Coast & Islands
The backwaters are a drainage system with a tourist fleet on it
Kerala’s inland waterways are a chain of lagoons and canals sitting behind a sandbar, and almost everything a visitor notices about them follows from how that system handles salt, silt and floodwater.
By Manish Trivedi3 min read
A backwater is a lagoon, not a river
The waterways of the Kerala coast are not the lower courses of rivers in any straightforward sense. They are long shallow lagoons lying parallel to the sea behind a barrier of sand, fed by rivers coming down off the Ghats and connected to the sea at a limited number of openings.
That geometry explains the shape of the network. It runs along the coast rather than towards it, the water is brackish where the sea gets in and fresh where the rivers dominate, and the balance between the two shifts with the season and with the tide.
Cut into that natural system is a large number of artificial channels, dug over centuries to link one lagoon with the next, to drain fields and to move cargo. The waterway a houseboat uses today is a mixture of both, and it is often impossible to tell by eye which stretch was made and which was found.
Kuttanad farms below the level of the sea
The area south and east of Vembanad, the largest of the lagoons, contains a great deal of land that lies below sea level and is farmed anyway. Fields were reclaimed from the shallow lagoon bed by throwing up bunds around a block of water and pumping it dry, and they stay dry only because the pumping continues.
This is why the landscape there looks unlike anywhere else in India: the boat runs at eye level with the tops of coconut palms, and the paddy is down behind an earth wall on the other side, several feet below the water you are floating on.
It is also why the region is so exposed to flooding. A system that depends on bunds and pumps has very little margin, and heavy rain in the catchment upstream arrives as a rise in a lagoon that cannot drain quickly through its narrow sea openings.
The barrier that keeps the salt out has costs
To stop seawater pushing up the lagoon and into the fields during the dry months, a barrage was built across part of the Vembanad system, closed for part of the year and opened for the rest. It works, in the sense that it protects an additional crop.
The effects on the water itself are contested and have been for a long time. Reduced flushing means silt and weed accumulate, salinity that once cleaned the system seasonally no longer does so, and the ecology of the lagoon above the barrier has shifted. Fishing communities and farming communities do not read the trade-off the same way.
Water hyacinth is the visible symptom. Mats of it drift and pile in the sheltered reaches, choking small canals and occasionally stopping boats altogether, and clearing it is a permanent and only partly successful operation.
The houseboat is a converted cargo boat, and there are many of them
The large houseboats are descendants of the kettuvallam, a long rice barge built from planks stitched or tied together and formerly poled and sailed along these channels carrying cargo. When road transport took the trade, the form was adapted for passengers.
The modern versions are mostly motorised, and the fleet has grown to a size that has generated its own problems with sewage, fuel and congestion on the popular stretches. Regulation exists and has been tightened at various points; how well it is enforced is a live argument in Kerala rather than a settled matter.
A quieter alternative is a small country boat, punted through the narrow canals where the big boats cannot go, which is where the village life the brochures depict actually happens. The scheduled public ferries that cross the lagoons are another, and they are used by people going to work.
Kerala is not the only canal coast
A long inland navigation route runs much of the length of the Kerala coast, linking lagoon to lagoon, and parts of it are still used for cargo as well as for tourism. Sections have been dredged and restored in recent years with the intention of moving freight off the roads.
Further north and east there are other systems that are far less known. A long colonial-era canal runs behind the coast of Andhra Pradesh and northern Tamil Nadu, built for barge traffic and now derelict or reduced to a drain along most of its length, and it’s a curiosity rather than a destination.
The Goan and Konkan creeks work differently again, being tidal estuaries rather than lagoons, and there the boat is a way across rather than a way along. If the backwaters are the famous version of Indian inland water travel, they are not the only one, and the quieter examples come without a fleet.
Common questions
Is an overnight houseboat worth it?
It is a pleasant experience and an expensive one, and the honest answer is that the popular routes can be crowded with other boats doing the same thing. A day on a small canal boat, or a stay in a village homestay on the water with short trips out, gets closer to the place for a good deal less.
When are the backwaters at their best?
The drier months are the easy answer for comfort and for water levels, and the greenest weeks come at the end of the rains. Heavy monsoon has its own atmosphere but flooding in the low-lying areas is a genuine possibility, and it is worth checking conditions rather than assuming the season is uniform.
Can you use the backwaters as transport rather than as a trip?
Yes, on the scheduled public ferry routes that connect towns and islands across the lagoons and run to a timetable for local passengers. Routes and timings are set by the operating authority and change, so check the current schedule locally rather than relying on an old listing.
Consumer editor, Traveology
Manish covers states, hills, coast & islands and the questions readers actually send in and reads the small print so you do not have to.
