It is history in the raw form. A collection of royal proclamations, documents of settlement, survey records, tax receipts, guesthouse registries, and rain records of the Cardamom Hill Reserve, apart from a country gun, a moneybox, and various equipment, of the Travancore and the British eras.
The village office here is all set to open its archive to people. History buffs can sift through them and piece together the life lived in the cardamom villages a century ago.
The office building itself evokes a sense of the past. Constructed in 1898-99, the building is surrounded by dilapidated structures, ageing reminders of a past as guesthouses of the British and staff quarters of the Pakuthy Kacheri, the Travancore-era village office.
The first exhibit in the archive is a lithograph map of 1915, depicting the then boundaries of the reserve. The other historical pieces soon vie for attention. The work on the Vandanmedu Village Archive is thus almost complete.
Even under the Travancore rule, the reserve had been under systematic control. The royal proclamations were for the administration of the cardamom-cultivated areas. The gun and various equipment show the British might.
The villages under the Travancore rule were Ayyappancoil, Kattappana, Anavilasam, Chakkupallom, Anakkara, Vandanmedu, Karunapauram, and Pampadumpara.
The documents show that under the British, the supervisors were guided by the proclamations of the Travancore King who had full control over tax collection and cultivation. The workers were from Tamil Nadu, who seem to have had a hard life considering the fines imposed on those who tried to escape.
The details of a family from Vandanmedu officially rehabilitated in the Andamans, the first official coffee cultivation rule in 1922, census records, collection of forest produce, land-assignment documents, “puthuval pattayams,” and “chempupattayams” have been archived.
The brains behind the archive are village officer Manoj Rajan and T. Rajesh, who has written Idukki Charithra Rekhakal , a book depicting the history of the district from the megalithic era.
Mr. Rajan said an archive hall inside the village office had been a long- cherished dream, as no other village office would have such a collection of history documenting life of a 100 years ago.
The hall and the exhibition boxes have been made moisture-free to the preserve the documents. Students and historians can have a peep into the economically glorious past of the High Ranges.
Mr. Rajesh said the Travancore documents were in bond papers, a reason for their intact condition. The old Malayalam letters would evoke curiosity.
