordinary effort was truly inspiring. The news report and the video were a godsend,” says the young entrepreneur, who runs a houseboat cruise venture called Spice Routes in Kerala.

Jobin says Sukhwinder gives him hope because of the zany solution he found — the Punjab man, having spent around Rs 1.5 crore on building the house in 2017-18, decided that he would much rather move it backwards than watch it get demolished and construct a new one. He is believed to have spent Rs 50 lakh on shifting his house.

Certainly, sinking houses aren’t uncommon in Kerala’s backwaters, especially as land and sea are so closely joined. In addition to the usual problems of regular maintenance, ancestral houses, called ‘tharavad’ in Malayalam, also have to deal with the occasional flooding. But because Kerala’s GDP is higher than most states — which means that labour is also far more expensive — contractors from North Indian states like Uttar Pradesh and Punjab have moved in to provide extraordinary solutions. To lift sinking homes, for example.

Jobin’s property, over a hundred years old and built in the traditional manner, is especially complicated because the plinth is almost touching the water, which makes lifting through the jack system difficult. But Jobin says he is determined to keep his heritage home alive for his children and grandchildren — he has no time for the shiny homes that dominate Kerala’s towns and cities.

These old ‘tharavad’ homes are especially popular in the backwater tourism landscape of Kerala, which is mainly prevalent in Alleppey and Kottayam — it’s an industry with an annual turnover of about Rs 150 crore, providing employment to over 10,000 people. It’s synonymous with the tagline that has made India’s southernmost state an international tourist destination, ‘God’s own country’.

On Jobin’s “wall of fame” in his living room, several photo-frames adorn the wall — from King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima of the Netherlands, Bahrain’s Deputy Prime Minister Khalid bin Abdulla Al Khalifa, the late Sheila Dikshit to actors John Abraham and Jacqueline Fernandez, he has hosted them all.

Travel tips

• Alleppey, located in Kerala’s Alappuzha district , is accessible via Cochin International Airport.
• For those travelling by train, the closest stop is Alleppey railway station.
• Famous for backwater houseboat rides, the tourist destination is about 55 km from Kochi.
• Houseboat charges range from Rs 8,000 to Rs 50,000 per room per night for two persons.