Sailing Through Time: History on Screens

Time of India

14 hours ago

Scholars combine tech, archives and field trips to explore 150 years of Dutch rule
For most of us, history is more than reading stories and documents—it is stepping back into time. When I boarded 'Vega', the Kerala water transport boat from Fort Kochi to Varapuzha, what caught my attention wasn't the scenic backwaters or green landscapes dotted with Chinese fishing nets. Instead, it was the screens glowing in passengers' hands—phones, tablets and laptops tracking our journey.
But these were not like the Google Maps we use every day. The displays showed our real-time location on pages that looked like they had emerged from the past: Light brown, pastel-tinged maps with names in old-world fonts. The 'country' was MALABAAR, and towns along the coast read Cape Commery, Colan, Calocolan, Porca, Megiere, Couchin. Couchin—modern-day Cochin—blinked with a live indicator. I realized we were navigating through history on a high-tech map. Had I stepped back into the future?
The passengers—mostly young scholars—were on a voyage to trace the missing pages of Kerala's history during 150 years of Dutch rule in Malabar. Their conversations and research are opening new chapters that go far beyond the limited knowledge we have of Dutch trade and the architectural evidence they left behind in documents, thalayolas, poems, oral histories and the famous Hortus Malabaricus.
The journey began in 2022 with Cosmos Malabaricus, a project born from an MoU between the University of Leiden, the Netherlands and the Kerala Council for Historical Research (KCHR). 'Four of our students are studying modern and early modern Dutch to understand various documents in various Netherlands archives.
Their Masters in Colonial and Global History is part of this MoU. Already, knowledge is flowing through discussions at the summer school we organized for young researchers,' said Prof. Dinesan V, KCHR director.
The summer school fosters scholarly exchange, archival engagement and field-based learning. By integrating history, cartography, paleography, heritage studies and digital humanities, the project is reopening questions about colonial governance, indigenous agency and socio-economic transformations in Dutch-era Malabar.
'My work focuses on slavery and caste, particularly the Mukkuvan (fisher) community. The lower strata were bonded to upper-caste families or farms. When the Dutch arrived, they didn't need to look for slaves—they relied on existing bonded labor communities,' said Lija Joseph, one of the Leiden students.
'We can now read Dutch and, with our professors' help, understand many things that contribute to our knowledge of those times,' explained Anjana Aby, another student. 'The main challenge is reading old documents because the old Dutch script doesn't use full stops—sentences run for several lines and their meaning can differ from what we initially understand.'
Technological advances in preservation and digitization are proving invaluable to these history students. 'Most documents are digitized and can be transcribed. We are also mapping old names to modern Kerala geography,' said Manjusha Kuruppath, postdoctoral team lead on the Globalise Project in the Netherlands (2022–2026), which looks at the complex historical interactions of the Dutch East India Company using multilingual archival materials and early maps.
Working with data engineer Leon van Wissen, Kuruppath made it possible for students to access old Malabar maps from archival documents as digitized, real-time maps. 'We used the Allmaps platform and integrated the historical data to create these maps.'
Using these digital maps researchers from Kerala and the Netherlands sailed on the Vega from Fort Kochi to Vypeen. Their first stop was Our Lady of Hope Church. Their guide was historian and former KCHR chairman Prof Michael Tharakan, who during his student years discovered a vast, underexplored repository of Dutch records in the National Archives of the Netherlands.
What Tharakan envisioned then became reality when Venu Rajamony, the former ambassador to the Netherlands, took chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan to visit the national archives there. 'I proposed this idea to Prof. Jos Gommans of the University of Leiden and Cosmos Malabaricus was born,' said Rajamony, one of the project's architects. 'The state govt was keen to follow through, and the results are amazing when we hear about the students' work.'
The boat then moved to Bolgatty Palace, which originated during the Dutch period before being taken over by the English. Much has changed at the palace. 'If I were to see it from the boat, I would get a feel for Dutch architecture,' observed Prof Lennart Baes, who has been teaching the Cosmos students. 'But as we came inside, the only thing I could recognize as Dutch were the huge glass windows.' The final stop was Varapuzha church and the tomb of Fr Mathaeus (Pedro Foglia), where his remains are still preserved.
For Prof. Jos Gommans, one of the architects of this programme, the Dutch documents—daily company reports—are windows into trade, disputes, and local life, albeit from a colonial perspective. 'Scholars must piece together fragments from multiple archives to reconstruct the historical narrative,' he said.
As the four students near the end of their course, the project faces uncertainty due to lack of state funding. Meenu Rebecca is pursuing a PhD at Leiden, while Lija, Anjana, and Shailaja M plan doctoral research. Cosmos Malabaricus may be closing, but it has opened doors for future scholars to journey into history, retracing the hidden chapters of Dutch Malabar.
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