Part of global developments

[keyaki]

The Kerala travel and tourism industry has seen several ups and downs in recent times. However, such a situation was more guided by the market forces than by any other phenomenon. Many a times the government policies and programmes were to be blamed for the decline in tourist arrivals. This is very similar to the situation that prevailed in Europe in earlier times. The fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century was a great setback for travelers traveling to Europe for pleasure. Also with the decline of the Roman Empire because of certain in-built causes, three came about a sharp decline in trade and commerce.

The Renaissance aroused a new spirit of enquiry. Traveling to distant lands became one of the popular means of acquiring and bringing a culture in to Europe. Francis Beacon, one of the greatest representatives of the spirit of Renaissance epitomized travel thus; “Travel in the younger sort is part of education; in the older a part of experience”. The tradition of the grand tour which was started in the 17th century by the aristocracy of Europe was firmly established in the 18th and the 19th centuries by the emergence of an affluent mercantile class.

Another by-product of the renaissance was the spirit of adventure and the discovery of new lands which motivated people to travel to distant places. Columbus, Marco Polo, Vasco da Gama and Sir Francis Drake, to name a few, extended the horizons of the world. While Vasco da Gama reached the present Kozhikode in Kerala, other explorers discovered other distant lands. The arrival of Vasco da Gama in Kerala is an important milestone in the history of Kerala.

Even in Kerala, until the First World War (1914 – 18), travel to distant lands was still the privilege of a small segment of the society. One of the early sociologists, Thomstein Veble, called it the ‘leisure class’ in his classical work, ‘Theory of the Leisure Class’, which was published in the year 1899. Probably, this was the first time that an author has linked leisure with propensity to travel. The First World War kept the people cabined and confined for four years. As a reaction, there was an outburst of travel in the inter-war years. This was the beginning of travel for pleasure and the transformation of travel into tourism industry. A great recovery came about in 1937 after the Great Depression of the thirties and a new ‘boom’ was on the way. In post-World War II period, tourism traffic reached a new ‘high’.