How Chettinad is outgrowing its 70 rooms

Several months before the third Chettinad cultural festival, Meenakshi Meyyappan had a pressing question. She scheduled a call for 9.30 p.m. to discuss how to enlist social media influencers to the cause of publicising the festival. The paradox is that no one could have been a more capable influencer for Chettinad than Meyyappan, who turned 90 in July.

Ever since she converted The Bangala, a private club owned by her husband’s family, into a hotel at her son’s suggestion a quarter century ago, her sharp focus on hospitality has always included finding ways to showcase the heritage of the region and revive and restore its homes through responsible tourism.

Chettinad’s turnaround has been remarkable. While it is still dotted with derelict mansions owned by Chettiars, a mercantile community who mostly live elsewhere, a revival of the region has been visible for some years now. The festival has contributed to raising its profile. This year, in addition to the continued participation of The Bangala, CGH Earth Visalam, and Chidambara Vilas hotels, The Park has joined the festival — after restoring a mansion of arresting East-meets-West gargoyles and statuary in the area.

Yacob George, manager at The Bangala, whose brainchild it was to use the festival to boost business for Chettinad’s hotels in an off-peak period, is pleased to see that the area’s heightened profile means more film production crews are using its opulent mansions for film shooting and non-Chettiars are hosting weddings there. Continual Instagram posts by festival attendees have also given it more of a presence on social media.

Carnatic music, the Cholas and Chettinad food

The destination’s increasing renown has meant that this year’s festival is almost completely booked. Meyyappan says in the past couple of years “there have been many repeat [visitors] and some new people. This year especially, most are new.” While 2023 had visitors from all the major metropolises, this year’s 156 guests will be from all over India as well as Sri Lanka and Singapore. It has succeeded to the extent of stretching the region’s capacity. “We can only offer 70 rooms. We don’t have that many rooms in Chettinad,” Meyyappan says.

2024’s iteration features a concert by renowned Carnatic vocalist and impassioned writer T.M. Krishna as well as a talk on the maritime history of the Cholas by writer-researcher Anirudh Kanisetti. After a conversation about temple courtesans, classical dancer Aniruddha Knight and his troupe will perform.

Food is very much part of the festival, with The Bangala globally feted for its Chettinad delicacies. Food writer and historian Vikram Doctor, who Meyyappan has known since he was a toddler, will be in conversation with Singaporean writer Khir Johari to discuss Southeast Asia’s influence — such as the use of mace and nutmeg — on Chettinad food.

One of the advantages of hosting the festival at the end of September is that local caterers are available to help with vegetarian food (as the wedding season comes to an end by then). “We make it a point to send all the non-vegetarian food from The Bangala,” says Meyyappan. Last year’s closing dinner at The Bangala featured Southeast Asian street food delicacies such as murtabak as well as appams served with delicious cashew curry and Sri Lankan pol sambol. The showstopper was a lightly spiced crab meat as an accompaniment to dosas.

Aachi and her process

Meyyappan has for years ably guided the chefs at The Bangala and has a finely tuned palate. A couple of months ago, she replied to a message I’d sent — about my having been served delicate crab meat cutlets at the home of a Sri Lankan family — with a nostalgic text on the delicacy of these cutlets that she had first encountered as a child 80 years earlier when her father was the Daimler Benz representative in Colombo.

In her stewardship of the festival, close collaborations with other hotels in the area, and in managing The Bangala, Meyyappan has achieved much that large hotel chains could learn from. Rahul Khanna, co-founder of restaurants such as Sly Granny and Mamagoto, came away from a recent stay impressed by what he described as “the aura” projected by the nonagenarian hotelier. Suggestions were passed on daily to him and his family during their stay, even though Meyyappan was not in Chettinad at the time. For instance, she intervened from Chennai to recommend a staff member take them to a sari shop more distinctive than the one initially listed on their itinerary.

Khanna says he was struck by how much affection there was for Meyyappan, widely referred to as Aachi, in the small towns nearby that have benefitted from the tourism boom. Guests at last year’s festival received individual messages from her seeking an honest critique of what hadn’t worked almost as soon as their flights home had touched down. He astutely points out that given the Bangala does not have corporate-style management processes, “she is the process”.

Problems of success

One of the loveliest aspects of staying at The Bangala is its library, especially its well-chosen contemporary non-fiction. For years, Meyyappan has ordered books assiduously, often using The Hindu’s list every Sunday. Responding to a disorganised moderator’s last-minute request to borrow a copy of Manu S. Pillai’s Rebel Sultans ahead of the historian’s talk at last year’s festival, she had one of her staff promptly locate it in the library. The contrast with the shambolic service encountered last year as part of a Madurai extension to the festival at the Taj’s sumptuous Gateway hotel there, where requests for buggies and umbrellas during a downpour were unsuccessful, could not have been starker.

As the festival and the region goes from strength to strength, Meyyappan is concerned with the problems of success. One is a heightened personal profile; in the interview for this article, she requested that it not focus on her but on Chettinad. She also hoped that visitors could be persuaded to leave their cars in parking spaces in the small towns that dot the area rather than insisting on alighting just outside the mansions, inevitably creating traffic bottlenecks. “In [historic areas in] Europe, you park and visit by foot,” she points out.

The market street in one of the small towns in Chettinad with newly opened hotels, she worries, has become ugly because of traffic jams and, on Sundays especially, a pile-up of garbage. Yet, even as a charismatic influencer who has helped turn around the fortunes of Chettinad, Meyyappan’s wish that tourists might be persuaded to be more disciplined when they visit its small bylanes and fairy-tale mansions will likely prove too optimistic.

The writer is a former travel food and drink editor, and author of a collection of travel essays, ‘Right of Passage’.