Chettinad

Where the merchant world left its mansions

The Nattukotai Chettiars were the great merchant bankers of colonial Southeast Asia — trading in Burma, Malaya and Ceylon, financing rubber plantations and rice mills, and bringing the money home to Tamil Nadu. They spent it on mansions. Not modest mansions — 60 to 100-room palaces of Burmese teak, Italian marble, Belgian chandeliers and ornate plasterwork, each one built to outshine the neighbours.

When the trade collapsed in the 1930s, the families came home and stayed. The mansions are still there. Many are still lived in. The Athangudi tile factories still produce handmade encaustic tiles by the original process. And the cuisine — shaped by spice routes that brought kalpasi and marathi mokku back from the Malayan trade — exists nowhere else in India.